Beetlejuice (1988)

Tim Burton is known for his unique and unmistakable visual style. As a creator, he leaves his fingerprints all over his work. Audiences either love it or hate it. His influences are many, including goth, surrealism, cartoon, and horror with a comical bent. His directorial debut came with Paul Reubens’ absurdist “Pee Wee Herman’s Big Adventure,” but his film that was all him came next, in 1988’s “Beetlejuice.”

Beetlejuice is also an absurdist, surreal exploration of expressive individualism, meaning, and existence. It involves a couple who die in an accident, and their efforts to run off the next family to move into their house. They don’t know how to appropriately and effectively haunt and seek the aid of a sinister ghost.

The themes and ideas are overloaded, if perhaps somewhat superficially handled. A looming idea deals with the afterlife. What happens after death, not just to our souls but to our legacy. The film has a decidedly absurdist take—life and the universe is meaningless. The afterlife is a bureaucratic nightmare. However, as with just about every single absurdist novel, philosophy, or movie, the movie is somewhat self-defeating on this front.

The proposal that existence is meaningless is undercut when such a detailed explanation of a universe—including and afterlife—is the foundation of the story. Sure, Burton’s is a silly reality, but it is full of systems, cause and effects, and meaning. His is a universe with the strongest of creator’s signatures. As is always the case in these absurdist stories, the creator tries to exclaim, “there is not creator!” all the while demonstrating that all stories clearly have an mind, an intelligence, a personality behind them.

Our reality is no different. The fingerprint of God are all over the place. Just because it can be beyond us to fully grasp, does not mean that there is no meaning. And the fact that our reality is distorted and broken, does not mean that it made itself or that it is spontaneously generated. We have broken things and need to have them fixed.