Beetlemania

Films and television do play into my style, via osmosis or shoehorn. Sometimes I’m Tony Leung when he’s in the mood for love, sometimes I’m an American gigolo. Who can resist the in-trays and ashtrays of Don Draper, Ripley when he’s fully magpied Greenleaf, Michael Douglas’s hair and suits for the whole of the 1980s. (An assimilation of Kim Novak’s topknot in Vertigo was a less-successful endeavor.) I think of myself as something of a well-proportioned freak—a trivial trunk, sure, but creepily long limbs, and feet you could potentially ski on. When dressing, I sometimes have to ask myself, What if Lurch had SSENSE credit?, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Being a well-proportioned freak has drawbacks, I won’t lie, but no film speaks to the well-proportioned-freak demographic as much as Beetlejuice, a Frankenstein of scenes where myriad odd bods dress fucking impeccably. They’re less costumes than hallucinogenic visions. Cauldron-concocted cacophonies of creepy couture. There’s a sense of something once-fruitful slowly spoiling in the sun, an acid trip turned sour, Lucy in the sky with demons. 

There’s a new Beetlejuice—Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice—coming down the sand wormhole this week, and though I support any vehicle for Jenna Ortega to be spooky, I’m sticking with Tim Burton’s 1988 calypso-infused ghost-comedy, which comes in at a tight 90 minutes (something more films should do). I actually think there should be an Oscar category for films that are 90 minutes or less—imagine the time we would all save, the amount of laundry we’d get done. The quick in-and-out of a 90-er is like sex before a dinner reservation—there’s no time for senseless embellishment—and Beetlejuice packs plot alongside style with alarming aplomb. I know you’ll want to argue with me, but it’s the best Burton, with Batman Returns running a close second, which we can talk through another time, as long as you don’t pitch Big Fish. Beetlejuice is like a Lewis Carroll opium fever dream, the perfectly bitter concoction of Burton’s searingly macabre wit and frankly bonkers production design and darkly refulgent costumes by Aggie Guerard Rodgers. 

“The looks are not so much costumes to re-create as character moods we can inhabit or incorporate at whim.”

The film surreals around the grounding straight act of Barbara and Adam Maitland (played by Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin), a couple who—after their car plunges into a river during their staycation—are fated to haunt their Connecticut house for 125 years (without a vacuum cleaner). Fashion-wise, Adam’s look is preppy and dry, like the guys you fooled around with in college. His checked-shirt-and-chinos combo has the comforting, unintrusive familiarity of a Caesar salad on room service, but there’s nothing for your wardrobe to really latch on to, unless you’re extremely Gap. It is okay, on occasion, to have an extremely Gap day, but I would look back with regret on an extremely Gap life. His wife, the strikingly suburban, unflavored yogurt that is Barbara Maitland, appears in a Ganni-esque prairie dress two decades ahead of its time. With its dainty floral pattern, the dress is desperately trying to outgrow its own drabness, its mousey-little-housey indoor comfort. Rather than punch it up—with…I dunno…an absolutely killer clutch? A stupidly expensive shoe? Not her grandmother’s hair?—she accessorizes with a dull tabard the color of mulch, with pockets ample enough for several microfiber cloths and cans of polish. It is a testament to Davis’s acting that such an astounding beauty can inhabit Barbara’s dairy-fed drudgery, the sexless, midi-length, watered-down Andie MacDowell of it all. Her coolest moment comes from two of her fingers on fire when she realizes she’s dead—burning fingers are a flex, like when you light a match and inhale the flare. I guess you only get one look in the afterlife—my recommendation is to die in the Row—but later in the film, the Maitlands get quasi-resurrected into their wedding outfits. Her dress is classic, but there’s something eternally sharp and tart about a tux with a ruffle shirt (for either gender, come to think of it). It feels like a prom look, an adolescent attempt at adult suave coupled with the latent hope of a hand job. There’s a bit in The Virgin Suicides where there’s a chemical spill and one of the year’s debutante party themes is “Asphyxiation,” the tuxes and dresses bathed in a toxic green hue. It’s a commentary on wealth’s ability to mask trauma, but all I thought was, Pistachio ruffles. 

