Pee-wee's Big Adventure (Tim Burton, starring Paul Reubens,1985)

Pee-wee’s Big Adventure

Disclaimer: I can’t promise I’m not going to talk about “I know you are, but what am I?”  in a serious and somewhat over-analytical fashion. The best I can do is promise I won’t leave it as a rhetorical tag that wraps up the post in a neat little circle, the equivalent of “isn’t this deep? Connections.”  Getting it out of the way: “I know you are, but what am I,” gets into a rhythm. Pee-wee's victims respond even when it makes no sense, as one would with a little brother or big brother or best friend from childhood just trying to get under your skin.  If we let it make sense for a moment, though, it’s like he’s throwing all our assertions about ourselves as responsible logical adults back in our faces, mocking us for being so sure of ourselves, and for believing that we understand the world that way. The question remains open-ended: we have no idea what the hell Pee-wee Herman is.

What I liked about it:

·      It surprised me

·      Man-children are weird and interesting

·      It featured athletic, impressive, and distinctive physical comedy

·      It walked some boundaries between the skin of reality and fiction. Ew?

·      It teaches kids useful lessons about cinema

·      I’m a sucker for a movie-within-a-movie

·      It’s an early collaboration of Elfman and Burton

·      The door-knocking scene

·      How it made me interact with my childhood and childlike tendencies

·      Awesome Larry

·      Reality=adulthood, Pee-wee=childhood?

·      It reclaimed Pee-wee for me from his Michael-Jackson-flavored-Neverland-status (I just realized if you cross Peter Pan and Michael Jackson you get Peter Jackson.     NAILED IT.)

Pee-wee is a man-child. As an adult, it’s kind of weird that this thin man with a

combination flaccid-taut face wears the same outfit every day (and what an outfit it is!), has toys and a fireman’s pole in his home, etc. But what kind of man is he? What kind of child is he? I don’t tend to think often about man-children, but doing so made me reflect on

the things I’ve reclaimed from my own childhood as an adult, about the ways I decided “growing up” was no fun. Note: feel free to substitute “sober” for “serious” in the list below.

No-fun ways to approach adulthood include:

·   Being serious all the time. I could never work with kids if I was serious all the time

·      Being serious when it’s probably appropriate to be serious, like in seminar

·      Being serious when it’s definitely appropriate to be serious, like at funerals, wakes, and       professional engagements

I don’t actually advocate being drunk for class and for babysitting. But it’s so obviously some of the appeal of drunkenness: to return to a time when you just didn’t give a shit about anything other than how cool your shoes were and what new items were in the magic shop this week. The removal of inhibitions is an oft-cited advocacy for getting sloshed, therefore dancing in your underwear in the middle of the street is partially reclaiming your childhood, plus some weird sex stuff.

So Pee-wee is a man-child who defies personal inhibitions without substance

abuse. And everyone loves him for it.  And I recognized enough of the real world in the film to reassure me about my own relation with it, or at least to temporarily relieve me of anxiety about it. With all the whimsy of Pee-wee, there was still a line of realism that wasn’t crossed. Live, “real” dinosaurs could only appear in a stop-action dream, for example, not in the actual diegesis of Pee-wee’s life. Yes, the amazing coincidence of finding his bike on TV at the exact right time was incredible, but coincidences like that are possible, if implausible.  It’s the kind of magic that results from the world being a complicated, incredible place, not from imagination.

 Most of the realistic oddities in the movie can be accounted for if you think of Pee-wee as an adult who treats his world, and whom the world treats, as a child with mental faculties intact. It’s Pee-wee’s fantastical self situated in the “real world” that makes him wonderful, because when he’s around the “real world” becomes fantastical. Instead of being annoyed or freaked out by Pee-wee, people choose to love him and indulge his desires, much as people do with children. No one does that for adults—a little boy has been battling cancer like a boss? OK, let’s build an entire universe for him to fight crime in.  That’s awesome. But as adults, we’re on our own. No one caters to your fantasies, even if you’re lucky enough to still have some. We’re supposed to figure it out and make it work ourselves (strangely enough, another message of Pee-wee, communicated through dialogue). To see the world bend around the offbeat desires of an adult man who gets his way not through power grabs or money but through sheer lovability and force of his desires is heartwarming and hopeful.

The sequence that drives this point home to me is the bar scene where Paul Reuben’s physical comedy takes center-stage: the dance scene oh my god. In adulthood, bars are places that are supposed to be fun, where we attempt to relinquish our inhibitions and feel reciprocal affection for the world,  but that are in fact often depressing, and the experience ends in disappointment. Pee-Wee takes back the bar, reclaiming the territory usually reserved for young women with either low or extremely high self-esteem. His dance is high-stakes, as he’s due to be trounced by bikers after this last request.  By sheer charisma, weirdness, and joie-de-vivre, he triumphs.  He’s evidence for how artists always justify their work: that no, we may not be surgeons, but we can make people feel good.

I also have to give a shout out to the scene where he’s knocking on the door along with the rhythm of the underscoring. It’s one thing to do it at the same time as the score—that’s basic Mickey-mousing. It’s another to repeat the process, without the power of the score and thus the authority of the gesture, and have it fail. It’s both a humorous reflexive gesture about the nature of cinema and, if you choose, a moment where we glimpse that Pee-wee is aware of how fantastical and awesome his world is.

Watch this scene here. If you want. It's good. Also, yes, I hear the Stravinsky.

Pee-wee reflects on cinema in other ways, most notably through the creation of a Hollywood film about his adventure, the movie-within-a-movie.  I like those reflections especially when you think about what ideas they make accessible to kids.  

Lessons learned:

·      To be successful a film does not need to reflect reality

·      Movies aren’t real

·      Being creative sometimes means bending the truth

·      Movies are silly and weird and fun and who cares

·      Movies sexualize relationships

·      Hollywood is a company

·      Drive-ins were cool

·      Eat snacks while watching movies

There’s more to say, but I’m trying not to edit this post too much (see the first post of this blog), and I don’t want these to be interminably long. So, in conclusion, it was fun and it made me laugh and think about myself.  I give it two turkeys and a Scrabble board.

Awesome Larry,

Kate