by Spitz, Marc
De Mornay’s call girl, Lana, can be seen as filling the same role as the Cat in Dr. Seuss’s beloved tale. Like the Cat, she creates havoc when the parents are away, jars a man-child out of his torpor, and exits just in time to leave everything safe and sound by the time the adults return.
Risky Business is also noteworthy for introducing an enduring Twee icon: the cool loser. John Belushi was dead by March of ’82. Slob comedies were yielding fewer and fewer box office dividends and suddenly you had to actually be Ivy League bound, with your stellar book and record collection packed, in order to fill the sizable antihero void he left behind. Perhaps the greatest of these winning losers was Curtis Armstrong, who created a kind of icon of the form over the course of three seminal ’80s films, all of them Twee touchstones. “Sometimes you just gotta say ‘What the fuck,’” Armstrong’s Miles instructs Cruise’s Joel in the first, Risky Business. “What the fuck gives you freedom. Freedom brings opportunity. Opportunity makes your future.” Here was a situationist credo uttered by a teen (though Curtis Armstrong was pushing thirty when he made the movie)—and not only a “teen,” but also one with the same haircut that Bob Dylan wore on the cover of Blonde on Blonde. His character gets into Harvard, while Joel’s is still sweating Princeton. This archetype of the loser who comes out on top would prove such a revelation to filmmakers, many of whom started out as nerds and geeks themselves, that Armstrong was typecast in the “Miles” role in two subsequent films and is probably singlehandedly responsible for Jack Black’s character in High Fidelity.
“It started with Risky Business,” Armstrong says. “Because Risky Business was so admired by other filmmakers, I was offered the Booger part in Revenge of the Nerds. The character of Booger didn’t really exist on the page.”
If Mark Ratner’s locker-room fight with Damone (defending Stacy Hamilton-Jennifer Jason Leigh’s honor, of course) was the first shot in this transition from jock hero to Twee hero, Revenge of the Nerds was the riot. On the surface it’s a campus comedy, raunchy à la the bygone Animal House and the current Porky’s (one of the few franchises of the neo-slob comedy affairs), but at heart it’s a morality play with a cast of fine character actors (John Goodman, James Cromwell, Fast Times vet Anthony Edwards, Robert Carradine, and Ted McGinley) addressing major issues of civil rights. The titular nerds are turned away from every frat house on campus and forced to sleep in the gym because of the way they look and their interests (chess, computers, computers, chess). It is no coincidence that the only frat that will have them is Triple Lambda, a largely African-American fraternity “open to people of all races and creeds.”
“There’s a nerd sign burning on the lawn,” Armstrong points out, an echo of KKK burning crosses, “and all this dialogue about how nobody is free until nerds are free. If you go through the movie thinking about it in those terms, it’s clear what the writers were talking about—but because it’s an exploitative movie and because it’s got a lot of broad humor in it, people sometimes miss the subject of the film, which is about bigotry, acceptance, and tolerance.” Continuing his proto-Twee rock-god throw-down, Armstrong appears in the final musical sequence in full Vegas Elvis garb with Anthony Edwards and Robert Carradine paying tribute to Devo. “We have news for the beautiful people,” Edwards’s character, Gilbert, says in his big monologue toward the film’s conclusion. “There are a lot more of us than there are of you.” In the 1980s, with Indie culture fast on the rise, this appeared to be coming true.
Writer, director, and mix-tape creator John Hughes graduated Glenbrook North High School in suburban Illinois in the tumultuous spring of 1968. In 1984, he was already a Hollywood success, having parlayed a staff position at the then culturally significant publication National Lampoon into a pair of produced screenplays, Class Reunion and the first National Lampoon’s Vacation film, based on a short story he’d written for the magazine. Hughes should not have remembered what it was really like for teenagers to walk those tricky halls and hang out in those polarized parking lots two decades away from his high school days, especially during the glossy 1980s, the idealistic flip side to the radical late ’60s. But, rightfully so, Hughes suspected that the dynamic was more or less the same now as it had been then.
“John Hughes was a young person. I found him to be the youngest, most awkward guy on the set, and I always felt he was writing different versions of himself,” Eric Stoltz, the star of Hughes’s Some Kind of Wonderful, recalls.
