One of the most surprising things in the new HBO Documentary Pee-wee as Himself is how playfully combative Paul Reubens is with Director Matt Wolf in the film’s interview segments. The documentary covers Paul Reubens’ life and career, as well as all its successes and pitfalls. The parts in which Reubens appears were recorded before his death in 2023. It’s part of the film about Reubens’ leeriness about being interviewed and how much he wants to share vs him just doing this himself.
In these moments, you can see what he pulled from his own personality in the characters he portrayed, especially his most famous creation, Pee-wee Herman. I think what I took from this film is his privacy was the most important thing to him and how that affects the way in which how public he was with his sexuality and also his relationship with his creativity.
There are times in the film when you can see or hear him reconciling the lack of acknowledgment of Paul Reubens vs. Pee-wee with his desire to be able to walk down the street in peace. That might be what resonated with me most as I value privacy over many things, and at times, I feel like it’s cost me opportunities because I just don’t want fame. Honestly, I think this part of his personality might be the most relatable way into his story.
Wolf does an amazing job here with taking all the things Reubens saved of his life along with clips of the many things that inspired him and all the appearances on television with the interview footage that made it feel very much like a biography you’d read versus the usual feeling of a passive documentary just feeding you a history. The back-and-forth between Wolf and Reubens is quite entertaining, but it did leave me wondering if Reubens was right.
With how documentaries are changing and how celebrities choose what they share and what to hide to make them look great, it’s also possible to look at these films like autobiographies in the book world. Wolf didn’t know Reubens was sick; of course, we didn’t either. Still, with that knowledge, when watching this, you can understand Reubens’ reasoning along with just how talented and skilled he is that he could’ve done it himself but acquiesced to everyone’s thought on how he would have the perspective to share his life with the world.
Most will watch this documentary to see everything about Pee-wee and his arrest in the adult theater, and while that’s, of course, part of the story, seeing how shows like Howdy Doody and The Mickey Mouse Club show informed his imagination and how Reubens was just a natural at performing and improve comedy—hearing how his ambitions, perfectionism, and possessiveness led to him losing some close relationships.
The story of how Pee-wee came to be and how it transitioned to becoming a kid show is very engrossing. I loved that show as a kid, and it’s a show that is still unique, with nothing looking like it. While you can see its influence on later things like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network shows yet, in live action, it’s like a small pocket universe in reality that would come on Saturdays on CBS, and then for reasons that never ever made sense to me, it was gone. No reruns or nothing.
Even as a child, the idea that he got canceled, and yes, let’s be honest, Reubens was canceled before we had a term for it for doing things on his own time in a place where adults can be, was baffling. It felt like they were waiting for something to get rid of him. Like it was just too weird in a way the mainstream culture didn’t like, and it bothered them, so they destroyed it.
Being that Wolf didn’t know Reubens was sick when they were making the film, it gives the film’s two parts a sadness to them and the type of regret you can feel when watching. As Reubens got sicker, it seemed he just stopped working with Wolf on the film, and that is something that, in a way, bookends the film and adds to that sadness.
As I end this, the film does deal with Reubens’ sexuality and his going in and out of the closet over the years. He gets to talk about his struggles with his sexuality at times and accept not only himself but how that conflicts with his alter ego. It also feels like he used that alter ego as a way to poke at the world’s views but his own as well. It’s something that makes me want to watch this a few more times as I feel there is a lot more there to get from how he talks about things and how his public trials affected his thoughts about his openness about himself. I didn’t know there was a later case that charged him with something way worse, and that seemed to really dismay him and pushed him to make this film so that people could understand him and his character rather than whatever ideas were thrown around over the years.
Also, this is another film that shows HBO is still great at producing documentaries. Pee-wee as Himself is a fantastic portrait of an interesting artist that should open his mind to us and show us he’s more than just his incredible creation.
Score: A
