The Night I Saw Pee-Wee's Big Adventure

RIP Paul Reubens

Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure came out in August 1985, the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school. That was a big summer for me. I had just been ghosted. My brother had graduated from high school and was going to college and leaving me alone in the house with my parents. My mother and I were starting to fight in ways that were new and dangerous. It had always been that she would get mad at me and I would do anything to fix this. But in the summer of 1985 I was like, you’re mad at me, ha, ok, well, guess what? I’m mad at you. And I don’t care if you’re mad at me. It was bad.

I was still at heart a people-pleaser who essentially believed in “the American project.” I just wanted to go to a good college so I could purchase an adulthood of tweed jackets, well-cut cotton blouses and horsey boots. I planned to live in a stone mansion in Cold Spring, a town often featured in the New York Times Magazine’s “Better Homes and Estates.”

It would be decades before I would learn about socially necessary labor time, but there was something in me that knew something was wrong with the world, something major, because I was like, ugh this is all a big fucking joke. I sensed that my dreams were not heartfelt but cynical, a substitute for real desires that I could not even fathom.

Everything is empty, I would say to myself all the time. The world is empty and the future is nothing. Given any amount of time alone I would stare into space and my eyes would well up with tears. At night, I fought off dread until I fell asleep.