Hughes’s genius was not necessarily the films themselves; the writing in Sixteen Candles can be hacky, and at times politically incorrect (Long Duk Dong, anyone?). The beauty of his work was its long overdue exploration of just “why” the binary nature of high school existed, why cool vs. uncool was so immovable. Cameron Crowe presented the “how” of things by laying out his undercover data for a sense of verisimilitude. Hughes suggested a powerfully attractive alternative and began to ask “why,” without an eye toward or a care for the “real” teenager of the 1980s, or even his own 1960s.
Adults, again, are idiots in Hughes’s movies, with toilet paper hanging out of the back of their pants. They see every kid as binary, good or bad, and the good kids need to be rewarded and the bad kids need to be punished—until, that is, one Saturday in late March when a weird mix of both wind up in detention. Hughes’s biggest contribution to pop may be the notion that the cool kids are just as fragile and fucked up (and terrified) as the geeks.
“You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal—that’s the way we saw each other at seven this morning. We were brainwashed,” Anthony Michael Hall says in voice-over at the film’s feel-good conclusion. Judd Nelson’s Bender is the Socratic Punk instigator who brings everything to an explosive boil, but once it bubbles over, there’s a huge sigh, among both the cast and the audience. Suddenly everything seems different. Perhaps Monday they will all go back to their own cultural corners, but in real life, that didn’t seem to happen. In the wake of the new 1980s Hollywood, teens seemed to want truth, not just cheap release; they needed answers.
“Are we gonna be like our parents?” Ally Sheedy’s misfit asks in The Breakfast Club.
“Not me, never,” Emilio Estevez’s star wrestler swears.
“It’s unavoidable. It just happens. When you grow up, your heart dies,” Sheedy responds. Teenage Twees of the 1980s, now in middle age like the Brat Pack actors themselves, seemingly never forgot those words.
The summer of ’85, in addition to hosting the Breakfast Club revolution, was also the summer of the 1980s’ greatest man-child, the eternally, sometimes uncomfortably youthful Pee-wee Herman. Like all great Twee figures, Pee-wee divided the room. Some thought he was simply perfect with his retro kitsch irony and anarchy. Others found it rather creepy that a man in his thirties would smear his face with rouge and lipstick, don a too-short suit and large shoes, and cavort like a young boy in a universe of his own making that Rolling Stone would later describe as “the collision of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with a raspberry-and-lime Jell-O mold constructed by Disney technicians recovering from the Taiwan flu.” Pee-wee was like a Seuss character made flesh, all hyperkinetic energy and mischief but with a gentle soul.
Paul Reubens had been around for years by the time The Pee-wee Herman Show premiered at the Groundlings Theater in 1981 and moved to the Roxy nightclub a year later. Reubens attended Cal Arts and studied improv with the famed Groundlings improv group, but it was clear his career was moving fast. Simply put, there was nothing else like him onstage or in the small parts he landed onscreen. He stole the spotlight, for example, from Cheech and Chong in a bizarre Chinese-restaurant scene in Cheech and Chong’s Nice Dreams. Reubens played Howie the Hamburger Man, a coked-up New Waver who utters the immortal lines, “You wanna know about the future of rock and roll? Bruce Springsteen’s fuckin’ it all up. New Wave. Neeeeeeew Wave!” If you’ve never seen this, all I can say is that this scene alone is better than most comedies, heck, most big-budget theater today. Howie
should have been given his own feature-length film immediately, but it would be Pee-wee who would unite actual children and adults still in touch with their childhood. Pee-wee would mainstream Twee as much as any figure who came before or since.
Reubens’s stage act was honed at the Groundlings theater at a time when performance art, irony, and a love of retro kitsch were in vogue in Hollywood: rockabilly was L.A.’s big post-Punk movement, for example. Punk designer Gary Panter (who did logos for local acts like the Screamers and drew the Jimbo comic strip) designed the stage set. The Pee-wee Herman Show was a critical and commercial hit locally, and was later filmed as a nationally televised HBO comedy special. A wry, knowing, and affectionate take on Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club, Howdy Doody, and pre-Beatles ’60s pop culture tropes, it was live-action contained chaos. Pee-wee was prankish: shoe mirrors for looking up ladies’ dresses are employed, as is fake poo and a “Naked Gumby.” He was also wistful; his greatest dream was to be able to fly like Pterri the Pterodactyl, one of his myriad misfit visitors. Others include Hammy, who is in love with eating ham; Captain Carl (played by Hartman, a cowriter), who’s been too long at sea; and a pair of hippies who stage a musical salute to Sly and the Family Stone complete with pink flamingo-shaped guitar. Punkish as Pee-wee was, the ’60s were not off-limits but rather once again holy. Pee-wee screened vintage cartoons and public service reels (“Only Mr. Bungle would run in the lunchroom”) to the delight of a knowing, increasingly postmodernist crowd who gobbled up the naughty humor and winking kitsch love like it was button candy. Reubens could do prop comedy, work in an ensemble, and hold the stage solo (or with Dr. Mongo, his ventriloquist dummy). He was a marvel or a psycho, depending on whom you asked. A veteran of Chuck Barris’s unstable The Gong Show, he became a favored guest of the legendary early days of Late Night with David Letterman as well.