Entering Beetlejuice’s bloodstream, like two sharp tokes of a cigarette and a slug of coffee, is the equally toxic and semi-hysterical Delia Deetz (Catherine O’Hara). How does one describe Delia Deetz, the stepmother and sculptress who sleeps with Prince Valium and whose rationality is completely on strike? Where her stepdaughter Lydia has feelings, Delia is a creature of pendulously swinging moods and the hair of a fire-damaged Ronald McDonald waxwork. Her sculptures look like gray Tangfastics, discarded prophylactics set in stone, but we’re here to talk about her fits. She’s a gash of red lips with a pitch-black wardrobe, an opaque Issey Miyake/Rei Kawakubo collection great for moving the set between scenes. Rumor has it every item was purchased on a single shopping spree at the forever avant-garde Maxfield boutique on Melrose Avenue. At one point Delia’s in a basic white button-down, but one of the sleeves is black, which I’m assuming is Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons and is already my next eBay alert. There’s a singular black opera glove, just because. While cooking, she dons the absolute chef’s kiss of a red kimono-trouser (her husband’s sweater, actually), which shouldn’t work and doesn’t work and won’t work for most of us. She’s partial to 4 Non Blondes top hats and ridiculous earrings, which is a yes for any wardrobe as long as you don’t stray too far into Culture Club territory. Her husband (Jeffrey Jones) is a man faithful to his adequacy, vaguely Hugh Hefner-ian, vaguely Trumpian in his costume. The less said about that the better. 

Alongside these obnoxious adults, we have a great American archetype—their depressive but shrewd-beyond-her-years teenager Lydia Deetz, all eye bags and angst. Lydia “my whole life is a dark room” Deetz is Winona Ryder at her most alt, her hair beachcombed by Nosferatu, the fringe a set of rabies fangs, all set with an entire can of spray. The things that I hate most about people—self-prescribing as “strange and unusual,” or an overemphasis on analog photography—oddly make her a legendary, rather sufferable goth. (I think it’s because she never reverts to that prevalent gothic Victoriana trope.) With an overabundance of solar-eclipsing black wicker hats that UFO above the head, Lydia is a crinoline-stuffed schoolgirl in a choker. She’s a petticoat and a kilt and a painter’s smock. She’s lace-veiled at dinner. Despite all this dark iconography her optimism is still there, hiding like fentanyl in your coke. For me personally, Lydia is a sage reminder that adolescence is boring and lonely for straight people too, which is very grounding, and that ghosts can kindness you out of any rut. That aside, I have to ask myself: Am I going to buy a long black trench coat in ode to this blueprint goth? I am not. But maybe I’ll return to some of my favorite gothic novels, maybe I’ll read them in a cold bath, maybe I’ll use a Kodak filter. Anything to feel a bit more Lydia Deetz.

“His vibe is both people at Erewhon before their Paradise Punch smoothie, and also the smoothie itself after three days on the dashboard.”

The Maitlands hide out in the attic while the Deetz parents renovate the house, chemically exfoliating each floor, expunging the cozy country pile, and birthing a toxic Escher hellscape. There’s enough gray and red to reshoot every Ikea catalog in the land. Delia’s superficial attraction to shiny things sees an abundance of glass bricks, a glass-and-granite kitchen, the corridor a long, sore industrial gullet, Arkham Asylum by way of Architectural Digest. Overseeing the renovation is the acerbic soft-serve Otho, the kind of overly confident guy that thinks he’s Spike Jonze but makes internal HR vids. Not so much a man as a snarky bag of saline, a gay XL bully (complimentary). The man can also serve a look. His black suit and patent ruby slippers speak to a very lost Dorothy. Someone once told me not to wear jazzy or notable shoes with a suit because it draws the eye down, but these rules are meant to be broken and Otho is the man to do it. 

