Esoteric Brezhnevism

  Beetlejuice (1988) costars Michael Keaton and Geena Davis got the chance to work with each other again in Speechless (1994), a politically themed but seemingly unremarkable romantic comedy written by Robert King and directed by Ron Underwood. Alternatively, however, I propose that Speechless can be viewed as an esoteric sequel to Tim Burton’s phantasmagoria, with Keaton and Davis essaying new realizations or encrypted avatars of the characters they portrayed in their previous collaboration. I should state at the outset, however, that the intertextual reading I advance below is probably not the one intended by the creators of Speechless and is rather representative of, at best, synchronicity, and, more pertinently, my way of sometimes amusing myself while watching movies. Speechless concerns the forbidden attraction of speechwriters Julia Mann (Davis) and Kevin Vallick (Keaton), who meet and fall for each other before they discover that they are supposed to be enemies, working

  Tim Burton’s summer blockbuster Batman Returns (1992), enjoyed superficially as a lavishly mounted superhero adventure by those of us who saw it on the big screen as children, elicited unease among other viewers who detected in its depiction of the Penguin (Danny DeVito) a set of anti-Semitic stereotypes. Columbia students Rebecca Roiphe and Daniel Cooper led the pack with “Batman and the Jewish Question”, published in The New York Times in July of that year, asserting that the supervillain “is a Jew, down to his hooked nose, pale face and lust for herring.” The film itself is ultimately “not anti-Semitic,” they decide. “But the director, Tim Burton, repeatedly uses imagery and cultural stereotypes that are rooted in Judeo-Christian culture” and “give historical depth and mythological resonance to his unreal technological extravaganza.” [1] “A fat, cigar-smoking, hook-nosed, fish-eating, greedy little man in a top hat threatens to kill the first-born of a general population,” shudd