What critical perspective should be taken on a plotless, digital-cinema verite movie that focuses on pain, self-inflicted agony, torture, bodily fluids (both ingested and expelled), and frat-boy hazing? What comment can be offered about a movie filled with punishing scenes of self-inflicted sadism instead of character development? A movie whose dual agenda appears to be testing the limits of the human pain threshold and flipping the bird to cineastes everywhere doesn’t seem like a springboard for intelligent comment. There is no plot to quibble with. Some sequences are so gruesome that some cameramen vomited while filming them – which, naturally, was proudly recorded by other cameramen. Other stomach churning gags will most likely leave you feeling nauseated, and if some hapless audience member hasn’t gagged up a belly full of popcorn and diet Coke onto the theater floor, I’d be amazed. Personally, I came close to puking twice, and when I left the theater my head was spinning from a giddy mix of laughter, amazement, and revulsion.
You can’t say much about Jackass Number Two except that it is an unalloyed triumph. It isn’t a paragon of virtue, but neither is it the amoral cesspool that bluebloods and politicians would dearly love to denounce. It might not be a movie for everyone – there are some gags (but only the few that don’t cause actual gagging) that you could show the family – but for those who are lined up in the Jackass demographic crosshairs, few will leave disappointed.
Since the dawn of entertainment, the best comedy has always been perilously physical. From the sadistic shtick of the Three Stooges to America’s Funniest Home Videos, watching someone fall down and risk injury is a staple of humor. From Harold Lloyd’s predicaments in Safety Last to the legendary Sideshow Bob rake gag on The Simpsons (which gets a real life rendition here), comedy has always been other people’s pain. This merry bunch of pranksters are far from the end of civilization, but just an adult iteration of the gags we have laughed at since childhood.
Jackass came to life on MTV as a half-hour show of pratfalls and cringe-inducing stunts that were designed to go awry in humiliating and painful ways. The show and both movies all adhere to the same minimalist, home movie aesthetic. The stunts are all performed by or inflicted upon a merry bunch of pranksters and overgrown adolescents who have graduated to grown-up levels of professional mayhem. Presiding over the chaos is Johnny Knoxville, an amiable good ol’ boy with a lopsided haircut and a crooked grin to match.
Mr. Knoxville isn’t the wildest or most outrageous member of the crew, but he is the elder statesman with an almost super-human tolerance for pain. Riot control devices, charging bulls, and snakebites are just a few of the shades of pain he gleefully hurls himself into. The rest of the group treat him with living-legend levels of reverence at his willingness to put himself directly in harm’s way.
As an actual work of cinema, there is a brilliance behind the execution of Jackass. It is lovingly crafted with a beautiful, low-tech aesthetic. The editing is ruthlessly efficient and crisp. Everything is onscreen for exactly how long it is funny, and not an instant more. It’s ironic, too, that a show spawned by MTV refuses to pile on the fancy editing tricks that dissolve most other shows and movies into meaningless streams of visual sludge.
In the end, it’s that brotherhood between the group that transmutes the bone-jarring pain into laughter. To an outsider, the pranks that the Jackass crew pull on each other would seem inhumane, and that’s the point. No matter how much you want to, you just can’t trap a stranger in a limousine full of bees and spill a box of marbles underneath the only exit. But your friends are fair game, because your friends know that they can brand a cookie-cutter shape of a penis onto your backside in return. You always hurt the ones you love, and in this case, pain just draws you closer together.
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