Sumith Prasad
In Tim Burton’s 1988 horror comedy film ‘Beetlejuice,’ Barbara and Adam Maitland become invisible to the living after they die in an accident. Their efforts to scare Charles and Delia Deetz off their house fail because of their invisibility. However, when the Deetzes’ daughter, Lydia Deetz, shows up in the property’s attic, she sees the late couple. She also manages to see Betelgeuse, the exorcist who tries to find a way out of his cursed existence by marrying the teenager. The film concludes without offering an explicit explanation of Lydia’s superpower. However, an early draft of Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren’s screenplay for the movie has the answer we are looking for! SPOILERS AHEAD.
Being Strange and Unusual Helps Lydia to See the Maitlands
Lydia Deetz’s ability to see the dead, especially Barbara and Adam Maitland, is rooted in her personality. According to ‘Handbook for the Recently Deceased,’ people who are alive ignore the “strange and unusual.” To explain with an example, Charles and Delia Deetz buy the Maitlands’ house to transform it into a tourist destination or attraction. The last thing they may have expected to see in the property where they want to build a business venture must be ghosts. Since they are not expecting dead individuals in the house, they are ignoring the possibility of running into ghosts, which makes them unqualified to see the former owners of the establishment.
Furthermore, Charles and Delia are full of themselves. While the husband sees himself as a businessman with revolutionary ideas, the wife lives as if she is one of her generation’s greatest sculptors/artists. There is little to no room in their minds to consider the possibility of a different type of people existing in their world. Thus, it is apt to state that they don’t see the dead rather than they can’t see the dead. If their personalities are similar to their daughter’s, they may have seen Barbara and Adam since their arrival at the house.
Lydia is part of the Goth subculture, which involves a heightened acceptance of death and mortality. As a goth girl, the teenager is more than aware of the dead. This appreciation for the element of death, evident in her apparel that resembles funeral clothes, makes her qualified to see Barbara and Adam. Among the living, she is an odd one, making her “strange and unusual” like the late couple.
Lydia Accepts Death More Than Charles and Delia
In an earlier draft of the horror comedy’s screenplay, Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren explained how a person would be qualified to see the dead. This particular dialogue was eventually omitted from the scene in which Adam and Barbara discuss ‘Handbook for the Recently Deceased,’ especially the part concerning the living beings’ inability to see the dead people. “Here it says, ‘the living are arrogant… they think they’ll never die, so they refuse to see the dead,’” Barbara tells Adam, as per the screenplay. This explanation makes it clear that the ability to see the dead is a choice one makes unknowingly.
If Charlie and Delia are not arrogant and full of themselves, opening their minds to their impending deaths, they may not have unknowingly refused to see the dead. In Lydia’s case, she is not arrogant. She also does not refuse to accept the reality of death. While her father and stepmother are committed to transforming their new house into a postmodern work, she writes her suicide note, in which she expresses her wish to die by plummeting from the Winter River Bridge, the same way Adam and Barbara die. As someone with suicidal tendencies, she is awaiting her death, hoping it will free her from her miseries.
Lydia’s wait to be dead makes it clear that she accepts the reality behind death and mortality more than anyone around Adam and Barbara. Therefore, she can see them without an exorcism or any other tricks. Even though she is stuck in the world of the living, the teenager is someone who belongs to the realm of the dead, which gives her the ability to see the ghosts living in her new house.
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