Tim Burton's use of a "Soul Train" scene in "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" was probably not the best idea
As is the case with many sequels (save for "Toy Story 2" and "Shrek 2"), "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" wasn’t anything to write home about.
While it wasn’t the worst follow-up film I’ve seen, it certainly didn’t do much justice to its iconic ’80s predecessor. "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice"'s lackluster quality effectively boiled down to being stuffed with far too many, largely disjointed plotlines — including a wildly underused Monica Bellucci as the sutured ex-lover of the titular crusty poltergeist (Michael Keaton) — and an unsettling ending scene that saw Jenna Ortega’s Astrid birth a bloody Beetle-fetus.
But perhaps the most cringe and egregious aspect of Tim Burton’s record-breaking fall blockbuster was the addition of a "Soul Train" segment, in a ghoulish riffing of the classic ’70s music television series.
Astrid becomes trapped in the afterlife after her new beau reveals himself to be a dead charlatan who once trafficked in parricide — he tricks her into swapping her soul for his, dooming her to "Soul Train" to the Great Beyond (where you go when you’re dead, dead). She’s navigated toward the ghost train through a crowd of dancers doing The Bump and The Roger Rabbit as a conductor (who looks suspiciously like the late Don Cornelius, the original host of "Soul Train") crows, “All aboard!”
"Beetlejuice" part deux’s inclusion of the groovy ghost train may at first seem like a fun cultural touchstone. In actuality, it’s Tim Burton’s lazy attempt at reconciling past criticism regarding his casting decisions.
Debuting in 1970 on a local Chicago television network, "Soul Train" highlighted the joy of Black Americans through dance, style, and culture. As Brooklyn White-Grier wrote in a 2023 CNN explainer, “In the middle of the Black Power era and feeding from the civil rights movement, 'Soul Train' provided a fresh opportunity for Black people to see and celebrate themselves. It was the most prominent stage displaying the mingling of sociocultural and political progress — and an imagining of life unencumbered by white supremacy.” The show also sparked the career success of a number of Black artists, such as Rosie Perez of Spike Lee’s "Do the Right Thing" and Vivica Fox, who lent her talent to Tarantino’s "Kill Bill" as Vernita Green.
If you know anything about Burton’s movies, you know that they tend to feature characters who embody all the qualities of a sickly Victorian-era child: waifish, sunken doe-eye and gaunt faces with a deathlike pallor. Think Roderick and Madeline Usher. And while there’s nothing wrong with a director emulating a certain aesthetic, Burton’s well-documented history of hardly ever casting minority actors for his roles makes the "Soul Train" scene sit all the more uncomfortably.
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In 2016, actor Samuel L. Jackson became the first Black person to play a lead in a Burton film when he was cast as the shapeshifting Mr. Barron in "Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children." (Keep in mind that Burton has been actively directing since the 1970s.)
When Burton was asked by Bustle to elaborate on his predilection for pasty actors while promoting the film, which was adapted from Ransom Riggs’ 2011 novel, the director offered a stunningly tone-deaf response.
“I remember back when I was a child watching 'The Brady Bunch' and they started to get all politically correct,” Burton told then-Bustle reporter Rachel Simon. “Like, OK, let’s have an Asian child and a Black — I used to get more offended by that than just — I grew up watching Blaxploitation movies, right? And I said, ‘That’s great.’ I didn’t go like, ‘OK, there should be more white people in these movies.’”
Unsurprisingly, those comments were met with considerable backlash on social media.
"If you say 'Tim Burton' three times, a goth white dude appears and mansplains to you how casting only white people isn't racist," wrote @knownforms in a post to X.
"Hoo boy they're discussing diversity with Tim Burton, who's never even cast a white person with a tan," added @alshipley.
For Jackson’s part, he affirmed to Bustle that while he “noticed” the lack of diversity in "Miss Peregrine"’s casting, it didn’t sway him from joining the project. “I had to go back in my head and go, how many black characters have been in Tim Burton movies?” Jackson said. “And I may have been the first, I don’t know, or the most prominent in that particular way, but it happens the way it happens. I don’t think it’s any fault of his or his method of storytelling, it’s just how it’s played out. Tim’s a really great guy.”
Even when Burton did cast Black leads in his popular Netflix series, "Wednesday" — which saw him partner with nascent scream-queen Ortega as the Addams family’s brooding, braided scion — he fumbled the proverbial bag. Fans slammed the casting of Black actors Joy Sunday and Iman Marson as racist, taking issue with how they were cast as a mean girl and a bully at Wednesday’s boarding school, Nevermore Academy, in their respective roles.
When the New York Post reached out to Burton’s team regarding the blowback, a WME representative for the director said, “I’m not forwarding a comment request this silly to Tim.”
In "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice," the ghost train in the "Soul Train" scene has all the makings of a funky subway car, fitted out with hot – albeit decaying — dancers wearing disco attire. If not for the fact that there’s no returning from the Great Beyond, it doesn’t seem like a bad setup for living in the land of death. It certainly bests the phantasmagoric desert full of sandworms.
But despite the scene's rhythmic appeal, its singularity is deafening. It stands in stark contrast to the fact that there are quite literally zero other Black people in the film — not in the land of the living, dead, or background for that matter. This fact renders the "Soul Train" a cheap caricature of diversity, only underscoring the sheer flaccidness of Burton’s attempt at inclusivity.
As one guffawing TikToker put it, “Tim Burton was so tired of people saying that he don’t be putting Black people in his movies that he said, ‘Here! Take a freaking 'Soul Train' joke!’”
Still, though, It would be remiss to neglect to acknowledge that one of the film’s leads, Ortega, is a Hispanic actor, hailing from Mexican and Puerto Rican parentage. The actor has previously spoken about diversity and beauty standards in Hollywood, and how she saw herself fitting in. “As a child actor, there are two jobs that you can get: you’re either the younger version of someone or you’re playing somebody’s daughter — and there were just not many leading Hispanic actors who I could be that for,” Ortega told The Hollywood Reporter in 2023. “So a lot of the jobs that I was going for growing up would never work out, because I didn’t look [a certain] way. That was really hard, to hear that something you couldn’t change was what was preventing you [from succeeding].”
While Ortega’s sentiments and experience are undeniably real and valid, it’s important to account for her conventional attractiveness and what some might argue to be her white-passing Latina status, a title I know well in my own right from growing up racially white but ethnically Hispanic.
Tack on the way Beetlejuice speaks Spanish ad nauseam while offering theatric displays of wedding-night love to Astrid’s mom and medium-extraordinaire, Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), and the film’s convoluted plot is thrown into even further disarray where diversity is concerned.
As one X/Twitter user succinctly put it, it all just feels like Burton, in "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice," “did the wildest stereotypical s**t.”
