Here’s where I admit something embarrassing: as a kid, I loved Pee-Wee Herman.
Mind you I was 9 years old, VHS rentals were a thing, and I could either walk up three blocks to my local VHS store or else we could just buy the VHS.
I don’t remember what we did—rent or buy—but I know that I have seen Tim Burton’s first feature “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” at least twenty times.
I also have not seen it since I was probably 13.
Why? I’d like to think I grew up.
The news came this week that actor Paul Reubens, Pee Wee himself, died of cancer. He is exactly both my parents’ age. I guess that makes him a tried-and-true Boomer.
Somehow, in the 1980s, the Boomer played a man-child that captured Gen-X’s hearts.
And their parents’ pocketbooks. I know I had a Pee-Wee doll, the kind that has a string on his back that you pull, and it would say his random catchphrases. “I know you are but what am I?!”
My family definitely attended the second Pee Wee movie, “Big Top Pee-Wee,” an even weirder movie that had at the time the longest on-screen kiss in cinema history, a ridiculous shot that seemed to last eons — as if I as an 11-year-old wanted to watch Pee Wee swap spit with some lady for two minutes.
He was wearing lipstick after all. That bothered me as a kid. What was the need for girls’ makeup on a bro? I hadn’t then thought about that, as nowadays everybody has been forced to confront such things.
This week I was a little taken aback by the laudatory posts for Mr. Reubens. Maybe it was a slow news day. Nice-guy stories poured forth. Praise like this, too:
“One of the most imaginative comic actors of his time…”
I admit that I tried the latest Pee Wee movie on Netflix, “Pee Wee’s Big Holiday,” a retro-80s thing that rehashes the Adventure movie and his Playhouse TV show.
I made it through half of it. But—and here I admit serious discrimination, the kind that most people have but most don’t admit in polite society—my innate “disgust” reaction took over. I shut the movie off at some point.
Here we have a man, in his 60s, playing a child-clown. He’s not virile. He’s pre-pubescent, too. If I were to guess, he’s trying to be an 11-year-old in a grown man’s body.
This is not natural, so says my gut, whatever that means. Dudes should grow up — again, so says my gut.
I know this is why I haven’t seen “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure” since I was 13 or so. I’d have that same reaction.
Sure, Burton’s movie is patentedly interesting cinematically, a film that combines ALL genres. You name it and “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure” has it: horror, Western, backstage Hollywood production, psychedlia, detective noir, buddy road-trip, and more. It’s the ultimate hybrid movie, genre-wise.
Also, it wasn’t until several years ago that it clicked for me that the movie is a giant riff on the classic Italian neorealism classic, “Bicycle Thieves.” The main difference being that “Thieves” shows the plight of post-war poor people in Italy, whereas “Adventure” shows off a weirdo spoiled man-child. And I think that difference, philosophically is larger than the size of the Grand Canyon.
What does “grown up” mean? Not Pee Wee. He was some guy pretending to be a little kid, entertaining people as a circus clown or court jester might. He’s Gen-X’s post-modern freakshow, ironizing the gritty realism of “Bicycle Thieves.”
If “Adventure” is weird, Pee Wee’s Saturday-morning kids’ show, Pee Wee’s Playhouse, was equally or more so. A show with five-year-old sensibility for ten year old’s featuring a guy who — let’s be frank — would be considered a child predator by today’s paranoid standards, just based on his looks alone.
Now it turned out that Mr. Reuben’s career suffered because of sexual deviance. Although, again, by today’s standards his deviance is now advertised and played to by billboards I pass all the time in the Midwest, with my young kids also allowed legally to stare at them openly. (I recall when my young ones asked the entire car, “hey, what’s an adult superstore?” I could’ve answered: the kind of place where Pee Wee Herman got caught.)
Yes, in 1991, Reubens was caught masturbating in an “adult” cinema. This got leaked to the press, and that ended his Pee Wee routine for a long while.
Nowadays, as I think on this, my question about that incident is “who had in Hollywood it in for him?” Because my bet is that kind of thing happens a lot, and we don’t hear about it. A good press agent would not let it out, if at all possible.
Above, I used the word “adult” in adult cinema with quotation marks on purpose. The contemporary use of that word is like the Pee Wee phenomenon: something sinful or childish dressed up as something for adults. It’s total immaturity trying to signal itself as mature.
A question: what really is true adult material, and not in the pornographic meaning of the word? My gut reaction to Pee Wee, my disgust factor of a man pretending to be a weirdo child, is trying to draw the limit between “child” and “adult” somewhere. It could after all just be me and my proclivities.
I teach Homer from time to time, and I’m struck by “The Odyssey” and its delineation between the immature and the mature. Telemachus and not Odysseus begins the “Odyssey,” as most forget, by whining and moping at home. His dad hasn’t come back from war. His home is overrun by piggish men.
He’s 18 or so, and he needs to grow up. Athena, the goddess of war and wisdom, sends him away to do so. A great part of the book is devoted to showing the maturation process of Telemachus, who needs to be destined to become like his superhuman father, a godlike man. (And maybe “godly man” is what the word “adult” should really mean, certainly according to the Greeks.)