In a panic to rid themselves of the living (the narrative thrust of the whole film), Adam and Barbara consult the Handbook for the Recently Deceased and travel to what Wikipedia calls an “otherworldly waiting room populated by other distressed souls.” These are not so much heavenly creatures as celestial car crashes, a great exploration of dumb ways to die. A wrist-slashed, viridian beauty queen draped in the foil from a Terry’s Chocolate Orange. A football team recently scraped off the road. An intrepid explorer with a shrunken head. The charcoal bones of a chain-smoker. We see dead people, but it’s much funnier than The Sixth Sense. Their caseworker, Juno (dressed like Judge Judy’s day off), tells them to scare the Deetzes away themselves and not to employ her former assistant Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton), a freelance bio-exorcist. When the ghosts finally return from the spirit realm, the shit really hits the Dyson Pure Cool.

And so to Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, a diabetically unsweet Willy Wonka of the hereafter, his playground a miniature model of the Connecticut village (close-up corrugated cardboard is cool). He’s a ghoulish human-evictor with the complexion of a night-vision scrotum and the hair of a girl who’s spent the entire summer in Malibu on prescription Adderall forgetting to condition her ends: Spring Breakers, if you mummified the cast in salt for half a century. Betelgeuse is like opening a fortune cookie drunk and finding it full of angry bees who want their honey back. His vibe is both people at Erewhon before their Paradise Punch smoothie, and also the smoothie itself after three days on the dashboard. He wears a zebra-crossing suit that’s plagued Halloween streets ever since. He is the opposite of quiet luxury, in that he is neither luxurious nor quiet. Gauche doesn’t even touch the sides. 

Betelgeuse endeavors to rescue the Maitlands from the home invasion of the living, at one point turning the banister into a snake. This was meant to be a pinnacle of terror but I found myself writing, Snakeskin drainpipe trousers? in my notes. There’s a frankly iconic Harry Belafonte–soundtracked possession scene—akin to E.T. flying over the moon, or the steps in The Untouchables—where zebra napkins double as streamers and fists of prawn gloves grab people’s faces. It’s hard to really tie this scene to fashion. All the New Yorkers who’ve come to visit wear Hershey’s Kisses dresses and have very tightly gelled hair (v late ’80s New York, v severe, v cool). There isn’t enough ectoplasm in the “Day-O” scene for my liking, but you can’t have it all. At one desperate-to-rid-the-house-of-the-living point, Adam morphs into a demented chicken, and Barbara, a gaping monster cradling her eyeballs in her mouth, but these are less-easy looks to incorporate with your navy COS. 

The apex of Beetlejuice is a wedding ceremony between the beetle and the schoolgirl, a gruesome pact to release him from his miniature village purgatory. For the gnarly nuptials Betelgeuse wears a perfect maroon suit. (Gucci currently stocks a great homage.) But it’s Winona’s blood-red, full-tiered, tulle-a-licious wedding dress—somewhere out there, Molly Goddard just sat bolt upright—that’s genuinely brilliant, at once vampy and virginal. The dress has what I call a Holiday Personality—one that’s really great to be around for a spell but you could never live alongside full-time. A day trip into sartorial psychosis. A temporary temporal shift. The red wedding dress is a great outfit for Carrie on her way to get dumped by Big for the zillionth time, but so many of the over-the-top costumes in this film would suit because Carrie is that girl. And that’s the thing about the shenanigans of Beetlejuice, the looks are not so much costumes to re-create as character moods we can inhabit or incorporate at whim. Delia Deetz in head-to-toe Comme des Garçons has the most transferable wardrobe, I would die for it, no notes. But the general energy of Beetlejuice is infectious. The silliness, the unusualness, the unapologetic-ness. You don’t need to dress like Lydia Deetz, but when her final dress is as witty as it is perverted, surely you could be too?