Wayne's World Remains Excellent

You know what movie REALLY holds up? 1992's Wayne's World

Some movies feel like home. You can watch them over and over again and never get bored. That is a wonderful feeling. It’s more than wonderful: it’s  transcendent. It’s life-affirming. It just plain makes you feel good. 

The Blues Brothers feels like home to me. It’s a movie I know by heart. Re-watching it connects me to a powerful nostalgic magic that transports me instantly and powerfully to the several moments in my childhood that were not traumatic or deeply scarring. 

1992’s Wayne’s World feels like home to me as well. Part of that is geographical. Though it was, distressingly, filmed largely in Canada, Penelope Spheeris’ zeitgeist-capturing masterpiece is set in Aurora Illinois, not far from the Chicago group home where I grew up.

The Blues Brothers is set partially in my old home town of Chicago and partially in small town Illinois. One of the many things that distinguishes the first Saturday Night Live films from the ones to follow was a sociological understanding of small town Midwestern life. 

In that respect Wayne’s World feels like a follow-up to Spheeris’ brutal, brutally funny 1987 hair metal documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part 2 as much as it does a Saturday Night Live spin-off. 

Only instead of focusing on wealthy libertines who are worshipped like gods for rocking and rolling Wayne’s World revolves around good-natured Midwestern kids who live to hang out, listen to tunes, chase girls and goof around.

Spheeris’ iconic documentary is about the creators of both rock and roll and the rock and roll life style. Wayne’s World is about the consumers. 

Mike Myers would test our collective patience by recycling zany characters with hammy accents, wild costumes and crazy hair in the decades ahead but we fell in love with him as an eminently relatable boy next door. 

Wayne Cambell is a brilliant creation precisely because he is so normal. He’s an ordinary guy who likes rock and roll and pretty girls and donuts and playing hockey and hanging out with his friends. 

Mike Myers is like Dan Aykroyd in that he’s a real comic auteur with a distinct sensibility and aesthetic that defined both his time on Saturday Night Live and the films that that he would go on to make. 

Myers and Aykroyd are similarly alike in that they’re writers as much as they are performers. That allows them much more control over their work. In the case of the famously prickly Myers, that might actually give him too much control as he has proven notoriously difficult to work with. 

Spheeris did a wonderful job with Wayne’s World. She has a peerless understanding of life among the young and aimless and made a movie with a real sense of style, that feels like cinema and not television on a movie screen. 

She was not invited back to direct the sequel, nor did she want to work with Wayne’s World’s temperamental star/screenwriter because she knew that her job would be realizing Mike Myers’ vision rather than pursuing her own. 

Myers had a very clear idea what he wanted to do. When you have that clarity and the result is Wayne’s World, you are handed the proverbial keys to the kingdom.  When you have a clear and lucid vision and the result is The Love Guru, on the other hand, those keys are then snatched away. 

Wayne’s World introduces Wayne as an aimless resident of small town Illinois with a series of hair nets and name tags  instead of a career. The affable young man channels most of his energy into hosting a public access show where he hangs out with best friend/sidekick Garth Angar (Dana Carvey). 

Myers apparently wrote a draft of Wayne’s World without Garth because he was jealous of the attention Carvey was receiving before Lorne Michaels informed him that this would be a movie about Wayne and his best friend Garth, not about Myers’ ego. 

The future Austin Powers star had right on his side. The studio and Michaels apparently wanted a Guns n Roses song for the big lip-syncing scene but Myers held out for “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

The most beloved scene in Wayne’s World is also, ostensibly, the most easily cuttable. It does nothing to move the plot forward. It serves no narrative purpose. It’s a fairly long scene involving securing the no doubt expensive licensing rights to a massive hit song. 

Beyond delighting audiences, “Bohemian Rhapsody” tells us everything we need to know about these kids and the cozy, limited life of small town suspended adolescence that they live. 

The “Bohemian Rhapsody” set-piece puts the audience in the cramped car with its characters so that they can experience the communal joy of rocking out to an epically silly song on another wasted night doing not much of anything at all. 

If you’re not already in love with Wayne and Garth, then you will be by the time the scene is through. 

Among its myriad other virtues Wayne’s World features, in Garth, a loving, affectionate and convincing portrayal of someone who is quite possibly on the autism spectrum. Garth is nerdy, introverted, nervous, extremely intelligent about scientific endeavors, has trouble understanding social situations and doesn’t look people in the eyes. Yet he’s loved and accepted not just by Wayne but by the people of Aurora. Everyone seems to accept him. 

