A Refractive Conclusion on Broken, Worn-Out Things

In 2007, Reubens began gingerly appearing in public as Pee-wee again. He released the third Pee-wee film, Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, for Netflix in 2016. A digitally de-aged Reubens stars alongside Joe Manganiello of Magic Mike fame, who plays his new friend Joe in a thinly veiled queer love plot that culminates in exchanging friendship bracelets in a romantically lit tree house. Reubens was also touring a live Pee-wee stage show in March 2020 when Covid-19 lockdowns began, the character’s last major appearance before Reubens’s death in 2023. Pee-wee came back, to be sure, but that night at the theater left residue we can only account for by bending a refractive media history through the playhouse, the porn house, and a broken talking doll. Pee-wee Herman was not just a character or show but a set of mediated practices both past and present that model two key tactics for queer media history: (1) being open to the what-ifs and the might-have-beens, and (2) centering repressed, personal, and speculative parts of a story that seem tangential but are not.

Being open to the what-ifs is crucial for contextualizing the playhouse as an imaginative, popular future-home prototype and as a queer precursor to the contemporary smart home. As Jed Samer argues, we can locate the queer potentialities in media history by looking back at how queer people used to look forward through media.1 The futures queer folks imagined in and through technologies are salient visions for our political strategies and world-building today. Pee-wee lived in a highly computational, networked home untethered from surveillance, data-extraction, or the horizon of efficiency. His example shows us some other pressure points for critique, different questions we might ask about what networked homes do and what it means to live inside them or refuse them altogether.

Centering the repressed and the personal is a strategy of thinking and writing against disciplinary constraints. Film historian Allyson Nadia Field writes, “speculation is often borne out of the necessity of the exhaustion—or unsuitability—of other approaches. If we are committed to asking certain questions of our past, of our archives, of our cultures, that cannot be addressed through existing disciplinary conventions, we must find ways to ask them differently.”2 We ought to research and theorize more like how Pee-wee played: in ways that are unwieldy, speculative, and undisciplined. Thinking refractively and carefully, rather than causally or linearly, from Pee-wee to Paul to a talking doll, and from Reubens’s movement between the playhouse, the porn house, and toy collectors’ shelves, entangles all these histories. Doing so is a way of attuning to the surprising intimacies drawn in and against mediation: on television, in the home, at the porn theater, in the news, and across these sites.

In the beginning, I thought this book would end with me repairing my broken Pee-wee Herman talking doll. I would use a stitch ripper to take apart his jacket and open the seam along the back of his shirt. I’d reach inside and pull out the tiny phonograph voice box made of the same peach-colored plastic as his arms and face, wield a tiny eyeglass screwdriver to remove the outer plate, and use some tweezers to bend the loose spring back into tension. I would write something clever about repair as a queer reading practice extended to caring relations with media technologies.

I have read some beautiful things about repair in queer studies and beyond—writing that has moved me and shaped my thinking. Queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work on reparative reading showed me a way to work with the affective dimensions of texts and my relationship to them, and freed me up from the comfortable strategies of Marxist and Foucauldian analysis I was attached to. Sedgwick sets reparative reading against paranoid reading, which is oriented to unveiling the real conditions behind the appearance of a text, object, or cultural artifact. Known for her cross-identification with gay men, Sedgwick affectionately called her home “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” according to a change-of-address poster in her archives at Duke University, so this could have worked on multiple levels.3 At times her essay on reparative reading feels written for understanding Pee-wee’s cultural legacies, like when she writes that reparative reading’s potential lies in showing “the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.”4

This is not that reparative ending. It turns out I like Pee-wee worn-out and broken, and I’m feeling weary of repair as a strategy of critique. For political theorist Patricia Stuelke, the turn toward repair in queer and feminist theory is a troubling step away from crucial structural concerns that is nonetheless enticing because it “feels good, feels like relief, freedom, and creative possibility.”5 I’m not willing to abandon repair, care, or desire as ways of understanding queer politics, but I do think that an overlooked aspect of repair is the time spent with broken things and the impossibility of moving on when the break is caused by a world keen on your annihilation.

Pee-wee’s Playhouse takes up what it feels like to sit with broken things in an episode titled “Conky’s Breakdown.”6 The secret-word generating robot is on the fritz, so Pee-wee takes him apart using his Conky Owner’s Manual, which he keeps in a stack of magazines beside his toilet. A jump cut finds Conky disassembled into hundreds of pieces, strewn all over the playhouse floor, while Pee-wee looks on, overwhelmed by the mess. Globey reads step-by-step instructions aloud from the manual while Pee-wee works on some parts with oversized pliers. Conky’s head, detached from his body, looks on, still alert and talking. Pee-wee asks, “Sure this doesn’t hurt Conky?” Conky replies, a bit more stuttery than usual, “N-No Pee-wee. The goo-goo-good thing about being a r-r-robot is th-th-that I don’t f-f-feel pain.” Eventually Pee-wee gives up and calls a professional Conky 2000 repairman (Jimmy Smits) to put his friend back together again. This scene of sitting with the mess and fear of pain that comes with being broken and overwhelmed trucks with aspects of repair’s chronology that are too often brushed over.

The work of sitting with the Pee-wee doll, the character, and the actor who played him led me to a different set of conclusions about repair and relations to broken things, one I hadn’t anticipated. Pee-wee played hard and he wasn’t treated well and it shows. Reubens’s organized public shaming and Pee-wee’s Playhouse’s subsequent disappearance from television were tragedies that continue to reverberate in the ways parents’-rights movements cut trans and queer kids off from their cultures: books, curriculum, and affirming adults. These scars and residues matter, and being with them is part of the work of looking back at Pee-wee. Though I know how to fix my doll now, I’m leaving it broken on the shelf in my office, looking down on the set of chairs I sit in when I meet with students to talk about their work.

A queer take on what the smart home was and might have been via Pee-Wee’s Playhouse is minor, speculative, yes. But it’s not inconsequential, and neither is Reubens’s public shaming to the ways we understand the reverberations of this media scene. History doesn’t always happen in ways that are logical, and the stories we are told about the past aren’t always reliable. As queer people, we know in our guts that there are pathways out of the toxic impasse of digital cultures today. We find them by weaving our way through other versions of the story.