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

Why This is Happening Right Now

Note: Due to its introductory role, this post is longer and way more self-indulgent than I plan others to be.  Thank you for being interested, and please leave any comments you would like! 

I have written a thing about Pee-wee’s Big Adventure that I’m going to post after the ensuing reflective paragraphs. Actually, I sort of wrote a thing about Pee-wee’s Big Adventure a month ago that I filed away but have continued to think about but be afraid of, and that I’m going to continue to fiddle with and then post after the ensuing reflective paragraphs, which themselves are the product of a month of scared thinking, and with which I am going to fiddle after writing this paragraph and before I fiddle with Pee-wee. And this addiction to revision and careful self-censorship is why I have started Down in the Jungle Room.  I’m going to test myself to see if I can leave this paragraph alone.  As soon as I wrote that sentence I changed “anxiety-filled paragraphs” to “reflective paragraphs,” and then had to change the phrase again later, and  I did that without even thinking about it until after it was done. 

I, like many people, fear putting ideas, especially in written form, in front of others, though we almost always benefit most from input outside our own brains. When words are on the page it’s somehow evidence of how you think, of what you know, of what you can do.  When words are in your head they’re safe because they’re yours because they’re secret.

When I was in early years of college, I was told that my work wasn’t about me, that the subject was the most important thing, though simultaneously my voice was important. There is, however, no easy directive for balancing voice and work. At the time, I needed to hear this lesson to keep my own ego and carelessness from getting in the way of learning skills and of producing a good product. It was an excellent message, especially for a young person. It was very true that these works or ideas were bigger than me, more impressive and powerful than me, and it was liberating to understand that I was subservient to them, that I was a vessel to share them with other people. However, in the spirit of all overachieving students, I have taken it too far, to the point at which I am afraid to reveal myself in my words or my actions, a step that was never the point of the lesson.  The lesson is not the source of my current anxieties, but rather a tool caught up in their machinations. I’ve twisted this approach into a crutch, my excuse for not producing, for not putting myself out into the world for others to critique and engage with.  I don’t write enough, I don’t talk enough, but rather just read more, watch more, listen to others more, or give up and play games on my iPad more, hoping that if I absorb enough one day I’ll speak and these lovely thoughts, perfectly assimilated, will dance from my mouth and everybody will join in a floppy orgy of happy beautiful conversation.  Exercising my brain and my spirit without fear and with joy is a fantasy I have sometimes at night before I go to sleep. The fantasy is itself an exercise in fearlessness and joy.

Also, um, I need to be successful, because I’ve chosen this path and I need to make a living doing it. I worry every day about the future of the field of musicology and my role in it. Will I be able to make enough money to support myself? How do people have families on these salaries? Every time I walk into a house that someone owns, no matter how large or small or clean, I marvel.  HOW DO PEOPLE OWN HOUSES? Really. How does this belong to you? So, I need to practice my writing and thinking and synthesizing and communicating, and maybe something helpful and lucrative will come of it, even if it’s just the habit of sitting down to reflect in external verbiage every day.

There’s also the fear of professionalism to consider. Academia of the arts has too much stuff, to the point at which it’s overwhelming to try to either engage with it or contribute to it. There is so much information available—and yes, yet so little, I know, I know, I know—that I feel the next wave needs to embrace writers’ voices. People have so many options to choose from that they don’t always choose what they read or listen to or watch based on subject but rather because of who was involved in its production. Most people don’t see the next Tim Burton movie just because it’s about stop-motion Emo dinosaurs with big eyes—they also go because it was made by Tim Burton and because Johnny Depp is playing a sad pterodactyl.