Meanwhile, back in Ithaca, the piggish men — the famous suitors — act like aggressive juveniles. They are classic leeches and pretty boys.
Everybody knows what happens to them in the end. Let’s just call it death.
At some point, I think, we all face that fact: we are going to die.
And yet I detect in the Pee Wee stuff nothing that might acknowledge that grim fact. His work and his character could be read as death-avoidance: a man trying to be something much younger than he should be, trying to reverse time to go back and be a weirdo child.
Maybe that’s what I sense is wrong about Pee Wee, at least part of it.
To me, good art will have in view — in the main or way off to the side and yet still present — the notion that death is a haunting, disturbing part of our existence.
What is an adult, I ask again? Someone who is well aware of that and acts on the basis of all of us dying. Including, potentially, civilization. And then in their own way trying to help others through that, and possibly counteracting the tendency of decline in all things. In “The Odyssey,” this is certainly what the godly and the godlike hero does.
I can’t return to anything depicting Pee Wee, none of the movies I’ve seen, even though I believe that Burton’s first movie could have some cinematic merit. And this is just because Reubens’ character has disturbing qualities that greatly bother me.
Admittedly, that may also be because I see these disturbing qualities in spades. Teaching college students, ages 18-22, the dominant tendency at least these days is delayed maturity. An absurd number of 18 year olds are still in a 12-year-old mental frame. Few have seen real natural hardships, the kind their ancestors saw daily: sickness, death, famine, suffering.
I might argue that the world, my world in a lot of ways, has turned into a bunch of Pee Wee Hermans. Old men who act and dress like children. Middle-aged people who try to look 20, and act 15. Young people who are stuck in delayed adolescence.
For a thousand cultural reasons, or maybe just a few, most of us are stuck in Book 1 of the Odyssey: as Telemachus or as the suitors. And not much is requiring us to grow up, whatever exactly that means.
Paul Reubens just died, though. He had cancer. Probably he wasted away, or was in great pain, or just really struggled for years with suffering health.
That’s what will happen to most of us. We can’t win that battle, though that isn’t the war.
Pee Wee, the eternal man-child, is no more.
Your blog on the death of Paul Reubens made me think of several interesting problems. When you write about disgust as a guide to aesthetic, even moral, evaluation, why is a conviction you reached in adolescence, a disgust for the Pee Wee Herman character’s “man child” portrayal, still relevant today? How definitive a moral and artistic guide would you say is the experience of disgust?
I ask because the exploration of disgust, in cultural contexts, seems (in my limited reading) to be pretty important in anthropology. I recall Mary Douglas’ work on Torah in Leviticus, and the biblical scholar William Countryman’s using her work on biblical purity codes. Do you have a similar starting point for your claims about the role of disgust in evaluating art?
In my understanding, Paul Reuben’s comedic work had a more specific context. He was part of a group of (at least early on) improvisational sketch comics of the late 1970s and 80s. Partly inspired by Monty Python (by then widely available on American TV), Reuben’s work obviously paralleled SNL, but also Steve Martin, Andy Kaufman, Judy Tenuda, and other absurdist, even surrealist comics. Reubens and others testified to the inspiration for Pee Wee Herman coming from his love of the 1950s children’s shows, like Howdy Doody. Pee Wee, on stage, in the movies, especially in Pee Wee’s Playhouse, were nostalgic, gently satiric recreations of those shows. Reubens’ CBS series especially reminds me of elements of Mr Roger’s Neighborhood. But children’s shows are developed, written and produced by adults. Adults represent the inner worlds of children. Your argument, therefore, marks Reubens’ creation of a “man child” character you find disgusting in some way, and which for similar or different reasons—it isn’t clear—you argue commodifies immaturity, defined as refusing to confront the seriousness of impending death.
But Reubens’ character and many of his shows suggest that, for children, death may be quite impossible to imagine without direct experience of it. Pee Wee Herman concentrated on the wonder, the spontaneity, the lack of filters, the strangeness of the child’s imagination. That imagination can often appear surreal in its dreamlike configuration of elements adults prefer to keep separated. You know better than I how film permits juxtaposing elements of the world to provoke new ideas, insights, experiences. There is something, to my thinking, fundamentally surreal, even childlike, about film as a medium, even while it often explores our most “adult” and serious subjects. That surreal childlikeness can be seen in contemporary movies by Quentin Dupieux, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Charlie Kaufman.
Reubens’ comedy probably did not realize the high standards you suggest the ancient Greeks argued defined great art. But his failure to reach that height is no diminishment, any more than the prose standard of James Baldwin (for example) casts a diminishing shadow over the work of subsequent and otherwise fine, insightful American writers. It seems, in my reading, that you have elevated your deeply personal experience of Paul Reubens’ character into a bold, broad account of American art, and the relative immaturity of American viewers. I’ve taught college for over thirty years, perhaps working with as many as 3000 students in that time. I am not confident I can move from that very small, and (at a college much like Dordt U) quite distinctive sample of American students, to general claims about Americans. This claim, and the others I’ve mentioned, suggested that your article said much, much more about your personal experience of the comedy of Reubens, and American popular culture today, than the kinds of analysis you more often contribute as a literature and film scholar. Clearly, I see Reubens’s work quite differently, so your essay puzzled me a good deal.