From: ubi@updike.sri.com (Ron Ueberschaer)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies,alt.usage.english
Subject: Hilarious analysis of WAYNE'S WORLD (long)
Summary: A most excellent textual analysis
Keywords: hubris hermeneutic semiotic exegesis not
Date: 12 Apr 92 20:51:13 GMT
Followup-To: rec.arts.movies
Distribution: na

This is one of the best movie analyses I have read in a long time.
It was even worth taking the time to type it in.  Enjoy!


------------------------------------------------------------------------

		AN EXEGESIS OF TEXTUAL NUANCE (NOT!)

		by Lee Gomes, Staff Writer
		   San Jose Mercury News
		   (Arts & Books Section, p.3, April 5, 1992)
		   Reprinted with permission.


Something most perplexing occurred at a screening some weeks ago of the
popular film WAYNE'S WORLD: The audience was laughing at what it saw.
Not occasionally or knowingly, mind you, but vigorously and with
apparent abandon.

That seemed odd, for while WAYNE'S WORLD no doubt contains the
occasional "joke," it is obvious to me, for reasons that will shortly
be made clear, that it is a fundamentally serious exploration of a
number of important, even grave, literary topics.

I even undertook a second viewing, but still, there was the same
response--a large audience convulsed in gales of laughter.

Clearly, then, this is a problem that will not go away--audiences seem
profoundly mistaken about the manifest intent of an important popular
film.  Hence, this essay, an attempt to take WAYNE'S WORLD seriously,
and elevate its discussion to the level it deserves.

I must admit that my own heightened appreciation would never have been
possible had I not recently attended the annual meeting of the Modern
Language Association, the professional society of the nation's teachers
and critics of literature.  These academics have forged many powerful
critical weapons, the full force of which they regularly bring to bear
against the "non-criticism," i.e. "literature," that is their passion.
It is only by their instruction and example that I was able to
undertake the present explication.

The notion that the "text" of WAYNE'S WORLD (hereinafter WW) can
support this sort of exegesis is quite easy to demonstrate; we need
only look at one of the opening scenes.

On their way to a popular evening gathering spot, the two central
characters, Wayne and Garth, along with three acquaintances, drive
along playing a rock 'n' roll song entitled "Bohemian Rhapsody" on
their automobile's cassette deck, and then collectively gesture
synchronously with the music's rhythms and syncopations.

Rather than being a mere adolescent romp, the scene makes an important
literary point, i.e., that art creates a community of like-thinking
responders, and that when confronted with text *qua* song, (or song
*qua* text?), a genuinely shared, and in fact quite potent, communal
response can ensue.

Thus does it reject the argument that no such points of communality are
ever possible, and that individuals are forever isolated in their own
private aesthetic reactions.

An additional clue to the film maker's intent is provided by the title
of the song being played, an apposite selection from the popular music
canon.  Its *collective* adjective is a trenchant argument for the
possibility of *shared* artistic bliss; otherwise, it surely would have
been entitled, say, "The Rhapsody of a Solitary Bohemian."

Thus demonstrating variegated levels of meanings, even in WW's opening
moments, we can go on to explore two of the film's many other
themes--its relations with textual tradition, and its implied textual
aesthetics.  As space does not permit a full airing of each, these
notes are in the spirit of an *aperc,u*.


MYTHIC RESONANCE

WW follows the familiar pattern of the hero's quest.  Confronted with a
challenge, the Wayne-hero is armed with a phallic totem (a Fender
guitar), seeks wisdom from a mentor (Alice Cooper), is deserted by his
confederates for an act of hubris, and then relying only on inner
character--but ultimately aided by an outside benefactor (Mr.
Big)--rises from his nadir, confronts his *doppelgaenger*-nemesis and
achieves his triumph.

In this quest, the Wayne-hero has a "sidekick," Garth, and the pair
collectively expresses the familiar dualities of action and
contemplation.  While the Western tradition is replete with such
pairings--Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Hamlet and Horatio--Wayne and Garth are
unusual in the modernistic way they simultaneously embody and reflect
on their positions in the dialectic.

