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Adam and Barbara Maitland are dead, but their troubles have just begun.

The farmhouse decor of their home is under threat

from the pretentious modernism of Delia Dietz, and her plan to remake it in her own image

could turn their post-life purgatory into earthbound hell. Solving this problem leaves them with

an impossible choice between figuring out how to navigate an intractable netherworld bureaucracy or seeking the help of a renegade demon whose perverse remedies

are worse than what they're supposed to cure. Their way out of this impasse involves

teaming up with Delia stepdaughter Lydia, whose goth style seems to lend itself to communicating

with the dead. Today we discuss

Beetlejuice and what its battle royale between conflicting aesthetic sensibilities, rustic,

gothic, and avant-garde has to say about the connections between love, mortality, and the many

pitfalls of growing up. This is Wes Alwyn. And this is Aaron Olonick. And you're listening to Subtext.

So Aaron, tell me about your goth phase in high school. Ah, it was short. So short is to be

non-existent, an infinitesimal. Almost couldn't detect it. Yeah. You wore black, all black that one day and then...

I'm still in a goth phase.

That's all I do is wear black now.

I think I told you that I have a friend who calls me the Italian widow.

That is like, you know, like the idea of like a person who is just always in mourning for the rest of their lives, always wearing black.

But no, I'm afraid I was never a goth. I was never a goth.

...