walk with me beetlebabes beauties: I adore the theory I’ve seen out there that it was while the Maitlands are gone for 3 months and Beetlejuice *Mads Mikkelsen voice* has the opportunity to Watch Lydia that he is drawn to her—I would like to argue in addition to that, it’s after the first time he actually talks to Lydia that Beetlejuice knows he wants to marry her.
cw for suicidal ideation, under the cut:
In the scene where Lydia first meets Beetlejuice and he tries to convince her to summon him to the living world, Lydia tells Beetlejuice forlornly, “I’m trying to get in.” Beetlejuice is confused as to why she would want that—but then he drops it, saying “you have your reasons” and moves on, vaguely saying something about making a deal before they start playing charades.
It’s Lydia saying “I want to get it” that makes plain that both she and Beetlejuice feel they don’t belong in their respective worlds. Beetlejuice was murdered and he hates the paper-pushing buerocracy of the afterlife, while Lydia is strange and unusual, and is now trapped in a small, plain town with parents that don’t seem to care for her very much. They’re each alone, and because of that, they both want to be Over There. They have the same but opposite problem.
And so Beetkejuice doesn’t give her a speech about how suicide is not the answer, or even about how much being dead sucks (as would be more in his character). He understands what she’s actually feeling and respects that—because he shares that feeling with her.
I think this is why Beetlejuice says later, “I think she understands me.” This is what they share that allows for such understanding. He asks Lydia “Why?” at first because he genuinely doesn’t know why anyone would want “get in” to the afterlife, but once he realizes they have the same longing in them (what better word is there for it..?)…
Reader, I think that’s when it gets real.
(Too tender for him, maybe, but I wonder if meeting Lydia made Beetlejuice change his mind from “Get to the living world to get out of the afterlife” to “Get to Lydia, she’s with whom I belong.” Either way, it’s all this that, to me, is why her photo is still on his desk, 30 years later.)
There's a pun in the German poem Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden) by Matthias Claudius that I find really funny as a Beetlebabes shipper
cause "Geh, Lieber" does translate to "go, dear". Putting a comma between the words and capitalising the "Lieber" makes it an endearment.
But spoken out loud (or sung as in the Schubert version), it'd sound like "geh lieber", which translates to "you better go", and sounds far less affectionate.
But secretly, she loves him. She's just not ready to go with him yet.
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