The sad end of Pee Wee Herman...

[Dave Monroe]

Took me a while to figure out where I read this (more
pink-covered film studies anthologies out there than
one would suspect), but, from Constance Penley, "The
Cabinet of Dr. Pee-wee: Consumerism and Sexual
Terror," The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism,
and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
1989), pp. 141-64 ...

What goes on in the Playhouse is that Pee-wee and his
guests are "playing house."  This is literally so in
one episode that takes place on a rainy day when
everybody has to stay inside.  "Let's play war!" is
one suggestion.  "Let's play headhunter!" is another. 
But it is Miss Yvonne who prevails, insisting that
they "play house,' even over Pee-wee's objection that
"that's girl stuff."  Pee-wee dutifully, if
grudgingly, takes up his assignment to play Daddy to
Miss Yvonne's Mommy, nut nalks at her demand that
Daddy give Mommy a kiss.  He relents, under pressure,
and gives her a kiss whose passion is just this side
of Ward Cleaver's.  Another episode makes more
explicit what playing house involves when Pee-wee, in
otherwise innocent circumstances, says, "I'll show you
mine if you'll show me yours." (In the second season
of the show they finally get around to playing
"doctor.")  Indeed, the dialogue and visuals of
Pee-wee's Playhouse abound with weenie jokes, for the
most part of the size variety.  "Think you've got a
big enough pencil there?" Reba the mail-lady asks
Pee-wee as he hauls out a giant pencil to write a
letter to his seafaring friend Captain Carl.  But
before Pee-wee can get the letter in the mail, Captain
Carl shows up with an equally oversize extendable
telescope as a present for him.  On another day at the
Playhouse, Mrs. Steve, the local snoop and mean-lady,
is looking for Randy, the eponymous bad-boy puppet who
has stolen apples from her orchard.  "I have a bone to
pick with you," she shrieks at Randy.  "where are you
hiding the little thing." she asks Pee-wee accusingly.
 Tracking Randy down to his hiding place under the
bunk beds, she snarls, "Come out here, you little
dickens." (141-2)

Also posed throughout the show is the kindred question
of the relation between the sexes.  In one episode
Pee-wee throws a party "to celebrate friendship."... 
Then everyone starts dancing.  Among the couples ins
Miss Yvonee and Tito, the muscular lifeguard, usually
seen only in skimpy bathing trunks [...].  Pee-wee
taps him on the shoulder, asking "May I cut in?"  Tito
steps back, Pee-wee steps in, but only to turn and
begin dancing with Tito, not Miss Yvonne. (142)

The question of sexual relations is posed once again
when Miss Yvonne asks Cowboy Curtis for a date. 
Cowboy Curtis exclaims, "Well, if that don't beat all,
a woman asking a man out on a date!"  What is implied,
of course, is that he has never been out with a woman
before [...].  Worried that he "won't know how to
act," he is rescued from his pre-date jitters by the
Cowntess, teh aristocratic bovine who claims that her
specialty is "dating dilemmas."  To demonstrate to
Cowboy Curtis what to do on a date, the Cowntess sets
up a role-playing game and asks Pee-wee to be Miss
Yvonne.  He objects at first, but then takes his role
with gusto.  The game comes crashing to a halt,
however, when Cowboy Curtis, carried away with his
role, tries to give Miss Yvonne/Pee-wee a goodnight
kiss.  Things go prety far before Pee-wee pulls back
to exclaim, "No!, none of that stuff! Game over!"
(144; illus. at 143)

It is highly appropriate that it is the figure of the
Sphinx that adorns the exterior of the Playhouse,
inasmuch as Freud declared the Sphinx's riddle to be
the very model of teh sexual questions invariably
posed by children.  The Sphinx therefore becomes the
icon or emblem of infantile sexual investigations
[...].  In its deliberate playing to two audiences,
one child and the other adult, Pee-wee's Playhouse
suggests that these are questions that never cease to
insist, even in fully Oedipalized adulthood. (144,
146)

... one inevitably wonders how this is allowed to go
on ... (147)

Perhaps too much has been made of the homosexual
subtext in Pee-wee's Playhouse. [...] As an article in
Film Comment said, "if Pee-wee has to have an
inordinate number of handsome young men on his show,
that's his business." [...] Bryan Bruce does a very
good job of it, however, in his CineAction [no. 9
(summer 1987): 3-6] article, "Pee-Wee Herman: The
Homosexual Subtext." [...]  He says that it is not
just taht there are a lot of handsome men on the show,
"it's rather that each represnts a specific gay male
icon, prominet fantasy figures in homosexual
pornography [...], including the sailor (Captain
Carl), the black cowbot (Cowboy Curtis), and the
muscular, scantily clad lifeguard (tito), not to
mention the escaped con (Mickey) in Pee-wee's Big
Adventure" ([Bruce] 5).  In the film we see explicit
references to gay fantasy in two instances of drag,
once when Pee-wee disguises himself as Mickey's
girlfriend to get them through a police roadblock (he
forgets to change back into his boy clothes after they
are out of danger) and again when Pee-wee makes abrief
appearance as a nun near the end of the film.  Bruce
says the nun, in particular, is a dead giveaway in its
appeal to the irreverent gay camp aesthetic. (155-6)

Ricardo, the Spanish-speaking soccer player, and
Cowboy Curtis can only look on and roll their eyes as
Pee-wee takes "ages" to decide where to place a chair.
(158)

It is, of course, inevitable that marriage, that haven
in a heterosexual world, should come in for ridicule
here.  Pee-wee's stock response to the question of
whether he likes something is, "Yes, but I wouldn't
want to marry it!" But in the second season, during a
mixed-sex slumber party at the Playhouse, Pee-wee does
marry something he likes. [...] Someone asks Pee-wee
if he likes the snack and he gives his usual snappy
comeback.  This time, however, he has second thoughts.
 "But why not?," he asks slyly.  With a quick cut we
find ourselves in the middle of a wedding ceremony in
which Pee-wee takes as his beautiful bride ... a bowl
of fruit salad! (158; final ellipses in text)

... originally published in Camera Obscura 17 (May
1988).  But from the ashes of Pee Wee rises the
phoenix of Paul Reubens.  Dunston Checks In is worth
watching for, if nothing else (though I'm a big fan of
yr monkey movies, myselkf), PR's hilarious turn as a
creepily intense exterminator, and (speaking of monkey
movies, not to mention Tim Burton), I believe he's in
the Planet of the Apes remake as well ...


--- JBFRAME at aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 02/06/2001 11:31:12 AM Pacific
> Standard Time, 
> mdtb at st-andrews.ac.uk writes:
> 
> << Current theories hold
>  that he did this on purpose, so that he wouldn't be
> stuck with silly
>  kiddies films all his life.  >>
> 
> Seeing reruns of his old show, I am inclined to
> think maybe he & his crew 
> were having way too much fun.  It looked more like a
> satire on kids shows.  
> Some pretty saucy bits that only adults would
> appreciate get through in a lot 
> of the gags.  My rich well-springs of paranoia
> maintain that he was set up & 
> turned in to get him off the air!
> 
> jbf


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 
a year!  http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/