May 22nd is World Goth Day, a holiday that was begun in England in 2009 as a way to celebrate, promote, and otherwise acknowledge those in the world who like to dress in black leather, hang out in cemeteries, and listen to a lot of Bauhaus. Goth, while perhaps not as big a cultural presence as it once was, is still a robust, living subculture of Halloweeny death that is always happy to be lurking around the fringes. Indeed, while not on official day on the Disneyland calendar, in late April or early May, there is always an unofficial “Bats Day” at the famed theme park wherein Goths gather in huge numbers to ride on children’s rides as a way of frightening the normals.
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The exact origin of Goth – as a modern fashion movement – has always been difficult to trace, and several amateur sociologists have posited various theories. Some have said that Goth is an extreme form of youthful religious rebellion that has taken the visual trappings of Satanism and other decidedly anti-Catholic schools of thought and co-opted them into a whole fashion underground. Most Goths, you’ll find, aren’t Satanists, but they do act like it to make their religious parents squirm. Others have said that it is a more acceptable set of attitudes taken from Norwegian death metal, although personally I think Goth came first. The name, after all, comes from 19th century Victorian literature.
Goth as we know it started, as far as we can tell, in England in the 1980s as part of several musical subcultures blending, cross-breeding, and pupating into their own form of depressive post-punk. To this day, Bauhaus, The Smiths, Morrissey, and The Cure remain the guideposts of the movement, with Marilyn Manson and certain death metal bands like Bathory falling behind.
In America, though, I think the Goth movement can be traced to one very specific source: Lydia Deetz, the gloomy teen girl played by Winona Ryder in Tim Burton’s 1988 cult hit Beetlejuice.
Warner Bros.
Lydia was Goth before it was cool. This was 1988, and Goth hadn’t really yet been seen by the American mainstream. Necromance hadn’t yet opened on Melrose Ave., and Marilyn Manson hadn’t yet begun recording, so Goth was waiting to make the transition across the pond. Tim Burton, that cultural giant, managed to introduce Goth to the world in the form of a dissatisfied teen girl who rejected her yuppie parents, believed in ghosts, had pale skin and dark circles under her eyes, an enthusiasm for gore, and who was an amateur photographer (a surprisingly common hobby for Goths).
Ryder played the part perfectly. She was black in a world of color. She was depressive in a world of tightly-wound businesspeople. And she wore funerary garb straight out of a Charles Addams comic strip. She was, finally, an Edward Gorey drawing come to life. And American audiences seem to have found their avatar. Tim Burton likely knew about the Goth movement, and likely was already living deeply within it when he make Beetlejuice. He had no agenda in including a Goth like Lydia – he wasn’t co-opting the culture for a mass market – he was simply expressing his own interests.
Nelvana Limited
Indeed, Lydia is the most sympathetic character in the film. She is strange and unusual, but also the clearest-thinking character. Everyone else is mired in bureaucratic red tape, actively does acts of evil, or is undone by stress. Lydia is a hero in her ability to accept the weird, and simply be who she is.
True, by the film’s conclusion, Lydia has changed out of funerary shrouds and into a normal schoolgirl outfit. Of course, over the course of the film, she learns that death is not an abstract concept, but something sad that happens to real people, so a slight turn away from death culture and seriousness makes sense; this is not a normalization of a kooky character, but a young person growing. Plus, she gets to live with ghosts, ensuring that her weird life will continue.
Lydia Deetz is the premiere American Goth icon for a generation. Goths everywhere may know who she is, and those who don’t owe her, and Tim Burton, an enormous debt. Lydia Deetz lives on this day. Now go listen to “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.”
Top Image: Warner Bros.
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and the co-host of The B-Movies Podcast and Canceled Too Soon. He also contributes to Legion of Leia and to Blumhouse. You can follow him on “The Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
