“Daylight Come and Me Wan’ Go Home”: Beetlejuice as Zionist Allegory

 

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,” shudders Garth Wolkoff of the Northern California Jewish Bulletin in an article published the following month: “As a Jew […] I wanted to duck – because of the images that could be interpreted as anti-Semitic.” [2] Kindred to Batman Returns in its appeals to “historical depth and mythological resonance”, Burton’s second feature film, Beetlejuice (1988), presents a similar array of associations and warrants additional attention.

The film opens with the demise of married couple Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis), whose house is then purchased by the Deetzes (Jeffrey Jones and Catherine O’Hara), who move in along with their daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder). Adam and Barbara continue to haunt the house as hapless ghosts, unable to muster the spookiness to drive the new occupants away. At wits’ end, the harried Maitlands conjure a disreputable “bio-exorcist” whose advertisements they have seen, to rid them of the Deetzes and regain ownership of their home. Michael Keaton, in a frenetic career-highlight performance, stars as the bio-exorcist, whose name, notwithstanding the spelling of the film’s title, is Betelgeuse, which comes from the Arabic designation for a red star, which, “like the planet Mars that derives its name from a Roman war god, has been closely associated with the martial archetype of conquest for millennia, and by extension, the motif of death and rebirth.” [3]

Adam’s initial mispronunciation of the character’s name as “Betel-guise” possibly hints at the use of crypsis, while his later rendering of the name as “Betelmeyer” leaves little question as to the hired man’s ethnicity. Indeed, horror and mystery novelist Michael McDowell, who wrote the original version of Beetlejuice’s screenplay – which received a “negative reaction” when it was pitched to Universal Studios – conceived of the character “as a winged demon, who takes on the form of a short Middle Eastern man” [4]. Likewise, Adam, whose name associates him with the first Jew, has summoned the violence of Betelgeuse to restore to him what he imagines to be his rightful home and to re-establish Israel. “You tell them that we are horrible, desperate, ghoulish creatures who will stop at nothing to get our house back,” Adam declares. In another scene, attempting to restore his face to its normal appearance after reshaping it into a distended fright-visage, Adam is temporarily left with a comically long nose that causes his wife amusement, making his subtextual Jewishness almost explicit.

An elemental embodiment of demonic chutzpah, Betelgeuse personifies the worst archetypes of the gutter Jew: an ugly, crooked-nosed, rat-infested merchant, hustler, showbiz huckster, “illegal alien”, lecher, grotesque clown, and psychotic criminal given to tacky exclamations like “It’s showtime” and “Attention, K-Mart shoppers!” “Who do I have to kill?” he immediately asks the Maitlands on being summoned. Unable to contain his lust, Betelgeuse forces a kiss on Barbara, also groping her and using a stick to lift her skirt. When Adam inquires about his qualifications, the spook rattles off what might as well be the résumé of the Eternal Jew: “I attended Juilliard. I’m a graduate of the Harvard Business School. I travel quite extensively. I lived through the Black Plague and I had a pretty good time during that,” he confesses, alluding to medieval allegations of Jewish well-poisoning. Then, becoming agitated, Betelgeuse shouts bitterly: “I’ve seen The Exorcist about 167 times and it keeps gettin’ funnier every single time I see it,” probably referring to the more than 100 occasions on which the Jews have been expelled from various countries. “You want somebody outta your house, I wanna get somebody outta your house,” he tells the Maitlands. “Look! We’ve been to Saturn. Hey, I’ve been to Saturn,” he throws in, alluding to the interpretation of Judaism as a form of Saturn worship. “Whoa! Sand worms – you hate ‘em, right?” he adds, referring to the dangerous creatures that inhabit the other-dimensional desolation surrounding the Maitlands’ house just as hostile Arab nations surround the Jewish “birthright”. “I hate ‘em, myself.” The deal Betelgeuse proposes to strike with the Zionist Maitlands is that their home, Israel, will be restored to their custody, but that the chaos of his wildest whims will be unleashed in the process. The tentative Betelgeuse-Maitlands alliance thus mirrors twentieth-century cooperation between the Zionist movement and the depravity of the US-based criminal underworld through figures like Meyer Lansky and Morris Dalitz. A fanciful, wisecracking shapeshifter bearing some affinity to the child murderer Freddy Krueger from Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Betelgeuse in one scene assumes the form of a giant snake evocative of the serpent “Alljuda” featured in a 1934 issue of Der Sturmer. Like Leo Frank, Woody Allen, and Jeffrey Epstein, Betelgeuse is attracted to very young girls, with “little girl” Lydia Deetz quickly catching his eye, the screenplay emphasizing her youth when she says, “I’m a child, for godsakes.” “I’m not exposing that little girl to that pervert,” Barbara finally protests, expressing her moral reservations and doubts about Betelgeuse’s utility to their cause.

