Pee-Wee Herman and the Postmodern Picaresque

Melynda Huskey

Department of English
North Carolina State University

 

“Heard any good jokes lately?”

 

–Pee-Wee at the MTV Music Awards

 

It’s been six months since “Pee-Wee’s Big Misadventure” was released to an eager public; the July 26th arrest of Paul Reubens for indecent exposure spurred renewed interest in what had been a fading cult. Only die-hards were still taping Saturday morning “Playhouse” episodes, and “Big Top Pee-Wee” had disappointed fans hoping for another jeu d’esprit on the model of “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.” Even a blissful cameo in the otherwise pedestrian “Back to the Beach” (Pee-Wee, balanced precariously on a surfboard, was borne shoulder-high by avatars of Tito, the Playhouse’s hunky lifeguard) failed to spark real interest. According to Peter Wilkinson’s rather solemn post-mortem, “Who Killed Pee-Wee Herman?” Rolling Stone, 3 October 1991), Paul Reubens himself was weary of being Pee-Wee; he was ready to branch out. So Pee-Wee Herman is not likely to reappear except in re-runs for some time. MTV has picked up the five years’ worth of “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” episodes; both “The Pee-Wee Herman Show,” a taped version of the club act that started the Pee-Wee story, and “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” enjoy moderate rentals in video stores. But Paul Reubens is no longer the post-industrial Casabianca, standing at attention on the burning deck of “Entertainment Tonight,” and his hip-hop claque has gone home.

 

With Pee-Wee out of the way, I can finally justify a valedictory consideration of the supreme moment in his career, “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.” There is no denying that “Big Adventure” is the zenith of the Herman oeuvre; it is the central text in Pee-Wee criticism. “Big Top Pee-Wee,” in comparison, is an embarrassment–hardly worth a mention.

 

Of course, one does not discount the importance of “The Pee Wee Herman Show.” The nightclub act which, astonishingly, sparked the children’s television show merits some consideration. Only the reckless would dismiss without reflection the amazing hypnotism dummy, Dr. Mondo, encouraging Joan the audience volunteer to disrobe, or Jambi’s eye-rolling delight over that new Caucasian pair of hands (“There’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time”). Not to mention Pee-Wee himself, crooning his anthem, “I’m the Luckiest Boy in the World.” In this version of the Playhouse, the keynote is struck by the opening words of the theme song: “Where do I go / When I want to do / What I know I want to do? / Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.” The Playhouse draws visitors; there are no permanent residents except the furnishings–Jambi, Clockie–and Pee-Wee himself (if he does live there). Everyone else is a transient. The Playhouse is a liminal region. We see this theme taken up in the television version as well, with its elaborate closing sequence of Pee-Wee mounting his scooter for the dangerous leap onto the desert freeway. On television, though, everyone but Pee-Wee lives around or in the Playhouse. It’s still Pee-Wee’s place, but it is located firmly in the center of a neighborhood which is some distance from Pee-Wee’s primary home. In the nightclub version, all roads lead to Pee-Wee. Neighbors like Hammy are allowed to visit on sufferance, until Pee-Wee chooses to dismiss them. When Kap’n Karl and Miss Yvonne begin to like one another too much, Pee-Wee hustles them out of the Playhouse with realistic gagging gestures. But they all come back eventually. Pee-Wee is the center of this universe, the luckiest boy in this world.

 

It is difficult to imagine that anyone who had seen the nightclub act agreed to let Pee-Wee have five years’ worth of Saturday kids’ programming. The focus of “The Pee-Wee Herman Show” is lipsmackingly infantile sexuality. Looking up skirts may be Pee-Wee’s most common behavior; in the course of one hour he uses shoe mirrors to reflect Hammy’s sister’s panties, holds Dr. Mondo (the aforementioned hypnotism dummy) under Joan’s dress before using his hypnotic powers to undress her, takes advantage of a graceful arabesque to peek up Miss Yvonne’s fluffy skirts. But the polymorphously perverse being what it is, there’s also the shyly masculine Hermit Hattie, courting Miss Yvonne with perfume and kind words, the swishily high-camp Jambi, the achingly Aryan, almost albino good looks of Mailman Mike, and M’sieur le Crocodile’s “Gator Mater Dating Service.” Without sexual attraction, there is no Playhouse; the show’s plot derives from Pee-Wee’s unselfish decision to share his wish with Miss Yvonne (that Kap’n Karl should really like her) rather than use it for himself. Not only does Pee-Wee give up his chance to fly, which he tells Pteri he’d rather do than shave, even, but he is abandoned by both Miss Yvonne and Kap’n Karl once they discover each other. The dreadful consequences of this amorous misdirection can be resolved only by Kap’n Karl admitting that he already liked Miss Yvonne. The childish sexuality which seeks pleasure not only through speculative consideration of the mysteries of sex, but also through wordplay (“I said your ear, not your rear!”) and sublimation, such as the wish to fly, is fully dramatized in the Playhouse.

 

But for the Real Thing, the rich substance of Pee-Wee’s amorous being, we must leave the liminal world of the Playhouse and examine Pee-Wee’s everyday life, the life dramatized in “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.” In that text the obvious and playful concern over child sexuality is discarded for a much more complexly developed world of sexual behavior.

