What Pee-Wee Hermans’s Big Adventure Reveals About the Jewish Mindset
Rock and Roll unleashed youth culture, and social critics fretted that the boomers(and subsequent generations) would never grow out of their teen years. This has indeed become a problem. But, there was another phenomenon, especially beginning in the 1980s, that fixated on childhood emotions. There was Steven Spielberg who made children’s movies for teens and adults(and for children too, of course). And there was Paul Reubens’ Pee Wee Herman who looked and acted like a five(at best seven) year old child snuggled inside an adult’s body(and brains, as he was pretty clever). Or more like a toy doll come to life. (If Pinocchio wanted to be a real boy, it’s as if Pee Wee wants to be a real toy.) If Elliott found the perfect friend or toy in E.T., the Tintin-haired Pee Wee was like a boy and a toy in one, almost a real-life Pixar character before the advent of CGI that made movies like TOY STORY possible. (Me, I’d rather have my own Terminator toy, like with the kid in JUDGMENT DAY.) Never mind adults failing to grow past teen emotions. Pee Wee mentality couldn’t grow past childish emotions. It was a disturbing departure from traditional children’s culture. When adults took their kids to Disneyland or a Disney movie, there was a clear distinction between children and adults(or parents). Grownups knew it wasn’t for them and just did it for the kids. But the Pee Wee phenomenon was different. As goofy and ‘cute’ as PEE WEE HERMAN’S BIG ADVENTURE is, it is rather perverse and disturbing in parts, indeed more suited for adults. But, is it proper for grownups to get their jollies by following the adventures of a perpetual man-child toy-boy, one who is blissfully, shamelessly, obnoxiously, and dementedly childlike, indeed enough to make Peter Pan blush?
Part of the appeal was surely nostalgia. While Pee Wee Herman was no one’s idea of the conservative archetype, he played on innocence as a fetish. In this, he shares something with Spielberg whose world shows few signs that the Counterculture even took place. The setting of JAWS is a tight-knit small town tourist community with nice middle class folks. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND begins with the discovery of World War II fighter planes, and cultural references are to toys, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, and a slightly more casual portrait of Fifties idyll of family life. Even though there are adults in EMPIRE OF THE SUN and JURASSIC PARK, Spielberg’s touch works most naturally with children. It’s as if Spielberg found a way to bottle the child’s sense of wonder inside a magic lamp. Even SCHINDLER’S LIST, horrific as it is, unfolds emotionally on the childhood level. Nazi atrocities are presented as crimes not only against a people but against innocence itself.
Counterculture promoted sexuality, drugs, cynicism, and obscenity(as gestures of rebellion and/or liberation), but Spielberg(and George Lucas) offered something nostalgic and reassuring. The Mexican village elder’s words in THE WILD BUNCH come to mind: “We all dream of being a child again…” And lucky for Lucas and Spielberg, their visions coincided with the Reaganite spirit of ‘Morning in America’. Neither Spielberg nor Lucas was a Republican, but their cultural references owed little to the Sixties, the spirit of which was revived with the ascent of Oliver Stone.
In a way, Sylvester Stallone also profited from the cult of innocence beginning in mid-70s when people wanted to put the Vietnam War, race riots, and Watergate behind them. Even though ROCKY has a violent fight scene, it is a Cinderella story, a fairy tale for grownups. And even though RAMBO(aka FIRST BLOOD II) was almost pornographic in violence, it too played on the cartoonish innocence of American Patriotism, i.e. “We were the good guys and would have won… had we not been stabbed in the back by cynical politicians and dirty hippies who called us ‘baby killers’.”
And of course, there was Michael Jackson, by far the biggest musical act of the 80s, a real-life Peter Pan onstage. But then, Jackson’s whole career arc was rather an outlier at odds with Rock culture. Sixties youth culture was all about late teen years and early twenties. It had no use for childhood, a time when one’s under the thumb of parents and teachers; indeed, it was embarrassing to admit you had once been a clean-cut kid in those grammar school pictures. On the other hand, like Benjamin Braddock in THE GRADUATE, it dreaded full adulthood with its responsibilities and ‘plastics’. The Woodstock Ideal was being old enough for sex-and-drugs but young enough to still dream of the future.
It was in such a cultural climate that Jackson Five burst upon the scene. It was incredible, a child star rocking with the best in Rock and Soul. How could a child do it and do it so well, so convincingly? By 1983, Michael Jackson was a full-grown man, at least biologically. But emotionally, it was as if he never grew past ten, and once he built his own Ludwig-II-like dream palace, he seemed to be growing backwards. In another 80s cultural artifact, AMADEUS the movie, Tom Hulce’s Mozart was like an androgynous MTV star, infantile and ‘gay’-ish, though not homosexual like Boy George. Given Pee Wee’s perky affectations, one might assume Paul Reubens is homosexual, possibly even pedophilic, though he’s actually straight, like Neil Sedaka, another one who seems ‘gay’ but is actually straight, though who really knows? (Michael Jackson was accused of pedophilia, but perhaps he didn’t see it that way as he was emotionally a child himself, i.e. in his mind, it was essentially a child-and-child matter. In our age, when a man who feels as a woman is a ‘woman’, perhaps some may argue that a man who feels as a child is a ‘child’, therefore his pedophilic acts aren’t really pedophilic since he identifies as a child. Crazy, but we live in crazy times.)