Even in minor ways, Beetlejuice comes across as a very Jewish movie. Real estate developer Maxie Dean (Robert Goulet), for example, dismisses Charles Deetz as a “putz”, and heavy smoker Sylvia Sidney brings a decidedly New York sensibility to her role as Juno, a cantankerous case worker for the departed. The memorably rambunctious score, meanwhile, was composed by Danny Elfman, who has said that, “as soon as I became a composer, I was deeply aware of the Jewish cultural roots that are embedded in my DNA.” [5]

As a distinctly Jewish and Zionist movie, moreover, Beetlejuice does not fail to address and caricature the persistent threat of anti-Semitism. Appearing as perhaps the Maitlands’ most formidable antagonist, the interior decorator and spiritualist Otho, is Glenn Shadix, also notable for playing the ridiculous Father Ripper in Heathers (1988). Otho shares his name with one of the Roman emperors who ruled at the time of the First Roman-Jewish War, and his preference for striking black and red attire grants him a vague affinity with the precedent of the NSDAP in his function as esoteric harasser of the Zionist Maitlands. Chubby and comical, Otho is nevertheless dangerous in his ability to perceive things others fail to notice, giving him something of the quality of a “conspiracy theorist”. His discovery of the Maitlands’ copy of the Handbook for the Recently Deceased, for example, functions rather like a copy of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion or The Culture of Critique in the hands of an anti-Semite. Similarly, there is surprise when the Deetz group discovers Maitland’s miniature model of “the whole damn town”, like some expansionist blueprint for Greater Israel.

In one sequence, Otho and Delia Deetz walk through the house with cans of spray paint, indicating their ideas for different rooms. “Blue-green,” Otho dictates as the correct color for one interior. “Hydrated chromic oxide,” he clarifies with quirky specificity, adding, “Remember, I’m schooled in chemistry.” This moment, which serves no obvious purpose, is, whether by intention or not, funnily reminiscent of the controversy regarding the absence of Prussian-blue staining on the walls of rooms posited as having been utilized as homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz, this being the hue that results from cyanide oxidation. The problem received publicity at the time of German “Holocaust” revisionist Ernst Zundel’s legal troubles in the 1980s, with American execution expert Fred Leuchter traveling to Auschwitz to obtain samples from the interior walls of the rooms claimed to have served as the camp’s gas chambers for chemical analysis. “I know just as much about the supernatural as I do about interior design,” Otho later states. Is this a sly allusion to Auschwitz? It was in February of 1988, mere weeks before the release of Beetlejuice, that Leuchter left for Poland to conduct the research for what would become The Leuchter Report [6], making it impossible that the line in the screenplay alludes to Leuchter’s work specifically. The alleged gas chambers had for many years been the subject of critical scrutiny, however, and Swedish revisionist Ditlieb Felderer, who was active during the seventies, had already “published photographs indicating […] the lack of Prussian-blue stains on the walls,” Robert Faurisson notes in his introduction to The Leuchter Report [7]. McDowell, author of the original Beetlejuice screenplay, “couldn’t get enough of death” and by the time of his own death of an AIDS-related illness in 1999 had assembled a sizeable “Death Collection” consisting of “photographs of people after their demise”, a child’s coffin, morbid jewelry, and other odd items [8]. Given such grim interests, it is not inconceivable that McDowell might have taken an interest in ongoing debates surrounding “The Holocaust” and worked a wink or two into his script.

“You two have really screwed up,” Juno scolds the Maitlands: “I’ve received word that you allowed yourselves to be photographed […] and you let Otho get hold of the handbook. […] Never trust the living!” she warns them. “We cannot have a routine haunting like yours provide proof that there is existence beyond death!” If Otho’s concern with chemistry is really an allusion to the forensic challenge to the official narrative of “The Holocaust”, then Juno’s worry about the discovery of “proof that there is existence beyond death” can be read as despair that, without belief in the “six million” – i.e., if “there is existence beyond [putative] death” for the “six million” in Israel and abroad – then one of the key pretexts for “routine haunting” of Palestinian land may be called into question, as critics will accuse “that these events were conjured up by the Jewish people mostly as a means to justify the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.” [9] With Burton’s Beetlejuice 2 presently in production and scheduled for release in 2024, it will be interesting to observe if these themes are further developed.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] Roiphe, Rebecca; and Daniel Cooper. “Batman and the Jewish Question”. The New York Times (July 2, 1992): https://archive.is/xu0cP

[2] Wolkoff, Garth. “Stereotypes in Films Damage Cultural Unity”. Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle (August 14, 1992), p. 5.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betelgeuse#Mythology

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

[5] “Elfman Circles Back to the Circus”. Jewish Journal (September 7, 2011): https://jewishjournal.com/culture/arts/95814/

[6] Faurisson, Robert. “The First Leuchter Report: Preface”, in Leuchter, Fred A., et al. The Leuchter Reports: Critical Edition. Uckfield: Castle Hill Publishers, 2017, p. 14.

[7] Ibid., p. 16.

[8] “Acclaimed Horror Writer’s ‘Death Collection’ Goes on Display – From Burial Gown Ads to Photographs of the Deceased”. New York Daily News (October 31, 2013): https://web.archive.org/web/20131104045608/https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/horror-writer-michael-mcdowell-death-collection-display-article-1.1503281

[9] GreatMystery. “Ending the Conversation Part One”. Holocaust.claims (May 11, 2023): https://www.holocaust.claims/general/ending-the-conversation-part-one/