Twenty-five years after his last genuinely worthwhile non-animated film, it’s hard to not see any Tim Burton film, even the best ones, as anything other than a walking corpse on an inevitable path to the director’s premature artistic demise. Burton’s style has become a transparently corporate product, an obvious manifestation of Hollywood’s ability to cannibalize anything that might challenge it. Burton’s story is really a tragedy. One year after 1988’s Beetlejuice, his box-office-bludgeoning, trend-setting Batman would reveal that beneath the oddball hell he could raise and the anarchy he could unleash, he always really, only, just wanted to be loved by the masses. Love, the desire for beauty, would kill the proverbial beast in him.

A couple of masterpieces like Ed Wood and one nihilistic blockbuster in Batman Returns aside, Burton’s parade of cinematic renegades now feels like a procession of the damned, a carnival of once-living, gleefully-manicured monstrosities having become a wax museum.In this sense, Beetlejuice’s sympathies are perhaps a telling metaphor for Burton’s internal tensions. He obviously self-identifies with the protagonists of Beetlejuice, the Maitlands, two everyday people who take irrepressible joy in the capacity to tinker in the attics of America, who hide pleasure and play within the carbon-copy domiciles of suburbia. But it’s hard not to see him as the interloping Deetzes, so fascinated with a facsimile of weirdness and its capacity to be monopolized for personal gain that they sell their souls for a simulacrum of adoration. Burton’s soul is laid bare, two entangled forces warring in the same Hollywood house. Over the past quarter century, the man has become a corporate shell cynically selling the very thing he once genuinely loved. Viewing it from 2024, 1988’s Beetlejuice can be depressing stuff. 

In 1988 though? I mean, Jesus. Burton had already lovingly skewered mid-century iconography and narrative structure with Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, the most spirited tale of mid-century America’s love affair with vehicular culture this side of John Carpenter’s Christine. Looking forward rather than back, Beetlejuice feels much more radical, like an open canvas for a diabolical energy eager to be unleashed. Instead of seeing it as a prelude to Burton’s later misfires, it can be read along the likes of Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark and the Coen Brothers’ Raising Arizona, scions of another America, an alternative 1980s trying to escape from the corporate world around it. These pop versions of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas suggest a wandering America both trying to cut itself off from its past and hopelessly being drawn back. Rather than itself being trapped, Beetlejuice seems to recognize that we’re all trapped in an American dream that became a nightmare.

It is thus that the film’s best joke is a waiting room of the damned, where the afterlife is just another permutation of an endless modern American bureaucracy that does not conclude with corporeal demise. But Burton has already seeded the theme that an eternity of homeownership is both the blessing and the curse of suburbia, the American purgatory par excellance. The film’s central conceit – Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) is a bio-exorcist who helps the recently deceased Alex (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara Maitland (Geena Davis) tackle some gentrifying interlopers in their house who are treated as rat-like pests in need of removal – uncannily upends the run of household comedies in the later part of the ‘80s. And Beetlejuice’s lounge lizard outfits, parodies of a proud, demented tradition of American hucksters, is itself a playfully nasty parody of the festering underbelly throughout ‘80s pop culture. That he briefly wears a copy of Alex’s checkerboard black-and-white shirt, only for it to become the black-and-white pinstripe more famously associated with Beetlejuice, suggests something about their symbiosis, about the slipperiness of Alex’s blasé American good-naturedness and the ingratiating, palpitating, pestilent heart beneath it. The tension nearly summarizes the film, and the promise of Burton’s career.

It’s all, truthfully, laid out in the opening sequence, a spellbinding helicopter shot through a picture-perfect manifestation of a hypothetical “anywhere, U.S.A.” that lovingly closes in – creeps up – on the film’s centerpiece house, only for a spider to skulk over the roof and a human hand to pick it up. In the form of this too-complex, deeply-labored-over, much-loved miniature masquerading as a full-blown neighborhood, Burton lays his heart completely bare: we get both a beautifully loving expose of cinematic trickery and a parody of the makeshift, regurgitated nature of the average American town. Everywhere is the same, the film says, but it’s still something to make a home out of. Your pretensions of uniqueness are passé, but turning that passé nature into a work of care and handicraft is still something worth fighting for. When Alex rushes to a hardware store next to a barbershop, the old barber who begins a conversation with Alex, who isn’t really listening, is as much a cosmic fixture of the location as anything in Alex’s model. He’s kind of a joke, but he makes life worth living.

It’s the perfect inverse of the opening of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet to boot. While Lynch famously exposed the festering decrepitude hidden in the carefully-primed grass of the beautiful any-time U.S.A. town in the  opening of his 1986 masterpiece, Burton instead finds flowers in the rot, sincerity in the artifice. And while Lynch depicts a playfully malevolent dog who violently fondles a particularly phallic hose, Burton offers his own exquisite beat where a similar dog jumps off the wooden plank keeping the Maitlands from immanent death and then looks on, with uncaring moroseness, as he sends them to their doom.

Of course, it was Lynch’s genuinely sincere belief in American decrepitude that made him a kind of romantic, someone entirely committed to his own vision and unwilling to compromise on his art. Burton has become a poet of compromise, and his romantic view of the U.S., of the beautifully necrotic potential beneath the surface, has proven much more superficial than Lynch’s artistry. While he unleashed him, Burton was all too willing to put Beetlejuice back in his grave. But for the short moment in his career where the man was out, Burton certainly gave us enough to love: how exquisitely expedient Beetlejuice’s set up is, with the stakes of the narrative established within a spry fifteen minutes, how self-mockingly the film explains its potentially impenetrable exposition in the form of the Handbook for the Recently Deceased, how maniacally gleeful Keaton’s exquisitely grotesque performance of an astonishingly nasty showman is (the polar opposite of his cloistered, preoccupied Bruce Wayne the following year), how sublimely Danny Elfman’s spectacularly sinister score invites us to feel both at-odds and at-ease.

And, of course, there’s Burton himself to appreciate, an estimable talent if one endlessly prone to confusing showing off those talents for really cultivating them. Working, as in most of his great productions, with production designer Bo Welch, Burton’s vision of disturbed domesticity is really the selling point here. His Grand Guignol theater, with its stop-motion vision of a world stuttering between a life and a death that aren’t as different as they seem, is an inchoate manifestation of his potential as a director, of the nightmare he treats as a dream.  

It is a nightmare though, and thus the film’s central joke has some bite. In this dark-minded fantasia of homeownership, the Maitlands encounter their death with a mixture of pragmatic common-sense and befuddled confusion that marks it as much less of an existential crisis than whether they can keep their property. It’s their lack of home, not their lack of lives, that seems to bother them. Death, here, is just one more trip around the American carousel, a loss that is really just a continuance, a change that is more of the same. It’s his choice to revel in this problem, rather than really reckon with it, that marks Burton’s general interest in mid-century Americana as a distinct, if to my mind ultimately lesser, talent than Lynch, who would have approached this material with a crueler, more challenging, more significant aura. Through it all, for better or worse, Burton can’t but smile.

Score: 7.5/10