The buzz led to Reubens’s feature-film debut based around the character. Eccentric visual artist and animator-turned-director Tim Burton signed on to direct. Danny Elfman would provide the madcap score, which became essential to the film’s opening sequence, in which Pee-wee wakes up in his kitsch-strewn house and makes breakfast for himself and his Chihuahua, Speck, via an ingenious Rube Goldberg contraption. Reubens plays Pee-wee as both dirty-minded and chaste. He knows about sex, but he doesn’t seem to be interested in it. His true love is his prized bright red bike, a vintage beauty in true Twee fashion.
When Dottie, the pretty blond employee at the local bike shop, asks him if he wants to go out, he hilariously warns her: “You don’t wanna get mixed up with a guy like me. I’m a loner, Dottie. A rebel.” But as he leaves the bike shop, he’s giggling, amazed that he’s managed to pull off a line like that at all. Here Reubens is no different from Dustin Hoffman when he dons dark glasses to take Elaine out on a date in The Graduate, or Mark Ratner playing Led Zeppelin in his car as he drives Stacy out for a large German meal in Fast Times at Ridgemont High: the geeks, Punks, freaks, and, in Pee-wee’s case, ninety-eight-pound weaklings simply cannot believe that they are inheriting the earth. With Pee-wee, Reubens, like Walt Disney before him, built a world of his own, designed and suited to his Twee vision of retro safety and perma-childhood, and almost by force of charisma and will alone, it became not only palatable but vital and attractive to other lonely, frightened souls. Dottie is not sexually drawn to Pee-wee so much as she’s enchanted by the man, or man-child, who goes it alone, against the flow. Pee-wee, like James Dean, actually is a loner and a rebel. There’s little irony in the actuality of the observation, even if the delivery is deadpan.
The Reubens saga, of course, would take a few unhappy turns. The success of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure paid off for both him and Burton, whose next film was the hit Beetlejuice. Reubens then brought Pee-wee and his gang (a beatnik puppet band, a genie, a talking globe and chair, a family of dinosaurs that lived in a mouse hole) to Saturday-morning television in 1986, and after a slow start (as Pee-wee had to wait for people to get it) Pee-wee’s Playhouse became a smash, landing him on the cover of Rolling Stone and winning him an Emmy. But the big-screen sequel Big Top Pee-wee, a circus-themed meander, flopped, and we all know what happened next. Reubens became another one of those soul-sinking mug shots that remind us that nothing ever stays completely pure.
It took years for Reubens to revitalize his image and launch a comeback, first as a character actor and, in recent years, as Pee-wee himself. Still svelte and manic, the middle-aged Pee-wee is kind of like the Peter Pan that Michael Jackson aspired to be, a real-life Twee hero for the hybrid generation, singlehandedly responsible for phenomena like Yo Gabba Gabba!, the kiddie hit of the ’00s. Pee-wee can now be taken seriously by critics. Reubens as Pee-wee had a hit Broadway show in 2012, and a new Pee-wee movie is currently in development with the new king of arrested adolescence, Judd Apatow. One can almost hear Pee-wee’s vengeful cackle off in the distance now: “I know you are, but what am I? Infinity!” Only vengeance was never Pee-wee’s thing. He was crucially a kind character. He didn’t condescend. The sweetness, the very Twee-ness was what both put him over the top and took him down. Always destined to be a kind of cult, he flirted with superstardom during a very strange time in popular culture and it nearly destroyed him. Today, the world seems ready for him again. He fits with the unfolding Twee age like a clip-on red bow tie on a pin-down white collar.
Chapter 6
Blue Boys
1982–1984
Glasgow becomes the epicenter for the first consolidated Twee culture boom that the media (read: London) acknowledges, and, to its own horror, the Glasgow School paves the way for acts that will rule the second half of the decade.
