| Ed Dykhuizen |
Pee-wee’s Big Adventure plays at the Trylon Cinema on January 11th, with promotional support for this screening provided by Sound Unseen. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information.
For the first half of the 20th century, all movies were made for everyone. There was no rating system, so everything had to be OK for both kids and adults. And there weren’t that many options on a particular day. You might have a choice of a western or a comedy or a romance, but you were confined by what theaters near you chose to screen. Especially in the 1930s and 1940s, most Americans lived near only studio-owned theaters that showed the latest studio products.
Great movies came out of this system, but they had to appeal to a wide swath of people. Hollywood didn’t risk getting too weird. Almost all protagonists were strong, handsome (white) men who wooed beautiful young (white) women. Cartoon shorts were allowed to get very surreal, and occasionally a comedy would showcase a genuine weirdo—Harpo Marx, I think we can all agree, is pretty strange. But for the most part, if you were an oddball, your appeal was too niche to get you on screen. The exceptions, like Ed Wood, snuck in the back doors of the theaters when no one was looking.
In the 1960s, moviegoers started acquiring a taste for cinematic strangeness. The website 366 Weird Movies, the best source I’ve found on the topic, has chosen 416 films at this writing that plumb the depths of the bizarre. Of those, 29 are from 1920-1959 and 61 came out in the 1960s. The latter group ranges from groundbreaking classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey to hippie freakouts like Yellow Submarine. The weirdness kept diversifying through the 1970s, with everything from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to Pink Flamingos delivering out-of-left-field surprises to very different audiences.
In the 1980s, weirdness was tamped down a bit. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher ushered in conservatism in the English-speaking world, and popular entertainment took a turn toward the predictable. Movies focused mainly on nuclear families in the suburbs and the action tropes that were established in the 1950s. I don’t think many people would use the word “weird” to describe John Hughes comedies or Indiana Jones adventures, great as they may be. Strange stuff was available, but was mostly quarantined in horror and art films.
Pee-wee Herman was the rare star who was able to port some weirdness into the 1980s mainstream. Within the Groundlings comedy troupe, Paul Reubens had created a truly original character: A cheerful, charming man-child with big feelings, a tight suit, and a wonderfully imitable voice.
Pee-wee’s specific brand of weirdness is one of living a prepubescent boy’s fantasy adulthood. This is established in the opening scenes of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. There are no parents around and he gets to do whatever he wants. Instead of going to school or work, he frequents a novelty store to test out new gags. The love of his life is not one of those icky girls but a bicycle tricked out with streamers on the handlebars and a plastic tiger’s head on the front. His house makes every routine task 200% awesomer: The toaster propels toast feet in the air for him to catch. He turns on a Rube Goldberg-ian machine made of toys that serves up Mr. Breakfast, a face that he makes ask for Mr. T Cereal.
In Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, director Tim Burton creates a perfect world for Pee-Wee Herman to play in. It’s a colorful, fun, slightly surreal America filled with oddballs like Amazing Larry and Large Marge. Like so much 1980s entertainment, the movie harkens back to what baby boomers were nostalgic for: in this case, the goofy pop-culture ephemera of the 1950s and 1960s. A tender scene happens inside a garish roadside dinosaur statue. Pee-wee gets to be a cowboy, confront a biker gang, and fall into a film noir plot (i.e., Mickey’s shocking crime). He makes friends at every stop, which pays off at the brilliant ending.
The website 366 Weird Movies did not deem Pee-wee’s Big Adventure weird enough to add to their list, but it still stands out in the context of mainstream 1980s culture. The Large Marge scene and Pee-wee’s dream felt especially out there to the suburban kids who loved the movie.
In the 1980s, entertainment choices had expanded thanks to VCRs and cable TV, but it still wasn’t easy for everyone to come across pop-culture oddballs. Pee-wee’s Big Adventure provided a great entry point into the unusual. The very fun mock biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic Story helpfully collects in one scene the celebrity weirdos a 1980s kid could explore: Pee-wee Herman, Weird Al Yankovic, Gallagher, Alice Cooper, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Tiny Tim, and even Divine if the kid happened to be especially hip.
Image sourced from the New York Times
Primed by Pee-wee and pals, the kids of the 1980s embraced more grown-up strangeness in the 1990s. Twin Peaks, Natural Born Killers, and 12 Monkeys were hits, along with many indie movies that might not have been dyed-in-the-wool bizarre but still broke from conservative 1980s templates. Weird entertainment has trucked on ever since, with the torch now carried by Adult Swim, Yorgos Lanthimos, and others.
There are many issues with entertainment in the 2020s, but lack of choice is not one of them—at home, at least. Now anyone with a good internet connection can explore Tubi and find what speaks to them. If you love the touches of weirdness in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, you can pour through the list on 366 Weird Movies and feel inspired to watch the films of Luis Buñuel, Jean Cocteau, Federico Fellini, Peter Greenaway, David Lynch, Guy Maddin, etc., etc. It’s a good time to get weird.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon