“Control Freak”
Hunter Hargraves (CSU, Fullerton)
Almost eight minutes into the first episode of the HBO docuseries Pee-wee as Himself (2025), Matt Wolf’s study of the comedian Paul Reubens, the reclusive comic cannot help but establish himself as a problematic subject. Reflecting on his childhood desire for fame and attention, he states authoritatively (yet with a smile) that “if you don’t agree with me, you’re wrong,” followed by a quick disavowal. He then walks back his retraction somewhat, saying that he’s “kidding…Or am I? I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m kidding.” With a sly grin on his face not unlike that of Alfalfa, the Little Rascals character and comedic inspiration for a young Reubens, he almost winks at the camera. “I know,” he says, “but you don’t!” Reubens exerts a lot of energy to spark this kernel of viewer distrust, saying “I know” with the same confidence and exuberance deployed in the childish retort “I know you are, but what am I?” said by his alter ego Pee-wee Herman. The paranoid viewer might see this as Reubens attempting to undercut Wolf’s directorial vision, which ultimately uses Reubens’ desire for control over his own image as a framing device, one that consistently destabilizes the documentary’s imperative to educate the audience about and contextualize Reubens’ life and career. Close to death—Reubens passed from respiratory failure caused by lung cancer in July 2023, during the documentary’s production—Reubens asserts control through the juvenile performance of relinquishing control.
In his early films, Matt Wolf utilized experimental techniques and fictitious characters to triangulate a relationship with real subjects, who were often mysterious gay men. At the core of Wolf’s filmmaking practice is a commentary on fandom, on the emotional attachments one has to art: not just audiovisual art or music, but also the art of everyday performance (a key strategy of survival for many a mysterious gay man throughout history). In Smalltown Boys (2003), archival footage of David Wojnarowicz is set against the fictional character of Sarah Rosenburg, a teenage lesbian trying to save the iconic single-season drama My So-Called Life (ABC, 1994) from cancellation and – it is inferred via narrative voiceover – the queer artist’s daughter via sperm donation. In I Feel Love (2004), reenactments of human interest talk shows and daytime soap operas depict Joel Manero, who allegedly survived meeting serial killer Andrew Cunanan the year that he shot and killed designer Gianni Versace. Like Rosenburg, Manero is not real: he emerges from a constructed TV archive to help us better understand Cunanan, whose obsessive desire for fame perhaps ultimately led to his death by suicide. These earlier films cannot be considered documentaries because of these formal inventions, even though the fake archives end up animating the real archival footage of Wojnarowicz and Cunanan, allowing viewers to reassess their looped mediations. Yet these films are not not documentaries either, insofar as they use the aesthetic and narrative language of fandom to refract back real people and the archives of celebrity they inhabit.
Wolf’s earlier films attempted to, in his own words,”reconcile our fandom, debts, and inheritances from our cultural predecessors,” yet in Pee-wee as Himself, Wolf cannot escape his own fannish investments in Reubens, whose seminal surreal Saturday morning fantasy Pee-wee’s Playhouse (CBS, 1985-1991) captivated kids like Wolf and myself during the late 1980s. Wolf does not need fake characters to approximate his relationship to Reubens, however, because of Reubens’ performative outbursts – absent Pee-wee’s nasal twang or throaty laugh – through FaceTime videos with Wolf that are meant narratively to establish trust between documentarian and subject and between documentary and audience. Reubens adopts a playfully cagey contentiousness throughout much of the forty hours of interviews with Wolf that over time—and especially in the second episode—crystallizes into an abrasive tension with the director around creative control of the docuseries and over the narrative stakes of Reubens’ self-redemption. (Reubens was charged with possession of child pornography in 2002, and while the charges were later dropped, he felt that the media had labeled him a “pedophile,” a label he adamantly refuses in an audio note recorded the day before his death.) His attempts to control the filmmaking process also constitute a form of epistemological control, as he hid his cancer diagnosis from Wolf and the producers. Reubens does not want to be an unreliable narrator, his participation in the docuseries reveals, but rather Wolf interpellates him as such.
This is particularly salient with respect to Reubens’ elusiveness regarding his sexuality. Throughout the docuseries, segments in which Reubens talks about his sexuality are paired with self-reflexive segments about the making of the docuseries or of the relationship between Reubens and Wolf. After Reubens explains that he could “pass” as straight in late 1970s Hollywood (and explaining to the “kids” what passing means), Reubens takes it all back, blaming Wolf’s “unfair work conditions” for coercing a fake coming out on camera. “You really can’t depend on anything I’m saying,” he explains, because he’s just sleep deprived and hungry. The camera lingers on Reubens’ scrunched up face, waiting for him to crack and break the fourth wall. Later, a segment about the professional necessity of being closeted while making Pee-wee’s Playhouse leads to Reubens berating Wolf for optimistically reading trust into their relationship, connecting the desire to “know” Reubens as a gay man to the larger problem of Reubens’ performance as a character or “as himself.” In talking about his 1991 arrest for indecent exposure, Reubens notes how “I lost control of my anonymity, and it was devastating,” and the inability to fully reestablish control over that anonymity becomes sublimated into the docuseries’ discursive slipperiness surrounding the seriousness of its subject. For gay men who have had to know themselves through a performance, even after stepping out of the closet, such a fundamentally tenuous relationship to “truth” may feel authentic and natural. Winking and smiling to the camera, constructing mystique to control one’s self-image: these are, Wolf says, among “the fandoms, debt, and inheritances” to be gleaned from our gay predecessors like Reubens.
