Beetlejuice in the Land of Enchantment: The Twilight Language of Speechless

 

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 as they respectively are for opponents in a New Mexico senatorial race. Julia is a feisty idealist onboard the campaign of Democrat Lloyd Wannamaker (Mitchell Ryan) while Vallick is a cynical sitcom jokester spin-doctoring for Republican Ray Garvin (Ray Baker), the two speechwriters’ clashing sensibilities blurrily mirroring the conflict between Barbara Maitland and Betelgeuse in Burton’s film. Reviews of Speechless at the time of its release frequently mentioned the similarity of the premise to the relationship of Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist James Carville and George H.W. Bush’s deputy campaign manager Mary Matalin, who were romantically involved during the 1992 presidential race and wed the following year, but King denied a deliberate parallel, asserting that he had written Speechless back in 1989 [1]. Christopher Reeve, however, in an interview he gave to promote Speechless, claimed King had written it in 1991, at the time of the Gulf War [2].

Aside from the ostensible coincidence of again being paired with his Beetlejuice costar, other clues point to Keaton’s Speechless character bearing some relationship to his previous role. Vallick’s name, for one, phonetically mimics that of Valac, a winged demon described in the seventeenth-century grimoire The Lesser Key of Solomon. Readers will recall that Betelgeuse, in Michael McDowell’s original Beetlejuice screenplay, was conceived as “a winged demon, who takes on the form of a short Middle Eastern man” [3]. Speechless writer Robert King, “a devout Catholic”, and his wife Michelle, a secular Jew, have maintained a “lifelong dispute about the origins of human malevolence,” according to a 2022 profile in The New Yorker: “Robert believes in demonic influences, Michelle in psychology and sociology” [4]. Additionally, Vallick jokes about wearing Black Flag bug spray instead of cologne, alluding to Betelgeuse’s insect-evocative name and repulsive person as well as the Jewish spirit of anarchy and violence. In committing a minor theft from a hotel maid’s supply closet, frequently lying, and making facetious reference to his “serial killer years”, Vallick further evinces faint echoes of Betelgeuse’s criminal, nihilistic, and antisocial nature. The presence, too, of Ghostbusters (1984) actor Ernie Hudson as Julia’s colleague Dan Ventura alludes to Keaton’s identity as the “ghost with the most”, particularly as Ventura could be said to “bust” Vallick to the extent that he more than once interrupts his amorous attentions to Julia.

Hints of Vallick’s demonic nature also include him more than once being framed against a lit fireplace and a snippet of a televangelist’s broadcast that disrupts a political debate as Vallick and Julia make love in a television studio’s control room, inadvertently switching the channels on a monitor. The preacher can be heard holding forth in fire-and-brimstone fashion about the “flames of fire in him, and his skin the color of the earth’s sun.” Again indicating the devilish, Julia in one scene sits in a toilet stall with the words “I’m in hell” written on the door. Perhaps referring to the otherworldly, supernal, or intertextual levels of meaning to Speechless, Vallick in another moment puts to Julia the question, “Did we just enter another dimension?” 

In answer to Julia’s hypothetical question about how Vallick would respond to infidelity, he answers that he might push her off a bridge – a detail that links her with her predecessor in Beetlejuice, who dies precisely when her car goes off a bridge. Julia’s name, meanwhile, phonetically identifies her as the Jew Leah, wife to Jacob and matriarch of the house of Israel. Etymologically, Leah refers to a cow, a significance that receives a wink when Vallick and Julia have a tense encounter against the background of a cattle pen. Linking Leah and Julia, moreover, is the deception both women practice in concealing their identities: Leah by taking Rachel’s place in her bed, and Julia by hiding the fact that she works for Wannamaker’s campaign. More intriguingly, Rabbi Marc Gafni, drawing on the mysticism of the sixteenth-century Kabbalist the Ari, explains that Leah can be understood as an incarnation of the “foul (though very sexy) demon” Lilith, destined to “return to paradise, and to her original status as the soulmate of Adam.” Julia-Leah-Lilith thus has an affinity with Barbara Maitland, wife of Adam Maitland in Beetlejuice. “The starting place for this drama of tikkun is in the household of Jacob, which we have described […] as an archetypal matrix within Kabbalah for discerning divine patterns in the events of the human world,” Gafni continues:

