The Utopian Aspirations of Wayne’s World
Wayne’s World is a place in which I’d like to live. The urban society it depicts is vibrant, egalitarian, community-minded and familiar. Small businesses thrive. There’s a lively nightlife, complete with a bustling local music scene and charismatic but unglamorous late night donut shops. Large cities were not yet being manufactured to keep the poor and working class at a distance from the joys they offer.
In Wayne’s World, people are almost totally honest and morally upstanding and it’s a place of opportunity for people from all walks of life. A crowd applauds when a bullying ogre is electro-shocked. Public access television functions adequately, is scouted by ambitious broadcasters and is popular with the local citizens. Policemen can take a joke. A video arcade can become a chain business with numerous franchise opportunities and its owner can become a self-made millionaire. There is great affection for both big cities AND their suburbs, which seem to exist in harmony with each other.
A world in which you can call a cop a pig and he doesn’t shoot you and claim later in court you went for his taser.
In a movie about Rock & Roll with wall to wall jams on the soundtrack, there’s barely any consumption of alcohol and no drug use to taint matters. In Wayne’s World, we see championed a pure, uncorrupted form of rock, emphasizing the authenticity and power of the music, rather than the shallow aspirations to celebrity and all the perks that go with that culture. The movie rocks — a deep love for music and pop culture as a whole informs not only the way the characters relate to the world and each other, but the way the movie frames and interprets them.
The numerous contrasts on display help illustrate this respect: there is a kind of intergenerational democracy between different age groups. Younger people are familiar and interact pleasantly with older people. Wayne’s World is both of its time and out of its time. It’s firmly rooted in the American culture of the 90's but its protagonists and their peers model their aesthetic on 80’s hair bands infused with 90’s grunge sensibility and yet are hung up on late 60’s and 70’s classic rock. A blonde-maned guitar store sales clerk wears a collared shirt tucked into his ripped jeans when on the job.
And on and on. Contrast upon beautiful contrast. Actual rock stars are ingratiating fountains of civic knowledge and philosophical speculation. A clean cut yuppie TV producer lives on a diet of Cantonese take-out and Shakeys Pizza eaten in bed. The heroes attend a “heavy metal” rock club and see a band covering a Jimi Hendrix song with a southeast Asian-born frontwoman who cites American pop culture as a factor in her learning of English. She’s another of the movie’s rarefied brand of culture nut — proactive, motivated, not hiding but living in the real world.
A Wayne’s World heroine was something I hadn’t seen in movies — proactive, motivated, hip and tough.
American popular culture is referenced repeatedly and lovingly and references are fleshed out so as to be (mostly) pertinent to the story (as with Mel Brooks or Edgar Wright) rather than merely mentioned or recreated to flatter the hip status of the savvy director or the shallow pop culture IQ of the audience (as with Gaspar Noe, Judd Apatow, and Quentin Tarantino). This is not a movie that just exists entirely inside of other movies.
Space in Wayne’s World belongs solely to the characters. When it’s violated, they feel the effects.
Spaces are beautifully prioritized and utilized in this movie. The best gags play with the unreality of movie space and non-linear time. Temporal and spatial shifts remind us this is sadly, not a real place. The characters mostly steer clear of ubiquitous, prefabricated corporate spaces and create their own amusements wherever they go. This appropriation of neutral space for amusement by the heroes (street hockey or “keep looking up!” outside the airport) is shown as contributing to a more satisfying, fun experience of life.
A prototype. What if these characters didn’t travel through time and they were like...sort of real people?
Wayne and Garth themselves are Bill and Ted 2.0. Smarter, shrewder; they’re surely creatures of a consumer society and its love of material comforts. But as principled individuals loyal to their community and friends, they eschew dishonestly, blind avarice and inauthenticity. Curious and self-effacing, they’re the zenith model of the directionless, arrested development adolescent male duo (Beavis and Butthead would be the beautifully disgusting nadir). In their world, life looks better when you’re clever and witty. They may be pranksters and have moments of bad judgement but not once in the movie do they ever lie, cheat or steal to get ahead. In showbusiness of all places.
You’d be cast out of Wayne’s World and looked down on for being very un-Rock and Roll if you did those things. If you sold out. In Wayne’s World, there are such things as personal principles both for members of a community and for artists. Wayne’s protest at having his show robbed of its authenticity mirrors Cassandra’s offense taken to Wayne’s implication during their fight that she would sleep with Benjaman to advance her music career. Principles matter. And there is such a thing as gallantry. Sure, the pelvic thrust towards a woman (Schwing!) may look like a misogynist or dehumanizing gesture at first but the dynamic of Wayne and Cassandra’s relationship throughout much of the movie is characterized by Wayne’s full support of his driven, independent girlfriend’s career and his stated refusal to temper that with the subjugation of wedlock (“Garth, marriage is punishment for shoplifting in some countries!”). In Wayne’s World, this enlightened form of chivalry is very much alive. It doesn’t go unnoticed and you’re rewarded for it by having Tia Carrere for a girlfriend.
You want to live there, in the most excellent world of this thoughtfully crafted, beautifully realized and delightful movie. People my age remember how things used to be when it came out, despite the movie’s best fourth wall-busting efforts to assure us all that it didn’t exist. That it COULDN’T exist, much like the drably idyllic 1950’s America drooled over by misanthropic conservative traditionalists. It did and it didn’t.
Is it a false movie world? Undoubtedly. It’s not immune to improbable coincidence, sentimentalist pandering, or a Deus Ex Machina or two. But these cheesy devices are all but telegraphed to the audience as such by director Penelope Spheeris and her savvy cast. Instead, the heroes are essentially configured as two errant Knights of Suburbia, roaming the landscape in search of truth, fun, laughs, pocket money and a chance to romance a beautiful woman in the purest and most ethical way possible. I do not in any way see anything false or hyperbolic about referring to the heroes of this story as Arthurian Knights. Without legends like these - bedtime stories you want to wake up to - perhaps the real world would lose some of its realness.
After all, it must mean something that Wayne refers to the guitar he intends to buy as, “Excalibur.”
