#25 - Jackass Belongs In The Criterion Collection

Johnny Knoxville was the first celebrity I ever had a crush on.

He stood by a gator pit, watching his friends sloth-crawl along a rope with raw chicken dangling out of the back of their jockstraps, and at that moment I imprinted on dudes wearing Levi jeans and aviators. (In my memory of this he’s wearing a white t-shirt, but in reality, he was shirtless and standing in the shade yelling at his friends and laughing so hard it accentuated the swimmer’s v that cut through his ab line and directly into my heart.)

A judgment I stand by to this day! There’s a reason Lana del Ray’s Blue Jeans is one of the sexiest music videos of all time!! (A music video that I once witnessed cause the accidental sexual awakening (and subsequent trauma of that awakening happening in front of a group of college kids) it incurred in a roommate’s 14-year-old brother. Fingers in the mouth are too powerful! Hands are the most sexual things to showcase on camera! Moving on!!)

Jackass, at its core, was a group of friends fucking around. Most of them were serious skateboarders, one of them was Spike Jonze, and there is absolutely a direct line you can draw from Jackass to prank videos on youtube, and I can’t overstate the impact on modern culture that stemmed from prank culture on social media. (Without it the world would be better! I fully blame the success of Prank vs Prank for David Dobrik and Jake Paul and blame the latter two for the generation of sociopath lite™ creators we’re now dealing with and will be for the foreseeable future!)

Jackass is basically a fuckboy vlog. They go to Mianus, Connecticut just to make fun of the town’s name to the resident’s faces. Most of the movie is just them making people who are just trying to do their jobs uncomfortable with their antics, but they are the butt of the joke. From, “Oh hey doc—there’s a car in my ass” to Dave England taking a shit in a toilet in the middle of a hardware store, it was novel to perform small acts of torture on unsuspecting workers. That’s like, a good half of the content that’s on YouTube? Party Boy’s entire schtick would still work on TikTok today! He would get more comments about harassment and the disrespect shown to the city of Tokyo, but it would still hit.

The movie is just interstitials that already have vlog titles! Clickbait ‘em up and you’ve got a whole channel babe!

WASABI SNOOTERS WITH THE BOYS!!!!

(The thumbnail is Steve-O with the straw up his nostril and big red letters that say HE VOMITTED! 🤮😱 at the top of the frame.)

Bam’s whole thing would have been a family vlog channel—with a twist! (The twist being that he caused intentional grief/strife in order to exploit his parents for views.)

There would be cool skating comp vids interspersed on their video feed so that they have family-friendly content that YouTube would be able to feature on the trending page. Comments would flood in about how “this guy Spike shoots skating well” followed by a ton of comments calling the original commenter stupid for not already knowing that he is, in fact, the director of Being John Malcovich.

«breath»

Jackass was culture.

The grip that MTV had on us in the early 2000s!!

The Real World is why we even have reality tv! MTV lichrally invented it. The success of The Real World wrought Road Rules which spawned The Challenge. Which is still going! And yes, CT is still featured! (I watch the video of him wearing Johnny bananas like a backpack semi-regularly! I got into The Challenge last summer and barely knew any of the players but in the subsequent months have managed to watch most of the earlier seasons on Dailymotion because I have a lot of time on my hands!) Laguna Beach is why we have all of The Housewives shows in the Bravo Universe. The Hills was the most-watched show on television for a long time—Brody Jenner was used as ratings bait in the early seasons of Keeping Up With The Kardashians because he was more famous than Kim Kardashian! This isn’t even to mention TRL and my 12-year-old assuredness that having cool poses ready to go in the famous photo was a fundamental life skill that it was deeply important to develop.

Also, their little music pop-up bar was one of the first things I cribbed “cool” culture directly from. Just my Virgo tendencies popping out, making little lists and then sprinting to Kazaa (and eventually Limewire) right after watching whatever was playing in The Ten Spot to download discographies/upload them to my baby pink iPod mini.

The id of Jackass is front and center.

These men have no pains, so they create them. Suburban women shoplift, and these dudes built Evil Kenivel replica ramps and incurred brain damage from riding bulls and display a Freudian (wet?) dream insofar as their obsession with performing complicated ball torture goes.

It’s all stemming from the same thing! We miss having community and purpose beyond capital and we want to feel the rush of danger! Humans are not used to a lack of walkable spaces! We want to be nomads and occasionally run away from big predators because it hasn’t been that long since we did that and instead we’re stuck in cars driving ugly streets with zero walkability scores to go Target to buy frames just to feel something! Why not let an alligator bite your nipple for ten seconds? What do we have to lose!!

The Jackass crew has suffered in the years since they debuted. There have been overdoses, drunk driving that resulted in death, fall outs within the group. But many of them have come out the other side due to the sheer strength of their friendship. Have you ever watched the documentary about Steve-O’s intervention while on your period? You will sob!! (And then have complicated emotions about seeing the pure rage mixed with annoyance on Knoxville’s face because he loves Steve-O so much and it is deeply hurting him to see his friends continued reluctance to stop destroying himself. Can you love someone enough to save them? In this case, the answer was yes!)