“Telling Secrets”
Cait McKinney (Simon Fraser University)
Matt Wolf’s film Pee-wee as Himself is a documentary about Paul Reubens (1952-2023), best known for the Pee-wee Herman character he created and played across stage shows, film, and television in the 1980s and beyond. Reubens was a fancy hoarder, by which I mean he was the kind of person who keeps and collects absolutely everything but has money and taste, so the practice seems productive. As a result, Wolf had access to a bountiful archive of photographs, home videos, and artefacts, alongside the notoriously private Reubens himself. This peek into Reubens’ archives is part of what makes the film so compelling for Pee-wee fans. But the crux of the documentary is not Reubens’ historical archive but rather how his onscreen relationship with Wolf plays out in the present. Wolf recently signed a deal with Bloomsbury for a book called Trust Me, which will explore their difficult relationship in more detail, building on the gorgeous essay he wrote for Vulture right after the film’s release. Their dynamic stands in for the film’s broader exploration of the shape a life takes when it is structured by secrets and a subject’s desire to control if and how these secrets are disclosed.
The uneasy connection between Wolf and Reubens is revealed through the film’s inclusion of banter between them as the director interviews the actor from behind a camera rigged with Errol Morris’ Interrotron device, which allows a subject to make eye contact with their interviewer in the camera lens. This banter is the kind of back-and-forth that might be edited out of a more conventional documentary. In these exchanges, Reubens often plays the incorrigible child, resisting Wolf’s framing or acting as if Wolf is pressuring him to participate in the film. Reubens clearly wants to tell us his story (and his secrets) before he dies, but he needs Wolf to be the extractive director “forcing” the story out of him.
In 2024, I published a book about Pee-wee Herman focused on what Pee-wee’s Playhouse, the Pee-wee character, and the actor Paul Reubens meant to queer kids and adults in the homophobic and AIDS-phobic 1980s and early 1990s. While I was working on the book, people would often ask me if Reubens ever came out. I find this question deeply boring: of course Reubens was gay, and of course all of us gays knew he was gay, and of course Reubens knew that we knew this. It was obvious, and indeed, gay inside jokes constituted much of Pee-wee Herman’s appeal for queer viewers. The real secret Reubens tells in this documentary is not about his sexuality, though for him, saying he was gay on camera for the first time must have felt like the big confession. Rather, I think the key revelation is the extent to which shame and grief became the shape of his life, buried under his alter ego Pee-wee’s wild ways of being.
One of the things that I imagine is most surprising for casual viewers of Pee-wee as Himself scrolling HBO Max is that this film about a comedian and children’s entertainer is so sad. There’s a stark contrast between the delightful playhouse world Reubens as Pee-wee built for us on stage, television, and movie screens, and the shame of his bogus, homophobic, and highly scandalized arrests for indecent exposure in a porn theatre in 1991 and possession of obscene material depicting children in 2002. The stories we tell about Reubens and Pee-wee ought to be sad, because the world did not treat him very well, and he retreated from that world in response.
In its focus on what the shame and stigma of the 1980s and 1990s did to Reubens, Pee-wee as Himself behooves us to understand the film within the genre of AIDS cinema. As I argue in my book, the “pedophile” label that was applied to gay men in the late twentieth century is unthinkable except through the cultural construction of their deviance in relation to HIV/AIDS. But more than this, HIV/AIDS pervades the film in the ways it approaches love, death, and dying. We learn that Reubens was out and in love with his boyfriend Guy while a college student at Cal Arts in the 1970s. They broke up, and Reubens made a choice to keep his sexuality secret for the sake of his career in the early 1980s. Reubens tells Wolf a story about flying to New York – a city ravaged by the virus – around the same time to be with Guy as he died from AIDS. Reubens would return there a few years later to film the first season of Pee-wee’s Playhouse in a SoHo loft.
At the end of the film, Reubens is dying from cancer. He made an audio recording for Wolf the day before he died, in which he describes, with abiding sadness, the ways the shame from his arrests shaped him. We learn that, though Reubens “kept his illness a secret from almost everyone” (including Wolf), he had a partner who loved him at the end of his life, who, along with his friends, helped to care for him while he was dying. These are convivial practices of grieving a good life and providing care that mean something specific for queer people who have lived in proximity to HIV/AIDS, an illness structured then and now by the kind of stigma that makes secrets feel like the easiest way forward. Reubens gave Wolf these secrets to give to us—there isn’t anything good or productive for us to do with them because the film is not redemptive. Rather, it is a film that sits with grief and what has been lost and broken, and that is perhaps what makes it a much more interesting take on the structure of secrets than a story about “coming out” would be.
DOCALOGUE 