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Pee-wee's Big Adventure
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The career of Pee-wee Herman (aka Paul Reubens [1952-2023]) played
out a brief but splendid trajectory between the late 1970s and early
'90s – from modest beginnings in alternative theatre, through to
mass cult stardom on the children’s TV series Pee-wee’s Playhouse (1986-1990), slightly uncertain departures from
form (like the second feature film, Big
Top Pee-wee [1988]), and finally an abrupt ending in a porno theatre (1991)
worthy of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood
Babylon.
Pee-wee’s
persona, and his art, is the dance of breathless suspensions, quantum
associative leaps, the sublime linking of ideological opposites ... often in a
few consecutive seconds of the one work. In an episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse, the scenario revolved around his childish,
innocent wish to fly – and his Christian act of sacrifice in handing his one
opportunity to realise this wish along to someone in greater need. But,
finally, all his playmates learn what he has done, and pool their psychic
energies to grant him the wish, after all. In the closing moments of the show,
Pee-wee flies (through a tackily fake video space) and sings to us the
sentiments of Spielbergian Utopia: “I’m the luckiest boy in the world” – an
inspiring example of all our collective yearnings come true.
But,
in the very next line of the song, there’s a cynical slap in our faces, the hip
betrayal of sloppy sentiment: “I’m so much luckier than you”. The TV audience laughs along in complicity with this triumphant moment of sarcasm. And then the
softening: “... and I’m going to share my luck with you”. The music modulates,
Pee-wee smiles sweetly, the audience oohs and aahs: the affect is total. Who
knows what we’re being told, let alone what we’re being sold, by Pee-wee and
his playhouse? It was a magnificent mindfuck.
But
even if his fifteen minutes of fame are over, we must never cease paying homage
to the genius and uniqueness of Pee-wee Herman – particularly as it incandesces
in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, thanks to
the vision of director Tim Burton (Beetlejuice [1988], Batman [1989]).
From
its first, giddily disorienting moments inside Pee-wee’s own private playhouse,
Burton takes us through a magical, kitsch universe where colours, shapes, sizes
and scales constantly transform and surprise us. Plot-wise, the film hangs on
little more than a nasty antagonist for Pee-wee (Mark Holton as Francis Buxton),
and the search for a stolen bicycle. But its open, road-movie structure allows
for a myriad for shifting scenes and eccentric characters, allowing Pee-wee to
reveal the many sides of his amazingly resourceful, Peter Pan-like character.
Furthermore,
if the postmodern is anything, it’s Pee-wee Herman. With Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, the reputed difference between modernism
and its post becomes very clear. Modernism extends from Winsor McKay (Little Nemo [1911], Gertie the Dinosaur [1914]) through to Jerry Lewis, with Warner
Bros cartoons in between. Pee-wee is something else, something different in
this history; he introduces a whole new problematic into the Lewisian mixture
of cartoon stylistics and childhood intensities.
Pee-wee’s Big
Adventure is in the same cultural and emotional place as the Coens’ Raising Arizona (1987), and takes a few more left turns to reach
that place than most commentators have realised (since the arty stuff that
provides their reference point evinces “new” aesthetic properties that were
already run-of-the-mill in Robert Clampett’s modernist cartoons circa 1937).
Let’s take Umberto Eco’s idea (in the 1983 “postscript” book of reflections on
his 1980 novel The Name of the Rose)
that postmodernism is modernism replayed, but without innocence. I can only
risk the incoherence of suggesting that Pee-wee’s
Big Adventure is the return of innocence – without innocence.
Pee-wee
does incredibly strange things to the dialectic of psychological avowal and
disavowal, the famous “willing suspension of disbelief” caught in the phrase “I
know this is not real, but all the same …”. Pee-wee knows all this and more,
because he is a child – and Pee-wee’s Big
Adventure turns all willing spectators into children. Or maybe
meta-children. Whew! Assignment: try to describe the internal logic of the
fictional world of this film. Woof! There’s something about the incessant
joining and splitting of real and phantasmic here – for Pee-wee as for us –
which is definitely Raśl Ruiz without the playful-monstrous double bind of High
French Culture.
At
any rate, Raúl and Pee-wee shake hands on the founding myth of the postmodern:
Peter Pan (cf. City of Pirates [1983], Manoel on the Island of Marvels [1984], etc). And now, at the mention of Pan, we must fly very far and fast
from Disney and Spielberg to our third true postmodern soul, the Joe Dante of Gremlins (1984) and Explorers (1985), and thus
to the question of emotion.
I
guess you need to have been brought up on Chuck Jones (Pepé Le Pew, Chow Hound [1951]) to now understand how
representations comprised solely of ciphers and clichés can be so unbearably moving
– and how, today, movies can be both absolutely inside and outside such
constructions of affect. Whatever. When Pee-wee goes to the drive-in, he
advances the best theory of spectatorship since the Gremlins hijacked a picture
theatre.
There’s
plenty more to say about Pee-wee’s Big
Adventure. But can it be said? There are films we must value at a certain
moment simply because they introduce a drift, an intensity, a tone never quite
experienced before in cinema, films which are (in the healthiest sense) perverse. Pee-wee Herman is a monument
to perversity – in the most refreshing and liberating way. He is both child and
adult, gay and straight, innocent and knowing, sentimental and cynical. What
finer role-model could we ever wish for?
So
Hail Pee-wee Herman; and roll on with the big adventure!
MORE Burton: Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Ed Wood, Edward Scissorhands, Mars Attacks!, Sleepy Hollow, Tim Burton's Corpse Bride © Adrian Martin August 1987 / August 1988 / December 1992 |