 

I have a theory about Tim Burton. I believe that he is recreating the great works of the English Romantics in suburban (or urban) American settings. Before you laugh, I submit for your consideration: “Batman,” the post-modern “Manfred.” Instead of the Alps, we have Gotham City skyscrapers. Instead of a guilt-ridden, incestuous relationship with a dead sister, a guilt-ridden, pointless relationship with brain-dead Vicki Vale. And most important, the cape, blowing back in the obediently melodramatic wind. Bruce Wayne, a Byronic hero for our time.

 

And what about “Edward Scissorhands,” possibly the best version of Frankenstein committed to film in the last ten years? True, the Arctic wastes over which the horrifying creation wanders are reduced to blocks of ice in the Avon Lady’s backyard, but such is the postmodern condition. “Beetlejuice”? The merging of “This Old House” and Coleridge’s visionary (and characteristically incomplete) “Christabel.”

 

And finally, I offer you “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.” “Childe Harold” and “Don Juan” both; a Byronic double-header for the big screen–a picaresque vision of the poet-lover as outcast filmed through a screwy postmodern lens. From the moment we see Pee-Wee cast his eyes impatiently to Heaven and say, “Dottie, there are things about me you wouldn’t understand. Things you couldn’t understand. Things you shouldn’t understand. I’m a loner, Dottie. A rebel,” we know that we are in the presence of Byronic greatness. And when, out of love beyond the ken of rich fat-boy Francis, Pee-Wee refuses to part with his bike–even for money–we know that tragedy must follow.

 

Vladimir Propp offers us an elegant two-part summation of narrative: Lack, Lack Liquidated. The plot of “Big Adventure” recapitulates those terms. Pee-Wee loses his bike, goes to the Alamo to find it, and ends up in Hollywood, where he recovers it. While searching for his lost vehicle, he discovers his true place in the world through adventures with many new friends. But no summary can do justice to the picaresque sublime of the adventure. Pee-Wee travels from East to West Coast, from self satisfied isolation to integration, from wealth to poverty (and back), and from obscurity to celebrity. He is by turns a cowboy, a Hell’s Angel, a dishwasher, a hitchhiker, a hobo. He befriends a truckstop waitress with a jealous boyfriend, an escaped convict, a ghostly truck driver. And in the end, he returns triumphantly justified to his home town, with his bike, his new friends, and enlightenment. He turns his back on self aggrandizement with the words, “I don’t need to see it, Dottie. I lived it.”

 

Like Don Juan, Pee-Wee is plagued throughout his adventures by unwelcome attentions. Dottie, the bikeshop mechanic, wants to go on a drive-in date with him. Simone-the-waitress’s jealous boyfriend Andy tries to kill him with a plaster of Paris dinosaur bone for watching the sun rise with her. The Queen of the “Satan’s Helpers” motorcycle gang wants to destroy him herself. But Pee-Wee is never moved by these desiring women–nor by the men who admire him, notably Mickey the convict and a jovial policeman who yearns for Pee-Wee in drag. He loves only his bike.

 

The bicycle functions, in fact, as the true woman of the narrative. An object of extraordinary beauty, attended by falling cherry blossoms and ethereal music, the bike is supremely desirable. Francis, unable to obtain the bike legitimately, is forced by the excess of his need to have it stolen. But having taken it, he dares not keep it; the rest of the film is taken up with Pee-Wee’s unceasing quest for it. True love triumphs; Pee Wee’s journey is, although perilous, not fruitless. His dream visions of its destruction, his dead-end trip to the (nonexistent) basement of the Alamo at the instigation of Madame Ruby the fraudulent clairvoyant, are all submerged, in the end, in his daring rescue of the captive bike from a Hollywood studio. Reunited, Pee-Wee and bike are then revised for the big screen. The love story of a boy and his bike becomes, with only a few alterations, the love story of a top spy and his super motorcycle. Pee-Wee himself plays a bell-boy.

 

The bike, like the vision which Shelley’s Poet follows in “Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude,” is most clearly present in its absence. It inspires, provokes, and closes the narrative without ever acting alone. It must depend entirely on the actions of others–the perfect heroine. Dottie, by contrast, is too forward: she asks Pee-Wee out. She is too active: she has a job. And she is most closely identified with Pee-Wee’s other close friend, Speck the dog. The bicycle is the Neo-Platonic ideal of womanhood, beautiful, unattainable, distant. She must be earned by a hero willing to suffer greatly in her service. Francis cannot fulfill the task; he pays a greasy j.d. to steal her. Pee-Wee is willing to dress as a nun to rescue her from a mean-spirited child star.

 

The picaresque adventure which forces Pee-Wee into heroic stature ends with his re-integration into ordinary life. Back in his hometown, he greets all his friends at a special screening of “his” movie. He passes through the crowd dispensing largesse–a foot-long hot dog concealing a file for his friend the convict, french-fries for Simone and her French sweetheart, candy for the Satan’s Helpers to scramble for. At last, seated on his bike, he pedals silently, eloquently, across the bottom of the drive-in screen, a man at peace with himself, ready to return to the quiet life he once shared unthinkingly with his darling bike, a wiser boy. Or man. Whatever he is.

 

“Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” articulates a central premise of post-modernism–the impassioned, erotic, inevitable love affair with technology. And it does so using an elegant pastiche of film and literary versions of the Neo-platonic, dream-visionary, questing romance–what we might call the true romance, with all that phrase’s resonance of cheap drugstore magazines as well as medieval poetry. The Playhouse offers us escape into the safe space of regression; the Big Adventure propels us–literary parachute firmly strapped on–into the strange desert freeway of the Future.