Beetlejuice turned 31 this past weekend, and that makes sense because it’s been a part of my movie-loving memory as far back as I can remember. Both of my parents dug Tim Burton and Danny Elfman, so the slightly strange cinematic dreamscapes of the director and composer were intertwined with my early memories of fairy tales and spooky stories. I started watching the Beetlejuice cartoon in syndication on Nickelodeon when I was five, and there she was: Lydia Deetz.
In the cartoon series, Beetlejuice causes a lot of trouble, but he and Lydia are basically friends. He’s a chaotic influence, to be sure, but Lydia almost always saves the day using wit and tenacity. She’s a goth Lisa Simpson, and I latched onto the character with everything I had. I begged my mom to let me watch the movie, but it turned out to be too scary for me. A few years later, emboldened by my newfound love of The Addams Family, I gave it another try. Wednesday seemed like spiritual sisters with Lydia, and I needed to know if she was as wonderful in the movie as in the cartoon series.
Winona Ryder’s performance and Lydia’s characterization made me feel seen in a way that hadn’t happened since Princess Leia said “someone has to save our skins” in Star Wars. This was different, though, because Lydia wasn’t a space-rebel princess or a warrior princess or a princess at all. She wasn’t supported by a perfect magical family like Wednesday and she didn’t have superpowers, but she was still the coolest person I had ever seen.
By the time I had finally gotten up the nerve to sit through all of Beetlejuice, I was 8 or 9 years old, and I had realized that I really wasn’t like a lot of the other kids in school. I grew up in a family that embraced all things spooky, but I started to feel like we were our own Addams family. My female friends were starting to become obsessed with boys, MTV, and fashion magazines. My male friends were starting to treat me differently, and they were becoming obsessed with sports. I was left with my Nightmare Before Christmas fanart, my Batman Forever soundtrack, and no one who understood my weirdness.
There’s a line in Beetlejuice that’s never left me. When newlydeads Barbara (Geena Davis) and Adam (Alec Baldwin) ask Lydia how she can see them despite their ghostliness, she laughs and points out a line in the Handbook for the Recently Deceased.
“Live people ignore the strange and unusual”, she reads. “I myself am strange and unusual.”
That line cut through me and nearly took my breath away. That summer I had gone to visit relatives and toured the family business – a funeral home. It began a morbid fascination with death and the dead that’s never left me, but I had been somewhat ashamed of it before Beetlejuice. Before Lydia, I thought being strange and unusual only meant you got your school lunch thrown at you. After hearing those six words, however, I embraced it.
When I was a bit older, Winona Ryder would give me another massive inspiration with her turn as Veronica in Heathers – another teenage girl possessed by her own macabre free spirit. Lydia is still her crowning achievement, however, giving goth femmes around the world a heroine to idolize. She’s snarky but surprisingly warm, capable of making mistakes and owning up to them. Lydia is the flawed kind of female protagonist more movies need.
It’s not difficult to see Lydia’s impact on pop culture. She’s the matron saint of goth girls, from MTV’s Daria to the girls in The Craft. She’s smart and savvy while still being genuine to her teen girl roots. More than any character in cinema, Lydia Deetz made me feel like it was okay to be strange and unusual, and she showed me that you could look damn good doing it, too.
