Wayne's World (1992)

2 years ago

Wayne’s World (1992)

PRALINES AND DICK

by Tess Lynch

Public access television was, in many ways, the blogging platform of yesteryear (yesteryear = dial-up, people, get with it!). Think about it: available to all, cheap or free, furthering the cause of free speech, for entertainment or educational use, and utilizing crappy production techniques and equipment. Are you with me? Can we agree? If we can, then I am going to float this in your direction: Wayne and Garth taught you how to blog.

Wayne’s World — and by this I mean the cable access show, not the movie itself — doesn’t earn Wayne or Garth a living. That’s why Wayne lives with his folks, producing his show out of their basement. But it does offer popularity, an enthusiastic and loyal audience, and the opportunity to do what Wayne and his best friend Garth love, which is to talk about babes and metal. They’re not waiting on a book deal, of course, but I feel certain now that Wayne and Garth shared the hope that maybe some of us hold deep in our hearts as we tap out essays and overshares and memes at our desks: maybe this could all work out. Maybe this could be a sustainable grown-up life.

What happens when that opportunity presents itself to our protagonists is brilliantly satirical and real. After Benjamin buys out WW for $10,000 (half for Wayne, half for Garth, the promise of a “huge” salary later) and reinvents the show by adding an interview with the un-cool sponsor Noah Vanderhoff (and changing the signature opening song to a creepy, empty-souled jingle, perhaps the most distressing change of all), he ends up firing Wayne for refusing to conform to the new image of the show (Wayne holds up signs making fun of Vanderhoff and is axed by Benjamin following the first taping). Garth, ever prescient, knows that they’re selling out from the moment Benjamin gets involved; for Wayne, though, it’s too hard to be skeptical of something that’s so potentially wonderful. The great thing about blogging, about public access, about doing something that’s not about the money, that’s just about making something you love? Well, it’s the freedom to do what you like without compromising, and the fact that your motives are pure. You just want to entertain, to rock out, to celebrate the babes. Money changes that.

Ads suck.

The ending of Wayne’s World is fractured: you get to pick how you’d like to leave Wayne and Garth from a variety of absurd possibilities. My only beef with the movie is that, for me, it’s not about Wayne and Cassandra (Tia Carrere, playing the lead singer of a band called Crucial Taunt, inspiring Wayne to learn Cantonese, underwhelming me completely), though that’s what the final bits of the movie revolve around (Garth gets a babe too. I guess it’s like, “Hey, viewers, they’ve been talking about babes this whole time! Look, they have babes now!”). It doesn’t do the film justice (I just called Wayne’s World a “film”), to distill it into a story about dating a hot lady with whom you can laugh (though props to making Cassandra more interesting than the chicks that sometimes populate male buddy comedies: at least she has a funny bone). I guess that’s important in life, but not as important as the show — Wayne’s World the real show, the un-tampered-with show — and not as important as Wayne and Garth’s most excellent bromance (on the hood of the car, staring up at the airplanes).

Wayne and Garth, playing Wayne and Garth, were the best fictional self-branding duo in history. No wonder they were popular: their tone was consistent and their beliefs made sense. Like the best Led Zeppelin songs, their emotional responses were almost Gothic (in particular: Garth when he hadn’t taken his Ritalin). The overwhelming joy of partying on, of wanting the guitar of your dreams, of the fantasy of being with a beautiful woman, of having a wonderful best friend: these are the things their viewers related to, this enthusiasm, this joy. It’s also something that I feel exists in some of my favorite blogs, for now uncompromised by any (or few, your tiny embedded ads don’t bother me) Benjamins or benjamins. So, let’s party on (a sampling):

PARTY ON CARAGH

PARTY ON MOLLY LAMBERT

PARTY ON JIM CHANEY

PARTY ON LAURA CONDI

PARTY ON TYLER

PARTY ON MELISSA

Tess Lynch is a writer and actor living in Los Angeles. She Tumbls here, and for all the shit she talks, would totally sell out for a book deal.