Pee Wee's Panopticon

Michel Foucault, in his work “Discipline and Punish,” speaks of the Big-Brotherish, invisible surveillance looming over our heads in order to maintain power over us. If we think we are being watched, even if we aren’t sure if we actually are or not, we are going to act differently than we would in privacy. In this way, the people watching us, what Foucault likes to call “the discipline,” have power over our actions, and we become objects that can be manipulated and controlled by the threat of being punished if we stray too far off of the grid by defying social norms. Disciplinary power, according to Foucault, “is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility.” (Rabinow, 199). The media often times acts as a panopticon in our society, caging fallen celebrities in a world of paranoia of being watched everywhere they go.

When the media spots an effeminate, grown man who is not the typical, masculine hero hanging around children, there is always an underlying suspicion of the man being a pervert, since he does not fit into the masculine norm. He is seen as the “Other,” he doesn't fit into our society’s grid, he doesn't adhere to our gender norms. So eventually, the media blows a rumor or a simple mistake on the part of the “Other” out of proportion, and forces him off of the grid completely, either by simply having his TV show pulled off of the air or, at the extreme, by having him institutionalized. Pee Wee Herman, aka Paul Reubens, and Michael Jackson are two effeminate men who have been a victim of being forced into a media panopticon.

Michael Jackson loved children and hung around them all of the time. Since Michael was perceived as a weird dude and definitely didn’t fit the stereotypical male image, or any stereotype for that matter, the media was itching to find a way to slap some kind of label on him. The second someone accused him of child sexual abuse, the media jumped on dubbing him, “pervert.” Whether he actually had relations with any children that could be deemed inappropriate may never be determined, because he was never found guilty and never went to jail, but the media went ahead and institutionalized him in a different way. Michael had to retreat to his ranch, constantly hiding from the media’s surveillance over him, and felt he needed to protect his children from the vicious media by having them wear masks wherever they went. For many years, he was forced off of the grid and had been locked away in an invisible panopticon, powered by media surveillance, and only just recently had he begun to emerge out of hiding for a comeback, when he succumbed to a heart attack at the age of 50.

Pee Wee was, hands down, the queerest children’s show host of the 80’s. Pee Wee’s Playhouse was a race queer, class queer, life-affirming space of play where even the objects around the house got the opportunity to speak their mind. However, Pee Wee and his space of play were a little too queer and outside of the norm for those in power (again, the media). As soon as Pee Wee Herman made one move deemed “wrong,” both the media and the law jumped all over it, pulling his syndicated show off of the air for good, and arresting him. He was yanked clean off of the grid, and institutionalized immediately. His “wrong” move: masturbating in an ADULT theater. Like that’s never happened before! There are designated employees at these places whose whole job is mopping the floors because so many people masturbate in there. So, Paul Reubens got busted for being an adult in an adult place doing adult things, and that didn’t jive with his children’s show persona. He was out of character, deviating from the role automatically ascribed to him as a children’s show host, and so he had to be disciplined and punished for it. By the time this media story hit my 10 year old ears in 1991, my favorite children’s show host Pee Wee Herman was apparently a perverted old man who jerked off in public theaters (a lot of us missed the part about it being an ADULT theater because our parents didn’t want to have to explain what an adult theater was, so all we heard was “theater”). For years, like Michael Jackson, Paul Reubens went on a hiatus, being censored inside of the invisible panopticon the media (and in his case, the law) held him captive in. Eventually, Paul Reubens began to slowly reemerge, taking on small television and movie roles. But it was as if the invisible voice of the looming panopticon he was trying to escape from suddenly shouted in a booming voice, “Not so fast, Pee Wee. We are still watching you, and if you make one false move, one misstep, you WILL be punished.”


In 2001, Paul Reubens was busted for having child pornography after his house was searched by detectives looking into a complaint made about him and a friend by a teenager. Now, when I hear “child pornography,” I think of XXX-rated, down and dirty, completely nude images of small children to be drooled over by old pedophiles. However, apparently Paul Reubens “child pornography” collection consisted mostly of gay vintage erotica – especially “pre-XXX physique magazines” from the post-war decades (Goldstein 1). Paul Reubens, in an interview with Stone Phillips for Dateline NBC, explains what police are considering as pornography in his case: “One photograph for example has a young man with his hand on his thigh. It is close to his genitals, but not even that close. That's what they're calling somebody getting ready to perform a sex act” (Phillips 1). And when Stone Phillips asks Reubens point blank asks whether his photographs contained young boys “masturbating” and sexually “performing,” Reubens replies, “No. Absolutely not. One hundred percent not” (Phillips 1). Although the child pornography charges against Reubens were dropped, the media embraced this opportunity to exert its power over him once again, to put him back into his place, to neatly file him in the “pervert” section of society.

Queer archivists who have in their possession vintage homosexual erotica from the 1950s and 1960s are now in fear of being charged with having child pornography, since minors were allowed to model for erotic magazines back then. Since then, the laws have changed to where any material containing images of minors modeling in a provocative way, even if they are fully clothed, is considered child pornography (Goldstein 1). This incident has created a larger-scale panopticon affecting anyone who may be holding these vintage materials. Now, these materials have to be hidden, despite the fact that the whole point of collecting this memorabilia is to be able to proudly show the history of homosexuality in the last century and how far we’ve (supposedly) come. This is an example of how the harassment of one individual, such as Paul Reubens, can affect people on a larger scale, such as with the holders of these forbidden artifacts of queer history, and the rest of the queer community that doesn’t get to view these artifacts because the owners are too afraid to come out with them.

Forces of power such as the media and the law acting as the invisible overseers and discipliners can be a danger to people’s creativity, because anyone who steps outside of the box and acts in a way that draws attention to themselves as a deviation from the social norm is threatened with punishment if they make one wrong move. They are vulnerable and out in the open, being watched (or not being watched, but they wouldn’t know the difference because they THINK they are being watched). If people conform to society’s cookie-cutter grid structure, they can hide themselves better and draw less attention to themselves. They could go to an adult theater and get caught jerking off, and their whole life wouldn’t fall apart as the result of media exploitation. But then these people, instead of being creative and exploring, would be stuck replicating common sense, because it is safer than being locked up in a panopticon. Pee Wee and Michael Jackson, in the end, chose creativity over conformity. Michael was in the middle of a comeback tour when he passed away, and Pee Wee is coming back with “The Pee Wee Herman Show” in January. These two have emerged from the panopticon scarred, but determined to keep up their creative work, which in effect renders the panopticon powerless over them.


Works Cited

Goldstein, Richard. Persecuting Pee Wee: A Child-Porn Case That Threatens Us All. The Village Voice, 14 Jan. 2003. Web. 6 Dec. 2009. http://www.villagevoice.com/2003-01-14/news/persecuting-pee-wee/1

Phillips, Stone. Pee Wee Herman Creator Speaks Out. Dateline NBC. 5 Apr. 2004. Web. 6 Dec. 2009. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4653913/
Rabinow, Paul, ed. The Foucalt Reader. New York: Penguin Books, 1984. Print.

Cruisin' for a Bruisin'

I was at a Jesus Lizard show the other day and when a small mosh pit formed, I immediately had the urge to jump in it. Later, I realized that this wasn’t just because I enjoy shoving sweaty people around, but because I was secretly hoping that they would send me home with a souvenir – a big ass bulls-eye bruise, somewhere on my body. I love it when I get bruises and cuts, and will spend a significant amount of time just staring at them in fascination. Though I wasn’t successful at getting anyone to bruise me (I even tried to situate my arm somewhat close to the lead singer’s boot as he was crowd-surfing in hopes that he would give it a little kick), this did get me thinking: why am I so mesmerized by injury?

My first instinct is to label myself as a masochist, and to believe that something must be wrong with me for thinking this way, which is likely the result of society’s Freudian way of diagnosing and treating any behavior that might be considered deviant and not the societal norm as a "psychological illness." When I stare at my bruises and then hope to get more instead of covering them up, letting them heal, and trying to prevent getting new ones, many people probably see this as strange, perverse behavior that is the result of some underlying psychological issue. I automatically beat up on myself (no pun intended) for wanting to inflict “harm” on myself.

Is this really “harmful” though, or is it actually to my advantage to pause for a second, stare at an injury, and realize that I am, in fact, situated inside of a human body? When going through one of my typical, hectic days, I am rarely aware of my body at all. I put one foot in front of the other, but never stop to think about how that motion occurs until I twist my ankle on the sidewalk. After twisting my ankle, I am very aware that I inhabit my body because when I try to walk, it hurts. After the ankle heals, I slowly become unaware again of how my body enables me to walk from one place to another; I just move on instinct and assume that I will get from point A to point B with no problems. Maybe my fascination with bruises is healthy because it brings me back to awareness of my body, and helps me become mindful of my humanness. Maybe I am a little masochistic, but is there anything wrong with that? And who are the dictators of what is “wrong” anyway, psychiatrists who need to diagnose people in order to make a living? People who are replicating the ideas handed down to them by their Freudian psychiatrists and the media?

I know I’m not alone in the obsession with injury to one’s body. Just look at some of the most popular shows on primetime television right now, such as CSI and Grey’s Anatomy. Both are focused in on the human body, and more specifically, injury to it. So why are these shows so popular? Because people are fascinated by bodily injury. The images of the injuries in this show are getting gorier and gorier, and America’s television viewers are eating it right up. Apparently watching people’s bodies become injured or even mutilated is exciting for viewers. So if I’m masochistic because I adoringly gaze at my bruises, then American television viewers are becoming more and more sadistic. Is this considered sick, “wrong”, or “harmful” by society? Nope, just profitable.

A Slave to the Rhythm: A Psychoanalysis

Grace Jones’ affective video (produced by Trevor Horn) “A Slave to the Rhythm” puts goose-bumps on my arms every time I watch it. Meaningful, symbolic images flash on the screen constantly in a distorted manner, resembling a hallucination, or a dream-like state. As someone who is hoping to psychoanalyze this video, I don’t even know where to begin...but common sense tells me I should start with common sense.

If the average consumer were to be exposed to this video, they would probably be thinking something along the lines of, “That woman is weird,” “That shit is scary,” or “What a freak; shut that thing off!” Maybe the more open-minded interpretive community would think, “Wow, this video is intense. She is trying to portray some kind of deep, artistic message. This video is awesome” (That was actually my first common sense reaction to her video). Either way, we all, as consumers of culture, see her video and our common sense has us pinpoint what her and her video ARE, not what kind of emotion her video invokes and what it DOES to us. For me, Grace Jones’ video immediately brings up emotion I can’t put a finger on. The multitude of images flashing in her video puts me in a trance, a dream-like state. This is what her video DOES to me every time I watch it.

Sigmund Freud and other psychoanalysts focus on dream-states because our unconscious desires (the id), repressed by our ego, appear in our dreams as distorted images. If I were to draw a parallel to Grace Jones’ video, I would say that her images represent our society’s dream-state, with the bizarre, twisted images symbolizing our unconscious desires. We have repressed images of what popular media has shown us about slavery and about race, and they come back up in a distorted way in this video. In fact, the most obvious binary at play in this video is that of black versus white. The video also includes sexual fetishism and symbolism, as well as distorted movements - all characteristic of the dream-state.

One snippet in the video that demonstrates this well is around the 1 minute, 25 second mark. A Black woman dressed in traditional tribal garb (popular media’s most common portrayal of Black Africans, and of slaves before they were forced into slavery) is drumming on a white woman’s nude derriere. This immediately brings up fetishism, since a woman’s ass is seen by many as a separate, sexual object. Seeing it smacked, or drummed in this case, is a turn-on for some. The white woman’s behind could also symbolize a drum, since it is being tapped on as such, and therefore could also be the symbol of a hollow object. Freudian thinkers see hollow objects in dreams as symbolizing a woman's genitals. This sexual fetishism and symbolism would make more sense to the mainstream if it was a white man drumming on her, but Grace Jones and Trevor Horn, the producer, decided to fuck with the mainstream and have the exact opposite, a Black tribal woman (possibly representing a slave based on the song title), drumming on her instead. The Black woman is now dominant over the submissive white woman, which is not at all what we see in the popular media’s portrayal of the relationship between Black women and white women. The white woman is also wearing long, pink gloves, which make me think of what an upper-class white woman of the eighties would wear. So the practically nude tribal Black woman is drumming on an upper class white woman who is nude from the bottom down, but is decked out in fashionable wear from the top up. This snippet appears for all of three seconds, yet it has so much complexity.

This snippet would never see the light of day in popular culture, because our egos would censor it. It doesn’t make any sense, and it seems vulgar and defies what we’ve been taught about the Black/white and upper-class/lower class binaries. But leave it to Grace Jones and Trevor Horn to bring the unconscious into the conscious, via a twisted, dream-like video. This may be the reason this whole video is such an affective one for its viewers. It triggers what may be lying dormant in our unconscious, and stirs it to life. It does what Grace Jones probably meant for it to do: it gets us thinking.