Finding the hidden meaning of a story is difficult work whether it’s a film, novel or your own story, but when you do it’s always worth it.

The book is centered on the idea that great films have great stories and great stories have life lessons that are in his words “key for survival.” Brian McDonald wanted to know why storytelling is so important to humans. We’re willing to shell out hundreds of billions of dollars a year world wide for stories between theaters, Netflix, podcasts, and books. He wondered why we all pause if we overhear a story in a bar or get captivated by a friend or coworker’s casual story about a disastrous vacation. Why are we made to respond to stories?

He traced it back to the dawn of man when humans sat around the fire and told stories. He argues that the key to our species’ love of stories comes down to survival. That before books or education, stories were told to let you know what to fear and what was valuable. A scary fable of the woods at night is letting you know how not to get eaten by nocturnal predators. Fables, folk tales, and great novels all persist over time because they impart survival information. It can usually be boiled down to a simple lesson. For example, the holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life is a pretty straightforward one: “True value comes from the people around you.” If the main character had known that, the events of the movie wouldn’t play out at all. And more than that, it drives the characters, and scenes.

As we take a look back at cinema and see that some films become classics and others fade away, Brian McDonald would argue that they fade because the survival information is not clear and that makes it on a fundamental level less important. 

I enjoy looking back at the films from my youth to make these posters. As I rewatch the films now, I’m opening them up and finding the invisible ink hidden inside. But it’s not always clear where the ink is. Beetlejuice was one of those films that baffled me, and it bothered me so much it delayed the making of the poster.

One problem was I felt I knew the story very well; it was one of my favorite movies as a kid. But what is the lesson that drives this story? As I gathered images to base the poster on, I replayed scenes in my head. The film is so rich with wonderfully exaggerated visuals from Tim Burton, an over the top performance from Michael Keaton, and the jokes come from every corner of the script.

It was not clear at first if I loved it because of pure spectacle combined with nostalgia or if it had strong survival information. Its’ a film about life and death and like many Greek myths it gives us a glimpse into the workings of an afterlife in a very relatable way. I wondered whether this film held up as survival knowledge like those Greek myths or was all nostalgia, destined to fade with each generation? I couldn’t draw until I knew.

So, I pulled it up and watched it closely. In the first few minutes I saw the glimmer of the underpinning of the story. At the beginning of the film the main couple talk about finally making time to have kids. Five minutes later they’re dead and become ghosts. And in five more minutes the underpinning of the story was punctuated in the most out-of-the-box-way, using the film’s claymation zebra-stripped beasts - the Sandworms.

As Alec Baldwin’s character steps out of the house, he falls into another world. He’s surrounded by a sea of blowing sand. In the distance something emerges, the Sandworm. It roars and comes crashing down to eat him. Then at the last moment he’s pulled out of that world back into the house by his wife, Gina Davis. Even though he was gone for a few seconds, in real time he was gone for hours, the sun now down and the house dark. So what does that all mean?

As a kid I just thought it was more wacky rules of the afterlife. After all, the next forty-five minutes are all about learning and breaking the rules of the afterlife. The Sandworms just seem like more of the same. But the Sandworms make a final appearance at the end of the film. As our main characters are about to lose their surrogate daughter to the villain Beetlejuice, Gina Davis runs out of the house to the sea of sand. Moments later she comes crashing through the roof on the back of a Sandworm that eats Beetlejuice and saves the day.

When I saw that I was confused. Because the idea set up at the beginning is that time moves slower then time in the house. How did she get back so quickly with the Sandworm when hours should have passed? How did she even get the Sandworm? Was it a logic puzzle or just a convenient plot device?

In my mind I stripped out everything but the story. Beetlejuice is just the obstacle. The story was about a couple almost ready to start living life. They had delayed having kids waiting for the right moment. They even delay finishing the conversation as they run one more errand in town, a journey that ends with them dying in a car wreck. As ghosts they meet a girl who wants to be dead, and they want to save her from their fate. It’s a second chance. 

Then I thought about how in the climax of the movie the main characters are brought back to the realm of the living in a seance. As they fill the only connection to the living left, their marriage garments, their bodies become older and slowly decompose. Time was taking hold of them and they were becoming powerless to stop the villain, losing their second chance. Death was taking them a second time. Beetlejuice wasn’t the villain, Time was. Then it came to me, I knew what the survival information was. The Sandworm logic puzzle was all intentionally built on a core idea. The answer was that now at the end of the film, the characters knew that their time was valuable. They became masters of the sea sands of time where the Sandworms live.

When Alec Baldwin first falls into the sea of sand it was much like a child falling into a rushing river. The sands of time swept him away. The main characters are letting themselves be swept away by time right into death, leaving much undone. But once they know you shouldn’t wait, it’s like learning how to swim, they don’t get swept away. When Gina Davis steps out into the sea sands of time she can swim and live for the moment. You don’t fear Time or Sandworms, you're their master.

The survival information is to live life while you can, treat every moment as special and never put your life on hold for the future or it’ll slip from your grasp. Or simply, “There is no time like the present.” A simple phrase built on the fact we have a limited time on this plane of existence. We get to learn that from a couple who gets a second chance after death.

This lesson holds up for all of the characters, scenes and lines spoken. It supports the whole film and experience, even the craziest of ideas in the film: the Sandworms. Brian McDonald calls this survival information, the lesson of the film that holds and motivates everything in the story, the “armature.” It comes from his friends who worked with special effects making little models of aliens or monsters for major motion pictures. They all started on an armature, the wire skeleton under a clay sculpture that holds it up. Without the armature, no matter how wonderful your model is, the clay would start the slump down and fall apart. It’s also a good metaphor because it doesn’t matter what you’re making; a three-armed alien, the bust of Arnold as the Terminator, or a Sandworm, you need the armature to hold it up.

It was difficult to find the hidden armature in a film like Beetlejuice but it is very rewarding. As I struggle to find the survival information in all things narrative, whether it’s a film, painting, or writing, I find myself applying it to my own life stories too.

When I stop and think about the armature of our own story, I often think of the parts that feel like they are falling apart. These parts of my story even feel like they have bewildering elements like Sandworms. As if past mistakes and pain are just as confusing as if I stepped out of my house into another world. 

If I apply the same hard work as I did to Beetlejuice searching for the survival information, I can find a lesson in these stories that feel like I’m falling apart. When I do they don’t feel like they’re falling apart so much.

I wonder how I would tell the meaning of this story to a friend or my kids. I ask me self, "What are the lessons I would want them to learn? What is the armature behind my experience?" Then I feel more supported, my story has a strong armature, a hidden meaning beyond my confusion and it deepens the story of my life. These moments become something I can understand like a good movie.