Thus, when Wayne is contemplating an unrealistic course of action,
Garth turns to him and counsels, "Wayne, live in the now."  Similarly,
Wayne expresses an appreciation for one of Garth's numerous intuitive
comments by telling him, (in the rhetoric of criticism!) "Garth, that
was a haiku."

There are occasions, though, when WW attempts to reinvigorate the
tradition.  In one scene, Garth is sitting alone in a doughnut shop,
and using toothpicks, fashions the confections on his plate into a
doughnut-monster that is attacked and eviscerated by a
doughnut-warrior.

The scene is astonishing, for by recasting the doughnut-eater as
doughnut-story-generator, it not only neatly replicates the creative
process, but also shows how clearly the locus of meaning exists
*outside* of language.  The hermeneutic circle, implies WW, is a wide
one indeed; that which is "signified" can not only be independent of
text, but can in fact exist in a raspberry cruller.

But most of the film is, quite deliberately, bounded by a received
tradition.  Thus, Wayne is vigorously heterosexual, and it is in his
libidinous pursuits that the familiar mechanics of the courtly love
convention are played out.

Garth, conversely, is far more meek in *his* pursuit of the idealized
woman; her very presence is the occasion for either his faining or
withdrawal.  It should come as no surprise that Garth also
acknowledges, albeit tentatively and timidly--and only to immediately
reject it--his own inchoate homoerotic yearnings, turning to Wayne
while the two are alone and asking, "Wayne, did you ever find Bugs
Bunny attractive when he dressed up as a lady bunny?"

Many writers will find WW's handling of the issues of gender and
sexuality to be retrograde, even politically incorrect.  Having said
that, the extent to which WW is patriarchal, phallocentric, or
heterosexist should best be left to others.


THE PRISM OF LANGUAGE

Wayne and Garth are emblematic of the contemporary preoccupation with
language as reality's mediator.  What else are we to make of the almost
Joycean linguistic invention that permeates the film?

The Idealized Female, for example, is given many names:  "Robo-babe,"
"Mega-babe," "Babe-ia Majora," "Babe-raham Lincoln," or, in the
converse, "Psycho Hose Beast."  The intertextuality of these codes
suggests not only a fascination with language, but also, on Wayne and
Garth's part, a clear recognition of the endlessly descriptive, if
ultimately unknowable, nature of text.

We even are allowed to see the very process of language acquisition
itself, in a joyous scene in which Wayne, in making his first flights
into Cantonese, begins by saying "You are pretty," but ends with the
rich utterance of, "The irony is that I feel partly responsible for her
self-nullifying behavior."

(In a later scene, however, when Chinese food is being ordered, Wayne
falters in his newly acquired second tongue by ordering the
non-existent dish of "sum yun gai," no doubt mistaking it for other
fare, perhaps "moo goo gai pan.")

In making literary invention and language acquisition metaphoric for
the protagonist's less significant struggles, WW confidently places
itself in the tradition of genre self-awareness that is one of the most
notable hallmarks of arts and letters in the 20th century.

Indeed, WW's very premise--a film about two auteurs who create a cable
television show whose universe is composed largely of television shows
and films--is a neat encapsulation of the wheels-within-wheels
stratagems that so enrich contemporary culture.

Further, that the "reader" play a dominant role of "re-creating" the
WW "text" is explicitly acknowledged by Wayne and Garth themselves, in
the way the pair regularly address the viewer.  So forceful is their
rejection of the traditional text-reader dichotomy that we can imagine
them shouting "Death to the writer" as easily as they exchange their
"Nots" and "No Ways."


CONCLUSION:

I hope that these notes toward a longer study of WAYNE'S WORLD show the
peculiar pleasures that await those who resist their initial reaction
to text in any form--including the popular cinema--and instead, by
rigorous analysis, strive to unearth what is really *there*.  At the
risk of sounding pedantic, any other approach runs the risk of
projecting one's own sterile preoccupations onto the text at hand.

And that, as we have seen, will invariably result in missing the point
entirely.

------ (Reprinted with permission of the San Jose Mercury News.) -------


-- 
                    _    _   _ _  
Ron Ueberschaer    (_`  |_)   |           "For every complex problem, there is a
ubi@unix.sri.com   ._)  | \  _|_      solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."
415 859 4399       International                                  --H.L. Mencken
Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies