Those familiar with the Tim Burton film, “Beetlejuice,” will already know it has nothing to do with beetles or juice although there will be bugs involved. Beetlejuice is a hint on the pronunciation for the titular character’s name, Betelgeuse (in American English). To summon him, one has to say his name three times, and the sequel make you say it twice, “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice” which factors into the plot of this fun and homey horror flick.
People in the Caltech and astronomy community may know that there is a red supergiant star in the Orion constellation called Betelgeuse.
It is the tenth brightest star in the night sky. According to Ian Ridpath’s Star Tales, the name comes from Arabic.
Alpha Orionis is called Betelgeuse (pronounced BET-ell-juice), one of the most famous yet misunderstood star names. Ptolemy described it in the Almagest as ‘the bright, reddish star on the right shoulder’ but did not give it a name. The 10th-century Arabic astronomer al-Ṣūfī said in his Book of the Fixed Stars that this star was known both as mankib al-jauzā’ (meaning the shoulder of al-jauzā’, as described by Ptolemy) and also yad al-jauzā’(i.e. the hand of al-jauzā’, which was the Arabic visualization). The name Betelgeuse comes from the second of these alternatives and hence means ‘the hand of al-jauzā’; however, it is often wrongly said to mean ‘armpit of the central one’ due to a misreading of the Arabic, an error perpetuated by R. H. Allen in his classic book Star Names.
Who (or what), though, was al-jauzā’? It was the name given by the Arabs to the large constellation that they saw in this area, a female figure encompassing the stars of both Orion and Gemini. The word al-jauzā’, which can also be transliterated as al-jawzā’, apparently comes from the Arabic jwz meaning ‘middle’, so the best translation that modern commentators can offer is that al-jauzā’ means something like ‘the lady in the middle’. The reference to the ‘middle’ may be to do with the fact that the constellation lies astride the celestial equator. The Greeks did not give a name to either Betelgeuse or Rigel, surprisingly for such prominent stars, which is why we know them by their Arabic titles.
Ridpath also notes the various myths surrounding Orion’s death.
Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice” is not about hunting, but it is about death.
Beetlejuice (1988) ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The film begins in a scenic town, far from the city. Yet we soon realize there’s something strange about this town: There are no people or dogs. Nothing is moving. The town we are getting an aerial view of is in reality a fine scale model made by Adam Maitland (Alec Baldwin). He and his wife, Barbara (Geena Davis) live in a white house above and away from the town. In the world of the model, their house is under attack by a large spider that Adam catches and sets free outside while listening to Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song).”
This is the fictional village of Winter River, Connecticut (actually Corinth, Vermont).
The interior of the house is filled with homey small-patterned wall paper. The Maitlands are a loving, child-less (but not by choice) couple whose main obstacle to peace is Jane Butterfield (Annie McEnroe), Barbara’s pushy real estate cousin. Jane has been showing photos of the Maitland home (which she claims she decorated herself) to customers in New York longing to escape the city. She insists that the house is too big for just two.
On the way back from the village errand, Barbara crashes through the walls of a red covered bridge, attempting to avoid a dog. The car plunges into the river. Soon after, Adam and Barbara find themselves cold and wet and back home where the fireplace has a good crackling fire, one that the couple doesn’t remember setting. But what happened to the car? How did they get home?
Attempting to leave the house to figure out how they got back, Adam falls off the porch into a strange desert where enormous black-and-white striped double-headed sandworms roam. He thinks he’s been gone for a few minutes, but Barbara, after rescuing him, tells him he was gone for two hours. They soon discover they don’t have reflections in the mirror. They aren’t vampires: They are just dead. But not to worry because they’ve been supplied with a guidebook: “Handbook for the Recently Deceased.”
One of the lessons they learn is that the living may not see them. Jane and her daughter don’t see them, but Jane does see an opportunity: Selling the house to some New Yorkers. The house is sold to Charles Deetz (Jeffrey Jones), a real estate developer, looking for the homey comfort that Barbara built, but he brings with him is pretentious sculptor wife Delia (Catherine O’Hara) who hates everything about the house and his goth daughter from his first marriage Lydia (Winona Ryder). Delia enlists her sycophantic interior designer, former hair analyst and former paranormal researcher, Otho (Glenn Shadix) to help her rip out the homey aspects and make this home an urban modern artistic horror.
The Maitlands attempt to stop this, but they haven’t studied their handbook and while attempting to get through the bureaucracy of the afterlife, they get to their caseworker, Juno, who tells they them need to scare Charles and Delia away. So the haunting commences, but the Maitlands can’t stop the renovation and their ghostly actions lead to more trouble. Although they were warned by Juno about Betelgeuse, they contact this “bio-exorcist” but find him crude and lecherous. The Maitlands, who can be seen by Lydia, are protective of her and, as it turns out, for a good reason. Betelgeuse wants to marry Lydia.
