Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is successful, formulaic, and dull

The Halloween season seems to creep in earlier every year, heralded this September by a long-anticipated film from the once-visionary director, Tim Burton: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. To call this movie “long-anticipated” also refers to the fact that it’s a legacy sequel for Burton’s Beetlejuice which he made back in 1988—a beloved cult classic of a quirky-horror-comedy that broke the mold of what gothic ghost romps might pull off on the silver screen. With much of the same cast reuniting 36 years later, including the zany Michael Keaton as the titular “ghost with the most,” middle-aged fans of Burton’s weird aesthetic felt their number had been finally called where they had been waiting with Beetlejuice in the “neither-world” waiting room.

But even though all the Beetlejuice pieces have been exhumed, dusted off, and reanimated, something about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice fell rather flat—even though it has enjoyed considerable box-office success. With an overstuffed plot and a markedly un-clever script, the film felt like well-packaged exhaustion, which is a shame since this film carried the hope of Burton’s return to form after a dreadful stint he suffered with the Walt Disney Company. But Beetlejuice Beetlejuice ironically finds itself shackled to the retreading, soul-sucking trend that Disney has spawned in the movie industry.

At one point in the film, two mothers are discussing Halloween costumes for their kids. “Nothing from Disney,” one of the parents says firmly, and the other agrees with exasperation, saying the only Disney character her daughter was ever allowed to dress up as was Cinderella’s dead mother. This dig at Disney is interesting in the context of a Tim Burton film because of the director’s somewhat complicated relationship with the infamous Mouse House.

Tim Burton had two stints of working with Walt Disney Pictures. First, early on in his career, when he was let go due to his dark style. Later on, after his commercial successes with Beetlejuice, Batman, and Edward Scissorhands, Disney produced some of Burton’s best efforts, such as Ed Wood and The Nightmare Before Christmas (which he did not direct). In recent years, he was locked into a contract with the mega-studio where he helmed garish, misconceived, CGI nightmares such as the Alice in Wonderland films and Dumbo. Burton himself was vocal about how relieved he was to escape from Disney saying that it was like working for an evil circus—which you’d think he would have enjoyed.

But, of course, he was referring to the aggressive studio interference and entertainment algorithms that Disney is a thought leader in. Disney has made telling stories a formulaic, money-making matter, and blazed an incredible trail in pumping new but artificial life into long-expired franchise husks, ushering in an age of seeming imaginative disenfranchisement. It seems that very little is new anymore, as the Magic Kingdom squeezes every last drop of blood and money out of Star Wars, Marvel Comics, Indiana Jones, and their own beloved animation classics.

Burton’s jab at Disney in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is amusing and perhaps poignant as a commentary on resisting the popularity of the show-business juggernaut. But there’s also something tragic (if not tortured) about it, as Burton’s film is itself digging up an old storyline that nobody was asking to see carried on, with aging actors who are too creaky to re-enact the manic energy of the old film and putting forth a stilted effort that just plays right into the scorched-entertainment tactic spawned by Disney. This imaginative bankruptcy is precisely what Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is itself a participant in. No original ideas, minimal risk, terrible writing, call-backs, and Easter eggs. The imagination, in short, has been sucked out of the movie industry.

This forfeiting of the imagination seen in the rampant cinematic re-hash trend is a cause for cultural concern. Catholics especially should take this creative depletion seriously as people who take the imagination seriously. Man was created in the image of God, and therefore Catholics cannot deny the importance of the imagination. Catholics should strive within the artistic and creative traditions that cultivate the imagination as crucial to the knowledge of truth—whether in making silly films or fashioning high art.

The imagination is an essential part of what makes us human, and its crippling contributes to intellectual decline. One of the Aristotelian principles of knowledge, famously phrased by St. Thomas Aquinas, is that nothing is in the intellect that is not first in the senses. This suggests an order of knowing, beginning with objects that lead to an intellectual awakening, which entails not only the direct experience of things but also the development of the imagination, the creative exercise of fancy with facts, exploring new visions and new ideas toward new knowledge.

It is through the imaginative arts—poetry, music, drama, literature, and film—that men can become sensitized to “the light of things,” as Wordsworth put it. In that light, the imagination, which Wordsworth called “Reason in her most exalted mood,” becomes receptive to the hidden mystery of being, leading people of imagination to wonder, the beginning and sustaining principle of wisdom. And though it may seem odd to talk about functions and facets of reason as we lament the imaginative failures of a campy piece of pop-culture fluff like Beetlejuice, when comparing the second entry to the first, the difference is night and day regarding the creative spark that gave people pleasure.

The imagination is just not there anymore; it is not permitted to flash and flourish outside the boundaries of established money-making markets. The result is atrophy, and we see the results everywhere in our burnt-out streaming services. The more diseased the imagination becomes, as in the less presence it has in the lives of artists and consumers, the less able we are to come into contact with images, stories, and other representations that lead to delightful places that evoke higher delights.

Even further, without the cultural development and rich presence of imagination, the less that people will be able to unlock the symbolic qualities of reality for themselves. In the retreading that is churned out for mass consumption according to mass studies calculating mass appeal, there simply isn’t that creative energy and inspiration that changes the way people think about a story, and from there, think about what’s possible in the world. There’s nothing new under the sun—and that’s a sad surrender for the magic of the movies.

The movie industry is as dead as Beetlejuice is, and also as cynical. Hollywood may well steal the bio-exorcist’s lines, “Go ahead, make my millennium,” as it grins, “It’s showtime!” Because people are paying for this fodder and, in the words of Hamlet, spreading the compost on the weeds to make them ranker. To a binging audience that just wants screen time, imagination is not high on the priority list. Just content and more content, and if it can have the titillation of quality because of past efforts, all the easier way to make a buck. As long as people pay, we will have more Jedi, more Ghostbusters, more James Bond, more Middle Earth, and more Mission Impossible.

Disney has shown the studios where the money is, and the fish are mechanically biting on nostalgia bait, tired tropes, and weary heroes. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is the latest in this catalog of zombie franchises, and though it casts aspersions on Walt Disney for steamrolling the imagination, leaving artists shackled and audiences shellacked, it can’t excuse its own cheeky existence as little more than a cash grab that will almost certainly pave and pay the way for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. When that inevitably happens, it’s almost a thing certain that people will still lack the imagination to steer clear.