According to the Ari, the Godhead reveals itself through many faces, some masculine, some feminine, and some – the highest ones – are androgynous. Some of these divine aspects are named after Jacob’s family and their history. In the language of early Kabbalah, the highest revelation of God is usually called Ze’eir Anpin, but the Ari often refers to Him as “Israel”. Alongside the central system of the sefirot, there is a lower, parallel image known as “Jacob”. Just as Jacob merited two names, which expressed two different levels of his existence, there are two levels of revelation of the divinity, or two types of divine personality systems – one, as it were, “Jacobic” and the other “Israelic”.

Gafni then cites the Zohar: “The Holy One, blessed be He, called Jacob a god. He said to him: ‘I am God in the upper realms, and you are God in the lower realms.’” Julia Mann’s surname further hints at her affinity with Lilith, the female aspect of an androgynous being, as well as suggesting an alternate identity for Vallick as Jacob-Israel, “an improved version of the figure and story of Adam” [5]. Vallick and his “Mann”, in crossing the Rio Grande from Las Cruces into Mexico, running out of gas, and passing the evening in scrappy flirtation, enact a parody of the episode in Chapter 32 of Genesis in which Jacob wrestles with a “man” or angel:

And he rose up that night […] and passed over the ford Jabbok. […]

And Jacob […] there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. […]

And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.

And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob.

And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.

Bolstering this interpretation is Julia’s home address, 81 Glenn Brook in Providence, Rhode Island, the King James Version describing the ford of the Jabbok as a “brook”. There is a Betelgeuse-Jacob connection, too, in that Orion, the constellation of which Betelgeuse’s celestial namesake forms a node, also contains a component known variously as Orion’s Belt, Jacob’s Rod, or the Three Sisters. As if in contemplation of these significances, Vallick and Julia lie in the back of a pickup truck on the way back to New Mexico, gazing up in wonder at the starry desert sky. New Mexico's Very Large Array complex, incidentally, is the preeminent facility in the United States for the study of the star. 

As James Shelby Downard and Michael Hoffman note in King Kill 33, “Mexico is itself a master symbol of America mystica and a place where the very foulest deeds of Masonic sorcery and witchcraft have transpired.” [6] Vallick and “infiltrator” and “slut spy” Julia are insomniacs, and their series of nocturnal rendezvous emphasizes their status as creatures of the night as well as the secret, conspiratorial nature of their relationship. “Midnight? I just wake up at midnight,” Vallick confesses. King Kill 33 elaborates on the meanings of the “mystical toponomy” or conspiratorially resonant poetry of the Southwest with particular reference to posited Masonic symbolism of the Zionist assassination of President Kennedy:

Let us take as an example the “Mason Road” in Texas that connects to the “Mason No El Bar” and the Texas-New Mexico (“The Land of Enchantment”) border. This connecting line is on the 32^nd degree. The thirty-second degree in Masonry of the Scottish Rite is the next to the highest degree awarded. When this 32nd degree line of latitude is traced west, into the “Land of Enchantment” it becomes situated midway between Deming and Columbus (NM). Slightly to the north of the town of Columbus are the Tres Hermanas (3 sisters) mountains. It is approximately 32 miles between Deming and Columbus and the 3 Sisters Mountains are a minute and some seconds south of the 32nd degree line. When this line is traced further to the west it is found to pass the ghost-town of Shakespeare at a distance south of the town that is roughly equivalent to the distance which the 32nd degree line passes north of the 3 Sisters Mountains. The names “Shakespeare” and the “3 Sisters” find their connection in the tragedy of “Macbeth”. [7]

