The Rare Old Juice

Has anyone looked at 1988's Beetlejuice as a metaphor for modern U.S. politics? I feel like I can't be the first. The house is America, the Maitlands are old school conservatives, the Deetzes are liberals, and Beetlejuice is Donald Trump. See it now? I guess you could look at the Deetzes as immigrants instead. It's interesting how political discourse has shifted on illegal immigration. Ten, fifteen years ago, liberals openly mocked conservatives for their fixation on border security, now Kamala Harris is proclaiming she'll do a better job keeping illegal immigrants out than Trump. Anyway, yeah, Beetlejuice is utterly amoral and self-serving with the instincts of a carnival huckster. And he gropes women.

I saw an analysis a couple years ago by a left wing YouTuber called Maggie Mae Fish who generally seems to wear especially thick partisan goggles. She was shocked to find, on her first viewing, that Beetlejuice is a really nasty guy and couldn't understand why her friends liked the movie. It's like being shocked that Dracula drinks blood. Do people really not understand he's the villain? I guess the animated series could make it a bit confusing, since it seems basically set in an alternate universe in which Beetlejuice and Lydia are heroes. I often think that frequently quoted line from The Dark Knight is truer in reverse: "You either die a villain or you live long enough to see yourself become the hero." Look what they did to Harley Quinn. And there are plenty of people who feel the Joker is a hero now, too. Hell, there's a guy in Tokyo running for office dressed like the Joker. He also dresses as The Mask. He's not likely to win but he is right that in the world of phony, manipulative outrage and stifling, hypocritical morality, people are instinctively drawn to these figures of chaos. That is how Trump won originally.

I am curious what the upcoming new movie will do with Beetlejuice.

That's why I was watching the original a couple days ago. It'd been so long since I'd last seen it that I was surprised by how fast it went by. I was expecting the first part, with Adam and Barbara alive, to be around thirty minutes but it's more like four. Everything seems longer when you're a kid, which is how I still best remember the movie. Whatever they do with the new movie, I'm sure it won't be worse than the 2018 Broadway musical. I mean, look at this shit:

Let's amend the phrase, "You either die a villain or you live long enough to see yourself become a hero and, if you live even longer, you see yourself become an excruciatingly hollow, mediocre shade of your former self."