![]() As with most classic movies, there isn’t really one single answer. The question of exactly what Pee-wee’s Big Adventure is is worth asking. His catchphrase, meanwhile, encapsulates the lovable, maddening ambiguity of his persona-it’s the proverbial riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma, except delivered with the taunting confidence of an overstimulated 6-year-old. The wonderful contradiction of Pee-wee is that he’s so transparent about his strangeness, at once blissfully oblivious and slyly self-aware in a way that places the onus of the joke on the audience. Like everything else about Pee-wee, the voice is a parody of prepubescent petulance, an affectation that’s also an alienation effect by a comedian with a gift for scrambling his audience’s expectations and prejudices. The words evoke the antiheroic rhetoric of James Dean, the patron saint of beautiful, misunderstood teenagers the pinched, nasal delivery, however, undermines the sentiment. “You don’t want to get mixed up with a guy like me,” says Paul Reubens’s bow-tie-wearing alter ego to Dottie (Elizabeth Daily) halfway through Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, just before he blows town in search of his stolen bike, an easy rider on the road to nowhere. At the end of Back to the Future, instead of riding his motorcycle out of town Marlon Brando style, Marty McFly glances happily at the brand-new Range Rover in the family garage.ġ985’s true born-to-be-wild hero-and its most provocative poster boy for the concept of arrested development-was a figure as far removed from John Hughes as humanly possible: Pee-wee Herman. moment, these movies still weren’t necessarily signifiers of rebellion. If the decade’s sudden pileup of adolescence-inflected dramas, rom-coms, slasher flicks, and even action movies (all together now: “Wolverines!”) served as a bit of a beachhead against the kind of cloying, family-friendly entertainment being pumped out by studios in a post- E.T. “I’m not crazy about movies about teenagers,” wrote Pauline Kael in 1984, grudgingly acknowledging Hollywood’s youth movement without capitulating to it. In a year defined by Back to the Future and The Breakfast Club, the not-so-secret theme of commercial American cinema was growing pains-the exciting, terrifying (and of course sexually tantalizing) transition from innocence to experience mapped out along a series of high school hallways. Welcome to The Ringer ’s Return to Summer Blockbuster Season, where we’ll feature different summer classics each week.ġ985 was a teenage wasteland at the movies. ![]() 2020’s summer blockbuster season has been put on hold because of the pandemic, but that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate the movies from the past that we flocked out of the sun and into air conditioning for.
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