It is clear how the shy boys and anti–femme fatales took over Hollywood, but let us travel backward a bit, as we are about to chart the course of how the Twee trend in music became massive and arena filling. It begins not in Los Angeles, New York, or, more crucially, London, but rather in the port city of Glasgow, Scotland. Glasgow was not the easiest place to grow up. Here middle-class kids and arts-college students often found themselves navigating the same urban basins as drunk, working-class football fans carrying knives. Sometimes just turning the wrong corner at the wrong time (read: after a football match) could get you “glassed” (slashed in the face with a broken pint glass). “It was a city that had an edge to it—certainly—and you could provoke a reaction by the way you behaved,” says Stephen McRobbie, also known as Stephen Pastel, leader of the beloved Glasgow band the Pastels.
In the late 1970s, with the United Kingdom still emerging from economic decline, a clear uneasiness seemed to run through this otherwise beautiful city, with its centuries-old, spire-topped buildings; slate-blue lakes; and verdant highlands. Glasgow was old country. Few in London, especially Punks still fighting to stay relevant, paid it any mind. Only Rod Stewart sang mistily of Scotland. The Bay City Rollers, Gerry “Baker Street” Rafferty, and the oft-maligned Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull were Glasgow’s favorite rock and roll sons. Nobody would have expected that here, Punk’s DIY spirit would be kept alive well into the 1980s. But it was far easier for a teen from Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, or Dublin, with only a tenuous connection to London via N.M.E., Melody Maker, Sounds, and the Mirror, to drop Punk and move on. Punk wasn’t so pervasive in these far-flung towns, away from the epicenter. Teenagers are like that. It’s not infidelity: it’s part and parcel of their bone deep, electrified search to belong.
“Nothing from that period can be separated completely from Punk,” says singer-songwriter Lloyd Cole, who moved to Glasgow to study and by the early ’80s led one of the city’s breakout bands, the Commotions. “We’d long stopped dressing that way. But even when it became a laughingstock, we hadn’t forgotten what great Punk records there were. ‘Complete Control’ by the Clash and the Sex Pistols singles. They were all fantastic pop songs.”
“The better things of the Indie era are always going to be seen and heard through a Punk and post-Punk filter,” music critic Paul Morley agrees. Megaba
nds such as U2, the Police, R.E.M., the Smiths, Depeche Mode, and the Cure have very close Punk proximity, no matter how massive their sound, stagecraft, and success became.
Why Scotland is important in the inevitable popularization of Twee is the groove. Glasgow was funky. Set against the stark realities of the Thatcher era’s austerity and perceived lack of compassion for the poor, it was a task of the musicians of the time to preserve a sense of humor and hedonism. Even more important was creating a sense of optimism and idealism—which is the backbone of any great pop song. Does it make you dance? Does it pick you up when you are low? Does it even make you glad to be sad? Such were the new rules of thumb for young musicians as Punk fragmented into a half dozen subgenres at the end of the ’70s, and there seemed to be a surplus of the subgenres in Glasgow. Elsewhere in the British Isles, Goth, industrial, neo-psychedelic, and new Mod all proved worthy new genres, but it was the music of Glasgow and later Edinburgh that made you want to dance the pain away. This was disco . . . through the Punk filter.
The Punk era had filmmakers like Derek Jarman, Penelope Spheeris, Don Letts, and Lech Kowalski; the “Glasgow School” also had its cinematic compatriots. Their films didn’t reflect the nihilism of old, but rather a die-hard cheer and romance in the face of bleakness. Any scene requires the documentarian, so to speak. The New York No Wave movement, for example, had a young Jim Jarmusch. Glasgow had William Forsyth. Like many in the city during those early Thatcher years, the aspiring film director was broke but unbowed, possessed to make a film and fueled by natural pluck and ingenuity. Already in his mid-thirties, Forsyth was old enough to have devoured the first run of Nouvelle Vague films in the ’60s. He’d idolized Truffaut and Godard and also amassed a wide and diverse personal library of other films he loved. Tall, shy, bearded but boyish, he was a quick study and managed to talk himself into a job at the commercial Thames and Clyde film-production company, where he learned basic filmmaking skills when not lugging heavy equipment. Inspired by the resolve and humor he saw every day in Glasgow despite the poverty and violence, Forsyth penned his first script, a black-comedy heist entitled That Sinking Feeling.