Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Jeffery Jones, Catherine O'Hara, Winona Ryder, Michael Keaton. Dir. Tim Burton, Geffen/Warners, 1988
About halfway through Tim Burton's 1988 comedy, Beetlejuice, I messaged Our Man in the Valley, Marc Edward Heuck (find his writing at theprojectorhasbeendrinking.blogspot.com and thenewbev.com) and said, "I desperately need you to tell me that Beetlejuice remains funny and imaginative and that I'm just in a bad mood."
That was three days ago. He has not replied. His silence deafens. Whatever my old friend thinks of Mr. Burton's 1988 offering, I thought it loud and obnoxious, frantic and silly, and at least borderline offensive. It is not only Mr. Burton's more recent output that leaves me cold. His early films, which I once considered perfect, aren't aging well, either.
I think the classic dinner scene, wherein Jeffery Jones, Catherine O'Hara and their guests find themselves possessed, engaging in a lipsynched performance of Harry Belafonte's "Banana Boat Song (Day-O)" told me everything I needed to know. Obviously intended as a kitschy set piece, today I question poking fun at a Civil Rights leader's performance of a traditional work-song among his people.
No black actors appear in Beetlejuice, even as extras. No hint of black culture exists (which seems remarkable given how much of it White America has misappropriated over the years) except for Mr. Belafonte's song, which is treated as a source of inspiration for zany hilarity. The moment could only be more insensitive if Burton had chosen Leadbelly's "In the Pines" or Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit."
If readers think "Jeez, Russ, those aren't jaunty singalong songs," I would encourage them to pay closer attention to the lyrics, which concern being bone-weary after laboring to harvest bananas on a plantation for 12 hours or more, the workplace hazards of venomous spiders, and the depredations of brutal overseers. It's a field holler, the West Indies version of an American chain gang song. An odd choice for high hilarity.
Mr. Burton was often praised in his early work for simultaneously celebrating and sending up American pop culture, yet somehow his reading of said has difficulty recognizing Black America's considerable contributions. His work increasingly reminds me of Tom Wolfe's observation in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test that Black Americans are no longer the arbiters of cool, as they had been from the 1920s through to the 1950s. Burton's pop culture appears to be the product of white suburbia, where people championed the Civil Rights Movement as long as it meant black men wouldn't be moving in next door.
What was the famous line, "Sure I think blacks and whites should be equal but that doesn't mean I want my daughter dating a black man"?
In 1988, I was too much a product of that world, that mindset, to notice. In 2021, I'm not.
None of which is to say Beetlejuice is some kind of monument to institutional racism, though it does highlight the convenient myopia inherent to white privilege. It's ironic, in the worst way, that Mr. Belafonte, a welcome dash of color in a whitebread decade such as the 1950s, is treated as a source of hilarity given that crap like Patti Page's "How Much is That Doggie in the Window" was so much more emblematic of white suburbia's uptight blandness.
I watched the rest of Beetlejuice but the foul aftertaste of that dinner scene proved impossible to remove. Its shadow, to mix a metaphor, overhung the rest of the movie. Only the now-obscure '30s star Silvia Sidney, as Alec and Geena Davis's ghostly case manager, Juno, lightened my mood, likely because I spent a day in August of '20 bingeing her movies on TCM. It was a great treat to see she never lost her edge, even decades after falling out of public favor.
I think it's time to work on a different decade's movie puzzle. The Aughts, unfairly slagged off as an era of franchise hegemony, continually prove themselves much more varied and interesting. The ascendancy of the indie film in the '90s continually appeals. As do the pre- and post-Code '30s. Increasingly, the '80s looks like a dreary, wearying, tone deaf decade of now-problematic and unfortunate films representative of Boomer and GenX cluelessness. When I review my list of seen '80s movies, I feel depressed and dispirited by what I once thought represented a high-water mark in cinema history. Beetlejuice is but one more refutation of that theory. I fear it will not be the last.
If readers think "Jeez, Russ, those aren't jaunty singalong songs," I would encourage them to pay closer attention to the lyrics, which concern being bone-weary after laboring to harvest bananas on a plantation for 12 hours or more, the workplace hazards of venomous spiders, and the depredations of brutal overseers. It's a field holler, the West Indies version of an American chain gang song. An odd choice for high hilarity.
Mr. Burton was often praised in his early work for simultaneously celebrating and sending up American pop culture, yet somehow his reading of said has difficulty recognizing Black America's considerable contributions. His work increasingly reminds me of Tom Wolfe's observation in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test that Black Americans are no longer the arbiters of cool, as they had been from the 1920s through to the 1950s. Burton's pop culture appears to be the product of white suburbia, where people championed the Civil Rights Movement as long as it meant black men wouldn't be moving in next door.
What was the famous line, "Sure I think blacks and whites should be equal but that doesn't mean I want my daughter dating a black man"?
In 1988, I was too much a product of that world, that mindset, to notice. In 2021, I'm not.
None of which is to say Beetlejuice is some kind of monument to institutional racism, though it does highlight the convenient myopia inherent to white privilege. It's ironic, in the worst way, that Mr. Belafonte, a welcome dash of color in a whitebread decade such as the 1950s, is treated as a source of hilarity given that crap like Patti Page's "How Much is That Doggie in the Window" was so much more emblematic of white suburbia's uptight blandness.
I watched the rest of Beetlejuice but the foul aftertaste of that dinner scene proved impossible to remove. Its shadow, to mix a metaphor, overhung the rest of the movie. Only the now-obscure '30s star Silvia Sidney, as Alec and Geena Davis's ghostly case manager, Juno, lightened my mood, likely because I spent a day in August of '20 bingeing her movies on TCM. It was a great treat to see she never lost her edge, even decades after falling out of public favor.
I think it's time to work on a different decade's movie puzzle. The Aughts, unfairly slagged off as an era of franchise hegemony, continually prove themselves much more varied and interesting. The ascendancy of the indie film in the '90s continually appeals. As do the pre- and post-Code '30s. Increasingly, the '80s looks like a dreary, wearying, tone deaf decade of now-problematic and unfortunate films representative of Boomer and GenX cluelessness. When I review my list of seen '80s movies, I feel depressed and dispirited by what I once thought represented a high-water mark in cinema history. Beetlejuice is but one more refutation of that theory. I fear it will not be the last.
Burton doesn't tend to hold up for me, either--I ought never to have watched Edward Scissorhands as an adult; as an adolescent who wanted to be Winona Ryder it was enchanting. As an adult I found it merely... cute, I guess? That dinner scene in Beetlejuice haunted me even in the eighties. The song was around (was it part of the Zeitgeist before or after the movie, I wonder? It was everywhere when I was a kid) and nobody, at all, not anybody seemed to think of it as anything other than an excuse to try on a goofy Jamaican accent and split their sides laughing. The worst I remember is a department store ad on the radio. "Day-o! One day sale-o! One day only at the Bon Marche." It must have run regularly because it's firmly in my consciousness. Horrible, when you get the full context.
ReplyDelete"The Vanana Boat Song" was definitely in the zeitgeist before the movie. The version played in the movie is, I'm pretty sure, from Belafonte at Carnegie Hall, a big record in the '60s. My parents had it in their collection and I grew up playing it. What's less clear is whether it always existed as a campy novelty tune within the zeitgeist. Belafonte was big with professional Civil Rights Democrats and folkies, so they may have understood the song otherwise, but it was a pretty big pop hit, as well, so it may have been understood by guys like Burton as inherently hysterical, a way to goof on their parents. I think I'll ask my mother.
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