Kolda Beetlejuice

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice!!

            Do our problems end when we die? It clearly doesn’t for the Maitlands. In fact, they can't even solve their own afterlife problems without the help of the trickster Beatelgeuse. And upon seeking his help, he becomes even more of a problem than the Deetzes.

            But Tim Burton turns this tragic world of death into a comic one. When the Maitlands seek help from their after life case worker, Juno, and find themselves in a waiting room in the underworld, we see other characters who are in their situation- recently deceased- who all died in comic ways. One got his head shrunk, one was attacked by a shark but the shark was still biting his leg, and one choked on something large that was still visible in his neck. And now that they all got through their (probably very painful) deaths, they are forced to sit in a waiting room for hundreds of years with nothing being solved because of the jumble of paperwork that is nowhere near being sorted out.

            The receptionist had the most ironic death. She cut her wrists to escape the living world, but when she arrived in the underworld she ended up with a boring job behind a desk. She told the Maitlands that had she known this would be what death is like, she wouldn’t have had her little accident.

            Lydia, the goth daughter of the family who moved into the Maitlands house, has no idea of the troubles the Maitlands face in death. All she knows is that she likes her ghost friends and wants to join them in their world. But we know, from seeing the struggles of the Maitlands, that she would not have a better time being dead than being alive. She would end up in the receptionist’s situation: unaware of the similarity of life and death.