Lydia will eventually attempt to save the Maitlands from Charles, his boss Maxie Dean and his cronies, when Otho mistakenly uses the wrong incantation from the handbook by promising to marry Betelgeuse. If they wed, Betelgeuse will return to the world of the living. The Maitlands will work together to save Lydia and there will be a happy ending. Barbara and Adam are allowed to live in the attic spaces and Lydia becomes like their surrogate child.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
When we last saw Betelgeuse in the original film, he was in the waiting room of those recently deceased. He’s near the end of the line, but he sits in-between a witch doctor and a man with a shrunken head, Harry the Haunted Hunter. After Betelgeuse switches numbers with the witch doctor, the witch doctor sprinkles something over his head and Betelgeuse’s head shrinks.
Thirty-six years later, Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) is a single mother and the infamous host of the talk show, “Ghost House with Lydia Deetz,” which is produced by her questionably talented boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux). Lydia isn’t totally at peace with her talent for seeing ghosts, but Rory tells her, “Don’t drown your talent at the bottom of a bottle of pills.” They met in the same sorrow circle, but haven’t made the move to matrimony.
During the taping of her show, Lydia suddenly sees Betelgeuse in the audience and abruptly leaves the show. That’s good timing because Lydia’s stepmother, Delia, soon informs her that her father, Charles, died. While her father was fond of her, he wasn’t the one who guided Lydia during her teens. Delia insists that the funeral be back at the Winter River, but Delia’s surrogate parents, the Maitlands, won’t be there. They found a loophole and have now gone to the great beyond. Remember it was the Maitlands who hesitated bringing Betelgeuse into the mix because they didn’t want Lydia to be exposed to his crass and lustful ways.
On their way to Connecticut, Delia and Lydia stop to pick up Lydia’s daughter, Astrid (Jenny Ortega). Lydia divorced her husband, Richard (Santiago Cabrera), two years before he disappeared in South America and Astrid doesn’t believe her “alleged mom” can see ghosts and questions why Lydia can contact the dead in other instances, but not her father. The kids at her school cruelly tease her, but Astrid retorts, “When you’re on your third kid and second divorce, let’s see who gets the last laugh.”
At the Connecticut village, Astrid is horrified when Rory proposes to Lydia during the funeral and a hesitant Lydia accepts his proposal to marry on Halloween. Things look up when a series of mishaps leads Astrid to meet a cute boy in a tree house, Jeremy (Arthur Conti), who just happens to be reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” (a favorite of Astrid’s) and who’s father (David Ayres) is a couch potato (since the accident) and his mother (Jane Leaney) is “stress baking.” Jeremy just happens to have a copy of that handbook.
Elsewhere, a grumpy janitor (Danny DeVito) just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Boxes fall and break open and body parts are stapled together to form a woman (Monica Bellucci as Delores) who is nothing like Sally (O’Hara) from “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” Delores is not the people pleaser, but a soul-sucking siren out for revenge against Betelgeuse. In this world’s version of the afterlife, there are several different levels of death and there’s no coming back from soul sucking.
Betelgeuse has somehow made peace with the witch doctor and employs a group of men in yellow suits with shrunken heads in his bio-exorcism agency, most notably the very put-upon Bob (Nick Kellington). He’s warned by Wolf Jackson (Willem Defoe), who in life had been a b-movie action star and now is a ghost detective whose death is proof of the foolhardiness of performing one’s own stunts.
This film which employs animation not just for the desert segments with the two-headed striped sandworms, but also for expositional moments, provides some Betelgeuse backstory and not only teases a wedding but provides one. Delia will make an asp of herself, the TV show Soul Train will be used to great effect and the 1968 song “MacArthur Park” will aptly illustrated.
While in theory Charles is present, you won’t see the actor’s (Jeffrey Jones) face. While Betelgeuse was portrayed as child-inappropriate creepy, legal woes have labeled Jones as the actual creep. The screenplay by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (with story by Gough, Millar and Seth Grahame-Smith) does adequately pay fan service the original “Beetlejuice” (story by Michael McDowell (1950-1999) and Larry Wilson with screenplay by McDowell and Warren Skaaren (1946-1990)).
Colleen Atwood’s costuming seamlessly bridges the 37-year gap and the animation and reality while Kat Ali’s makeup makes Lydia’s quirky do from before, a definite don’t in this world. Oscar-winning Atwood didn’t do costume design for the 1988 “Beetlejuice.” That was Aggie Guerard Rodgers, but Atwood was costume designer did the 1990 “Edward Scissorhands.”
The film is rated PG-13 for violent content, bloody images, strong language and suggestive content, but this is mostly cartoonish and not grisly or grossly anatomical. The juice is loose and just as lecherous as before, and this film plays with death in a way that fun and, at times, comforting, at least for someone mourning the recent death of a beloved dog.
“Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice” had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on 28 August 2024. It was released in South Korea on 4 September 2024 and released on 6 September 2024 in the US.
The Dragon Lady Files 