One of the highest forms of entertainment is a group of friends having a laugh together, teasing each other so specifically that you can immediately see the love behind it—it’s why Oceans 11 is a fantastic movie, and Run BTS is all I want to watch when I’m having a bad day. We just like to watch friends (especially talented friends) hang out. And societally, we prefer if it’s a group of dude friends because that just feels less complicated (despite the fact that it’s due to the apparent emotional repression and subsequent inability to communicate those emotions and not because men are just more chill and fun).

There are no women in the Jackass crew. The movie features one woman, a professional kickboxer, for fewer than five minutes, and the bit is literally called Ass Kicked By A Girl.

The lack of representation for anyone outside of a white man was not criticized at the time (or, based on all of the fawning articles written this week about Jackass: Forever, now). We were not pondering whether Jackass passed The Bechdel Test, and honestly, thank god. Women, especially at this time in culture, were mostly there to be looked at. It’s probably allowed the movie to age as well as it has because there aren’t blonde women in bikinis holding beer in the background of some shots. Women at the time, even the ones with immense talent who performed and ran pop culture, were treated so poorly because we assigned no value. We told girls that the pinnacle of their existence was being hot and thin so that you could be mocked to your face by Carson Daly on national television because your ex-boyfriend recently revealed that you weren’t a virgin. (A totally normal thing for a man to expose about someone he once was intimate with and definitely not an absolute violation of the other person’s autonomy!!!)

The only time I remember the Jackass crew interacting with women at all was when they came on America’s Next Top Model season 5. The concept of the shoot was the girls yelling and screaming as the boys destroyed things in the background. Women are un-fun nags! Yell at the camera but remember to be pretty!! Hïgh Fashïon!

The idea that women would never be interested in doing something as mindless and silly as the rest of the Jackass crew was so pervasive at the time this film came out. Looking back, I wonder if that compulsory reaction led to the reactive rise of “not like other girls” being the go-to compliment (and self-descriptor) throughout that decade. And while we finally came to the conclusion that actually, being like other girls was a good thing, we became aware that it had all been centered around bids for male attention (the most valued and precious resource available).

(I worry that the current iteration we have of this sentiment is when other people assign girls as “pick me personalities” and I know that the phrasing seems like it’s describing the same thing, but when we used to proudly proclaim that we were “not like other girls” there was some semblance of agency, whereas other people assigning you as someone who does things to get male attention seems much more devastating. It might not be as cool these days to outright admit that we seek male attention, but the value of the attention has not depreciated at all. And we are still not asking why boys are trained to hate girls so much that the only ones deemed worthy are the ones who anomalize themselves! And I would argue that misogyny and violence against young girls has only gotten far more dangerous/prevalent since the mid-2000s!)

So, now that Jackass Forever is coming out, I ask, where is the all-female reboot of this series? And I ask that facetiously because oh my god please give me a mid-budget movie that is a new concept I beg you, but I don’t think we would ever consider making one. And why is that? Women can be anything they want! Except Jackasses, apparently.

This is the equality we have still yet to achieve and I feel like the confines of being a woman are becoming increasingly narrowed within the vein of ultra-feminine gender expressions and I would just like to live in a world where a bunch of skater girls got to fuck around with their friends and that would be seen as equally entertaining.

The friendship of the Jackass crew is on display so plainly because they’re are allowed to display vulnerability due to the environment that they themselves have created in order to allow those displays to be seen as reasonable reactions, and a lack of vulnerability in those moments becomes extra manly.

It’s not cool to cry, but it’s totally okay if it happens while you’re rolling around on a floor covered in mouse traps while dressed as a mouse.

Anyway, the film is mostly purely entertainment. There are parts that continue to haunt me years later (papercuts), but it’s just watching a stunt crew do stupid things with a large budget, they had like three super fuckable members of the group (is it a fun game to guess who the other two besides Knoxville are?), and the cinematography is well constructed and clearly inspired the entire next 20 years of guerilla-style prank videos so, we should honor the impact that it had. (And also maybe acknowledge how Skate culture in general totally shifted how sports as a whole were captured, and that action shots of the kids popping out of the pools in Dogtown by Glen E. Friedman propelled skateboarding into the mainstream, and how Stacey Peralta, who was often featured in said shots, eventually developed a new form of alternative advertising in his photos for the Bones Brigade’s Powell-Peralta shoots which led to one of the most effective disruption marketing ever and absolutely defined skate culture into being the funny bros doing fun things which leads directly to this group of semi-pro skaters and stunt people making an MTV show…oh. WE DID IT EVERYONE WE GOT THERE!) (The Bones Brigade Video Shows…are proto-Jackass. I can’t believe I didn’t realize this before!)

If Jackass doesn’t qualify for the Criterion Collection, that’s fine. It’s now in mine because it was only a dollar cheaper to buy it rather than rent!

I think as the early 2000s hits the peak of the nostalgia cycle, we’re going to get to take its impacts more seriously. We get to actually look at the threads that come from the wild tapestry that Jackass wove and see what and how it inspired. It’s so clear that it did, and yet, I’m yet to see anyone ever truly analyze what fucking hold prank videos have on society at large and why so many people enjoy watching them. Anyway.

Let women be Jackasses 2k22!

P.S. ANTM continues to be culturally relevant in specific ways that make very little sense! See below for more photos from that shoot because…what was happening over on UPN in 2005!