This is my attempt to simultaneously do something for myself and to practice doing something for other people, and for the objects that I love. Constant fear of being unoriginal, reductive, and poorly read is paralyzing and makes me not even want to try. I want to be rigorous. I want to be well-informed. But I can’t just keep absorbing information and keeping it to myself and my small circle of friends and cats and boyfriend willing to listen to me and then occasionally to my professors in term papers that don't really sound like me. Repeat to self: who CARES if someone has had the thought before? Yes, innovative thoughts are important, but in the history of the world, it’s the communal thoughts that have made the most impact.  A new thought is only important if it has the potential for others to share in it.  Not everything about every post is going to be good.  In fact, an entire post may be kind of crappy. I might—gasp—say something that’s just outright wrong. But it’ll be better than keeping the thoughts to myself and not receiving a corrective, or of having that crappy post exist in some floating unrealized form in the folds of my brain.

And one final thing: I want to be able to write about objects I love, and I don’t want to apologize for it.  This blog is designed around the premise of talking about what I LIKE about art objects.  That’s my voice. My initial response to lots of stuff—Maroon 5, Disney movies, Francis Bacon, Annie Clark, Umberto Eco—is almost always positive. I look for what I like, and sometimes I forget to compare objects to other objects to see which one accomplishes something better.  

I don’t remember the first time I felt the need to hide, or at least downplay, my enjoyment of an art object due to others’ judgment of it to be tacky, empty, shoddy, shameless, derivative, commercial, boring, cannibalistic, mainstream, not the best example of something, poorly scored, manipulative, whatever. I don’t remember why I decided my response was less critical, less important, less cultured. I don’t remember why I felt that even if my response was less critical, important, and cultured that it was an indicator of my inferiority, some depth of misunderstanding or lack of that elusive ability to “get it.” I don’t remember that pivotal inevitable first interaction, but I’m trying to own it, and I’m trying out the reverse impulse. 

There are plenty of people out there happy to cast judgment and rank and aesthetically order products.  We need them. But that doesn’t have to be what I do. If my typical responses mean I get more pleasure out of the world, then why not explore what is agreeable to me? It might mean that others are able to find pleasure in an object when previously for them there was none.  That’s a lot of what artists do anyway, and I miss being an artist.

So, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure  is a good place to start both because I really enjoyed it and because it navigates between adult and child worlds, especially humor.  In so doing the film reminded me of what was awesome about not only being a kid but being a kid watching movies. I didn’t have to care about what was good or well-done or comparative.  All I had to care about was how I responded to it, which I suppose was in a somewhat helpless way that usually privileged things that made me laugh, animals, pretty women, gentle voices, and music I could sing along to. Burton is also a good figure to muse on these ideas with, because people often dismiss his films as too cute, whimsical, and commercial to have value. This movie also is a great place to start my blog because it’s just like, “do what you want. Jesus.” 

And who knows, maybe I’ll start experimenting with cartoons.

High-proof and Fiddle Faddle,

Kate

P.S. No one read this before I posted it.  Also, I’ve revised it a lot more since that initial idea, and a lot more than I want to for a blog, and I still think it sucks.  Onward and upward!

P.P.S. I fiddled with the first paragraph again after settling on the title of the blog. 

P.P.P.S. Here's a list of what I'm trying to doooooo:

What this is for me:

A motivator to write frequently and quickly

A motivator for honesty

A celebration of individual and collective thought

A celebration of things that I love, and a place to indulge in an exploration of why  I love them

A place to work through my desire to apologize for guilty pleasures

An attempt to reclaim my sense of artistry

Freedom from the scholastic responsibility to read everything that's already been said on a subject before saying something about it myself

A repository for ideas I don’t want to lose (and probably some that I do)

A means of organizing my thoughts

A celebration of randomness

A therapeutic ego trip

An exploration of alternative modes of thinking

An alternative to taking pictures of my perfectly normal cats and anthropomorphizing them until they’re weird and funny 

Something I’m ok with only me reading if it works out that way

For you:

All of the above, if you wish, and anything you want it to be for yourself

An invitation to engage with me and others, despite my fear of confrontation and exposing my ignorance

What this is not:

A blog to learn about the comprehensive history, most important aspects, or truth of an object

A demonstration of my mastery of secondary literature

A demonstration of my mastery of anything

A blog for deconstructing the problems with an object

A blog where every post is perfect, or even good, or even eh

A banana

Something that will look pretty, unless somebody else wants to take charge of that

A closed conversation