Typical gothic director Tim Burton is back with a sequel to Beetlejuice (1988), the film that made Winona Ryder a star as iconic goth Lydia Deetz. Beetlejuice sees Ryder reprise her role alongside recent goth Jenna Ortega, offering an unusual insight into how different generations have interpreted the goth.
One of the primary overtly gothic characters to look in a mainstream film, Lydia Deetz's style had an enormous influence on alternative teens within the late Eighties. Beetlejuice got here out the identical yr as one other gothic horror comedy – Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. Compared to Cassandra Peterson's equally iconic but unashamedly sexual gothic vamp, Lydia was an attainable role model. She was the goth round the corner: sweet, stylish, likable, and never overtly sexualized.
Every element of Lydia's look was unforgettable: the spiky bangs, the combed-up hairstyle, the massive wide-brimmed black sun hat, the black mourning veil, the red tulle wedding dress, the SLR camera accessory.
Costume designer Aggie Guerard Rodgers was influenced inspired by the kind of the goth subculture of the time, but added twists to make the look “strange and unusual,” to paraphrase Lydia herself. Ryder went on to have a profession marked by edgy, goth-tinged roles, and gained a repute as one half of the last word goth celebrity couple in her relationship with actor Johnny Depp within the early Nineteen Nineties.
The story of the Gothic girl
Since Beetlejuice, the gothic girl has been a ubiquitous figure in popular culture. She appears particularly continuously in comics and animations. The figure Death from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman (recently dropped at life by Kirby Howell-Baptiste within the Netflix TV adaptation) was an early version. Goth girls are ubiquitous in manga and anime. There was even an animated TV spin-off of Beetlejuice within the Nineteen Nineties that focused on Lydia.
The ancestors of the Gothic girl are the heroines of 18th and nineteenth century Gothic novels, who’re typically on the brink between childhood and maturity. Characters like Emily St. Aubert from Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) live in gloomy, often enchanted castles and are artistic, sensitive – and susceptible to a wild imagination.
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Radcliffe parodies Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (written in 1803 and published in 1817) through the heroine Catherine Morland, who’s perfectly normal but imagines she resides in a Gothic novel. Similarly, Lydia melodramatically declares: “My whole life is one big dark room.” The twist is that Lydia's house is definitely haunted.
Contemporary depictions of goth girls often mix cuteness or quirkiness with the dark and macabre. They challenge stereotypical notions of cuteness or satirize them by merging them with horror imagery, or defuse the fear with quirky humor.
Goth girls are attractive to many young women because they concurrently conform to and reject conventional femininity, making them a powerful role model for navigating the teenage years. In a world where pink is in every single place, selecting black could be empowering.
Representation for Gothic moms
What these examples rarely show, nevertheless, is what happens when goth girls grow up. Most goth heroines' stories end in marriage or death, or within the case of comics and cartoons, they conveniently stay young perpetually.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice deviates from convention by featuring two generations of gothic women. Lydia is now the host of a magical talk show within the kind of Most Haunted and the mother of sulky, rebellious teenage daughter Astrid, played by Ortega.
In terms of her gothic credentials, Ortega is to Generation Z what Ryder was to Generation X. As the star of the Netflix series “Wednesday” (2022), a reinterpretation of the character from the Addams Family, Ortega is the proper goth girl for the 2020s. Off screen, the style media celebrates Ortega’s “Gothic glamour” Style that mixes designer labels with a way of gothic in a fun way.
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Influenced by social media culture, Ortega goes much further than Nineteen Nineties stars like Ryder or Christina Ricci (the Nineteen Nineties incarnation of Wednesday Addams) in consciously constructing a goth girl identity as a sort of private brand.
However, the generation that originally loved Ryder and Ricci has not yet finished with their Gothic heroines. Sociologist Paul Hodkinson has shown that most of the original Goths of the Eighties and 90s selected to age inside their subculture.
He surveyed participants on the Whitby Goth Weekend in 2010 and located that lots of them had married and began families, but retained – in modified forms to accommodate careers, parenthood and ageing bodies – the style, musical tastes and leisure activities that had built their identities.
Winona Ryder as older Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice represents these aging goth parents. The goth mother – the grown-up goth girl – is a personality we’ve never seen on screen in this manner before.
The older Lydia wears a modified gothic style that continues to be recognizably her own but adapted to adult life. She reconciles together with her selfish stepmother Delia, an artist played by Catherine O'Hara. This film focuses on female relationships.
You can get along along with your parents and still wear gothic clothes, the film seems to inform us. Forget the Addamses – that is what a gothic family looks like.
image credit : theconversation.com