Wayne’s World: Reviewed by Davis Rivera

Inspired by a long-running “Saturday Night Live” skit, “Wayne’s World,” the 1992 comedy directed by Penelope Spheeris, is told from the point of view of Wayne Campbell, played by Mike Myers. Through exposition, we learn that Wayne is a man seemingly in his late twenties who still lives at home with his parents in the tiny suburb of Aurora, Illinois. Wayne hosts a local late-night cable-access show with his best friend Garth Algar, played by a well-coifed Dana Carvey at the peak of his career. The show consists as Wayne and Garth playing air guitar and drums, interviewing local people in a sarcastic manner and worshipping their rock idols and ideal dream women.

By chance, television executive Benjamin Cane, played by Rob Lowe, sees a snippet of the program while visiting his girlfriend and, when made aware of how popular the show is, instructs one of his producers to find the show. Cane eventually tracks down Wayne and Garth, offers to buy the show’s rights and keep the two hosts on for what he calls “a huge salary.” Wayne agrees to Cane’s offer, sells the show and is shocked when he sees the liberties Cane has taken with his show, including being made aware that Noah Vanderhoff, the show’s sponsor, has been guaranteed a weekly interview. The one high point in Wayne’s life at this point is his girlfriend Cassandra, lead singer and bass guitarist for the band Crucial Taunt. This brief moment of happiness doesn’t last, however, when Cane begins to take an interest in her career and steals her away from Wayne just as he has had a major fight with Garth.

Wayne eventually patches things up with Garth and arranges for a broadcast of Crucial Taunt’s basement performance to be shown in the limousine of Frankie Sharp, record company executive for Sharp Records. What makes this film so unique for, not just a mainstream comedy, but also any narrative film, is the ostensibly (to the audience) haphazard handling of situations contributing depth to an otherwise predictable plot. Sharp does indeed see the performance and shows up at Wayne’s house to confront Cassandra. In this jarring example of the vast differences that a denouement can bring to a viewer, Sharp tells Cassandra that it is the “wrong time,” a fire breaks out in Wayne’s basement, Garth dies and a clip is shown of Cassandra and Cane sipping drinks on a tropical island.

For many filmmakers, this kind of closure would provide just enough sense of the instinctive provocateur to both alienate viewers and probably win over critics but what Spheeris does instead contributes heavily to both her, and the screenwriters’ (including Myers himself), talent. Wayne directly addresses the audience (a recurring motif in this film), calls attention once again to the narrative as a process and decides he would rather see the “Scooby-Doo ending.” When that doesn’t satisfy him, Wayne reverts to a more typical approach, the “mega-happy ending,” which ends with both Wayne and Garth addressing the camera in a humorous way.

Not satisfied with having merely a creative ending, Spheeris also leaves us with a deep sense of the film’s own open-endedness (some, but not all, questions were answered in the sequel) and a deeper appreciation for her diegetic usage of music to add comic relief and a new perspective on an otherwise canonical song known to millions. In this instance, Spheeris presents Wayne, Garth and their friends in a car driving aimlessly when someone decides to put in a tape featuring Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Skipping the introduction, the film presents the song at the middle to stress the dynamics of Freddie Mercury’s vocals and to showcase Myers and Carvey’s keen sense of timing as they mimic the words in what has become one of cinema’s most beloved scenes.

In this scene and in many other scenes throughout the film, Spheeris has successfully attempted a good-spirited departure from the conventional narrative structure to an alternative formula that has proven to be a staple of our contemporary culture almost two decades after the film’s release.