If marriage is hell, Tim Burton has a funny way of showing it in his beloved film. Beetlejuice Movies. With the recent success of Beetlejuice BeetlejuiceFans new and old alike have responded well to the bizarre horror-comedy sequel, set 36 years after the original film. Beetlejuice He made the prospect of marriage a real nightmare. Of course, the prevailing opinion was that marriage had become a real nightmare. 2024 The sequel also revolves around a lavish wedding that includes a stunning musical number, and connects the two films through the horrific marriage of Lydia (Winona Ryder) and Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton).
However, upon closer examination, one can argue that the underlying theme in Beetlejuice The films equate marriage with death, hell, reincarnation, and other nightmarish attributes that threaten to trap Lydia in a world of purity forever. For Burton, Beetlejuice This book offers an artistic model for critiquing the horrors of marriage as a commercial contract devoid of true love, and does so in subtle, playful ways that are somehow still tender and romantic.
Beetlejuice lays the foundation
In Tim Burton's original version Beetle juice, The film depicts the first marriage of Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara Maitland (Geena Davis), a happily married couple living a simple life in the small town of Winter River. While driving over a covered bridge, the couple's car is struck by a small dog and plunges into the river below. When they return home, they slowly realize that they are no longer alive, and that they have both disappeared. Guide to the Recently DeceasedAnd enter another strange world between the living and the dead.
When the Dietz family arrives from New York to buy the Maitland house, Adam and Barbara realize that their goth daughter Lydia Dietz can see them. Lydia dislikes her stepmother Delia (Catherine O'Hara) and begins to bond with Adam and Barbara, claiming she wants to be dead like them. Meanwhile, the “exorcist” Beetlejuice lives inside a model of the city that Adam built and stored in the Maitland attic. Adam and Barbara summon Beetlejuice to the real world, and the demon convinces the couple that he can scare the Dietz family and prevent them from desecrating their house and turning it into a haunted tourist attraction.
After torturing the Dietz family, Adam and Barbara work to take down the demonic villain. An exorcism is performed on Beetlejuice, Using Adam and Barbara's wedding clothes to summon them to the land of the living.Unfortunately, once Adam and Barbara appear, they age rapidly and parts of their bodies begin to fall off. It is a horrific display of the pain of purgatory.Which forces Lydia to act quickly to save her ghost friends. To do so, Lydia reluctantly agrees to marry Beetlejuice in front of an evil minister.which underscores Burton's message about the brutal horrors of marriage.
The consequences of marrying Beetlejuice cause the demon to wreak havoc on Earth with uncontrollable harm. Fortunately, Lydia is saved in time by the Maitland family after they regenerate and Barbara attacks Beetlejuice with a sandworm in this classic horror comedy. Not only is the prospect of marriage terrifying, the wedding causes Lydia to lose her voice when Beetlejuice shuts her mouth every time she tries to object to the marriage..
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice intensifies anti-marriage themes
Marriage is like hell is a topical issue that has been brought up in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. The most obvious embodiment of evil comes when Beetlejuice's terrifying ex-wife Delores (Monica Bellucci) arrives.a soul-sucking demon seeking revenge for her ex-lover. Every time Delores appears on screen, she literally sucks the life out of each victim, leaving their bodies as lifeless rubber dolls on the floor. As for Beetlejuice, Every time he thinks or talks about Delores, he expresses thoughts of pain and suffering, thus equating marriage with death and destruction.However, as Delores pursues Beetlejuice, all Beetlejuice wants is to reunite with Lydia, who escaped 36 years ago.
When Lydia is introduced, viewers learn that her husband Richard (Santiago Cabrera) died in an accident in the Amazon. For Lydia, ideas of marriage are also distorted by tragedy and death.Lydia gets a second chance at marriage when her producer boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux) proposes to her in an inappropriate manner at Charles' funeral. Lydia is reluctant to marry Rory because she doesn't really love him, and Delia and her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) are against it. Despite knowing it's the wrong thing to do, Lydia agrees to marry Rory two days later on Halloween.
The horrors of marriage come to a head during the Halloween wedding. Rory is given a truth serum and declares his true feelings for Lydia. He doesn't love Lydia and doesn't want to marry her for real reasons. Instead, Rory wants to marry Lydia to take control of her TV show “Ghost House” and exploit her for financial gain.When Lydia learns of Rory's betrayal, Beetlejuice dresses himself and Lydia in wedding clothes and prepares to marry her.
The idea of a happy marriage to Lydia turns into a nightmare for Beetlejuice when Deloris arrives at the church seeking revenge. Between Deloris' evil ex-lover, Rory's scheming betrayal, Lydia's first marriage marred by death, and Beetlejuice's quest for redemption, the film highlights the horrors of marriage over and over again.
in Beetlejuice BeetlejuiceThe death of Charles Dietz plays into the theme of marriage as hell. Delia explains that Charles died in a tragic plane crash that left his body headless in a rewatchable horror comedy. Charles wanders the underworld with his bloodied spinal cord, seeking to be reunited with his family. After being bitten to death by a twin snake, Delia meets Charles in the underworld, and the two board the Soul Train to the afterlife. While it's great that the two found each other, it took a gruesome beheading and senseless poisoning to do so..
The gruesome fates remind us of Adam and Barbara, who rapidly aged and eventually collapsed. Beetlejuicewhich proves that The horrors of marriage extend beyond just marrying Beetlejuice himself.Marrying Beetlejuice is a hellish prospect for Lydia, just as marrying Deloris was a nightmare for Beetlejuice. ButThe afterlife offers no happy marital ending for Adam and Barbara or Charles and Delia, the long-married human couples whose lives have been ruined forever by Beetlejuice.The irony is that Beetlejuice believes that marriage equates to salvation, when in reality marriage is often a one-way ticket to hell, if not to a humiliating afterlife.
Beetlejuice Available to stream on AppleTV+ and Max.