Myers and Carvey have such tremendous chemistry that it’s hard to believe that they apparently were bitter rivals in real life just as it's hard to believe that a movie that nails the essence of Midwestern life wasn’t even filmed in the United States. 

Wayne and Garth are habitual fourth wall breakers who puncture the film’s reality to talk to us, their good friends in the audience about their lives and goals. 

Wayne wants to do Wayne’s World for a living and, presumably, move out of his parents’ house someday. Fortunately and unfortunately, at that exact moment blow-dried slickster Benjamin Kane (Rob Lowe) is looking for a show to promote the businesses of Noah Vanderhoff (the great Brian Doyle-Murray), the misanthropic, child-hating owner and proprietor of Noah’s Arcade. 

Lowe was a proto-Jon Hamm: a ridiculously good-looking, hunky alpha-male who became a star of drama before establishing himself as a comic character actor with a light touch, a gift for self-deprecation and serious comedy chops. 

Lowe is great as the bad guy; he’s a smarmy bastard you just want to punch right in his oily grin. He’s the anti-Wayne, a calculating phony full of fake praise. Where Wayne is effortlessly authentic every weasel word that comes out of Benjamins mouth is calculating and false. 

Wayne’s World has a trio of unforgettable villains in Benjamin, Noah and finally Russell Finle (Kurt Fuller), the big city producer/director hired to turn Wayne and Garth’s adorably amateur enterprise into a professional television show. 

The award-worthy screenplay, co-written by Myers and Saturday Night Live staff-writers Bonnie and Terry Turner, is gloriously dense with jokes of all varieties, some big and broad and goofy, others intriguingly tiny. 

One of my favorite running gags, for example, involves Russell telling the crew of Wayne’s World that for no discernible reason when true television professionals count down before a broadcast they skip 2 and 1 so that their countdown ends at three and consists entirely of “5,4,3” and then a hand gesture to convey the final moments. 

It’s a tiny, technical detail that many viewers wouldn’t even notice but from that point on whenever I saw a character counting down 5,4,3 and then letting loose with that dumb hand gesture with a goofy look on their face I chuckled. 

Benjamin wants to exploit Wayne and his homemade lemonade stand of a show and he wants to seduce Cassandra (Tia Carrere), Wayne’s smoking hot rocker girlfriend. So he dispatches Wayne and Garth to Milwaukee, to see Alice Cooper and learn more about the region’s history, while he puts the move on her at a music video shoot he’s overseeing. 

It’s a shame Carrere didn’t ascend to higher heights because she’s terrific here: funny, sexy, badass and graced with tremendous magnetism and charisma. Moreover she has wonderful chemistry with Myers. 

Myers could be funny and sexy and goofy and romantic when he wanted to be. Before he was the love guru he could be a convincing romantic lead. Wayne is understandably gobsmacked by Cassandra’s hotness but he also legitimately digs her as a person. 

Wayne even learns Cantonese to impress her. He’s such a loving and concerned boyfriend that when he behaves like a jerk briefly in the third act it feels like a violation of the character. 

Wayne ends up getting the girl and the girl gets the big gig and everything turns out alright.

The filmmakers got their happy ending as well. Wayne's World wasn’t just a hit. It was a blockbuster. It was a pop culture phenomenon. To this day people lovingly recycle its catchphrases and iconic moments. 

It’s a magical movie that has not receded culturally. Instead it’s gotten bigger and more important in the ensuing 32 years. 

As of this writing The Blues Brothers is the only Saturday Night Live movie that has been set aside for preservation by the National Film Registry for its cultural and historic significance. 

Wayne’s World should join The Blues Brothers in the National Film Registry because it is excellent but it is also, improbably but wonderfully enough, important, both for me as a movie lover/Gen Xer and for society as a whole. 

Wayne’s World is a cinematic home I can return to again and again.

It’s crazy to think that in 1992 only two movies based on Saturday Night Live existed and that they were both beloved instant cult classics as well as big box-office hits. 

Lorne Michaels is most assuredly not one to quit while he's ahead when it comes to television or movies.

I am going to watch every episode of Saturday Night Live for between two to seven books about its best and worst episodes that you can pre-order by clicking this link