Indeed, one character in Speechless dubs Vallick “Shakespeare”, and Julia’s birthday as glimpsed on her driver’s license is March 15th, conjuring the Ides of March, famously the occasion of the killing of another king, Julius Caesar. The Kennedy brothers’ assassinations are referenced in the screenplay as Vallick and Julia stroll past a cannon in a park, a visual indicator of the military and geopolitical subtext of the “campaigns” they wage as speechwriters. Vallick guesses that Julia has a “framed picture of JFK in the living room”, but Julia, alluding to the assassination of Robert Kennedy in the kitchen hallway of the Ambassador Hotel, corrects him: “In the kitchen.” Another nod to the RFK assassination can be detected when a scene featuring a recitation of the line “Someone’s in the kitchen” from “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” cuts to a scene with a brief clip of “Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)” from Annie Get Your Gun (1950) – a song in which the protagonist boasts of her marksmanship. King Kill 33, further delineating the relevance of New Mexico within the symbological matrix of the Kennedy assassinations, adds:

District Attorney for New Orleans, James Garrison, was supported by a “Truth and Consequences” Club […]

Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, is a town located on the thirty-third degree of parallel latitude, and near the same latitude John Fitzgerald Kennedy became an oblation and on the same latitude is the chief Temple on this planet, in the minds of sorcerers, namely the Temple of Solomon at Jerusalem, which was once located there and is sworn to be re-built on this thirty-third degree.

This information […] exists in reality in such a way as to forthrightly indicate the extraordinary nature of the processing of this planet which is taking place.

This method and process is summed up in the principle of the “Making Manifest of All That is Hidden” […]

“In a literal, alchemical sense,” this Revelation of the Method “is the accomplishment of the Third Law of the Alchemists and is, as yet, unfulfilled or at least not completed; the other two have been – the creation and destruction of primordial matter (the detonation of the first Atomic Bomb at the Trinity Site, at White Sands, New Mexico [near Las Cruces], on the thirty-third degree of parallel), [and] the killing of the king (at the Trinity Site, at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, near the thirty-third degree of latitude)” [8].

The esoteric relevance of the film’s events to the Middle East is reflected in New Mexico’s desert landscape and is expressed in Vallick’s rival for Julia’s affections (Christopher Reeve), whose nickname is “Baghdad Bob”. Additionally, more than one display of faux-indigenous handicrafts visible behind characters exhibit a Magen David motif. Specifically, one scene finds Vallick standing in front of one of these as he suggests to Baghdad Bob a “behind-the-scenes kinda thing” in connection with candidate Garvin’s handlers. Keaton and Reeve, most famous for portraying subtextually Jewish DC superheroes Bruce Wayne in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) and Kal-El in Richard Donner’s Superman (1978), can be read as standing for competing visions of the Zionist project in vying for Julia’s heart. Reprising Beetlejuice’s metaphor of Israel as the contested home, Speechless hands the keys to Vallick with “House of Love”, a duet by Amy Grant and Vince Gill that plays as the end credits roll. 

Speechless, even if the somewhat whimsical and less-than-earnest interpretations I offer here are overly strained, does contain an undeniable element of truth concerning the falseness and conspiratorial nature of American politics, with Republican Garvin and Democrat Wannamaker being revealed to have been bribed by the same junk bond billionaire – just as one Zionist billionaire class dominates the bankrolling of both major parties, with plutocrats and kleptocrats like Stephen Schwarzman, Donald Sussman, and Sam Bankman-Fried throwing money at Democrats and Republicans alike. The American regime, at least to this extent, is very much a “House of Love” – and a house of Israel – which is why my moral support goes to the sandworms.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] Price, Michael H. “Love among the Smoke-Filled Rooms”. Fort Worth Star-Telegram (December 16, 1994), Star Time section, p. 38.

[2] “Christopher Reeve ‘Speechless’ 12/94”. The Bobbie Wygant Archive (June 30, 2021): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7ddOq7jbPM

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beetlejuice#Writing

[4] Nussbaum, Emily. “The Couple behind TV’s Boldest Shows”. The New Yorker (June 13, 2022): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/20/the-couple-behind-tvs-boldest-shows

[5] Gafni, Marc. “The Second Gate: Leah Is Lillith”: https://archive.is/tPYK8

[6] Downard, James Shelby; and Michael A. Hoffman II. King Kill 33. Coeur d’Alene, ID: Independent History and Research, 1998, p. 12.

[7] Ibid., p. 11.

[8] Ibid., p. 34.