Death
is a fact of life that is inevitable. There’s a 100% failure rate in people
that have tried to live forever. No matter how important or rich a person is,
death makes us all equal in the end. America refuses to believe this.
What
with such popular trends in the media telling us to “live while we can” and new
advances in medicine allowing us to live just
a little bit longer, Americans, it would seem, cannot and will not grasp
the concept that at some point they will depart from this life here on Earth.
Death, I think most can agree, is a concept that most do not want to hasten.
Why think about dying when one can think about living forever? Hollywood films,
like Beetlejuice (especially Beetlejuice), would rather people laugh
at death, which most are more than willing to do.
Beetlejuice, a story of ghosts and the
after-life, would appear at first to be a movie about accepting death as just
another phase of life, and that death is not the end-all-be-all that people
believe. Yet, I believe it does not accept death at all. It wants to sugar-coat
it and say that people will just come back as ghosts, and it will be the same
as life – waiting rooms and all. Take the Maitlands, for instance. They had no idea they were dead until they
started experiencing weird things and found the manual called Handbook for the Recently Deceased.
Their only conflict throughout the movie was scaring the Deetse’s out of the
house so that they could continue living in it and work on the model city. Even
at the end of the film they are helping Lydia with her school work and
continuing to live their lives as before.
I do not know if Burton
did this intentionally or not, but in one scene Mrs. Maitland tries to scare
Mrs. Deetse by in a closet by tearing off her own face. Mrs. Deetse bats her
out of the way, a symbolic moment of how the Deetse’s do not think about death.
In Beetlejuice, Tim Burton makes one thing clear: death, in all its
forms, is something Americans want to ignore.
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