No, I’m not talking about news footage from the war in Iraq. I’m talking about Jackass the Movie.
Having decided to take a break from the 24/7 TV coverage of the Battle for Baghdad, I recently rented the video based on the popular MTV show dedicated to self-inflicted human mayhem. Fortunately, the only casualties in the room were my family members and myself, who were reduced by convulsive laughter to the point of tears (but not quite to the point of puking).
Why is it, you may wonder, with all the real-time war coverage on TV (some call it "the ultimate reality show"), we end up taking a breather by watching even more violence? I don’t know, but it seems to work.
There’s something about watching people gleefully driving their BMX bikes over a ramp onto a huge cactus plant, or giving each other a series of searing paper cuts, or attempting to receive a tattoo inside a moving off-road vehicle that just makes you want to give ‘em all a thumbs-up.
No, the people in Jackass the Movie are not actual morons. The participants – host Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, Steve-O, Jason "Wee Man" Acuna, Chris Pontius and others – are either professional skateboarders, extreme sports nuts, or amateur stuntmen (there are no women jackasses). They’re well-paid, reportedly having received about a million bucks or so each to do the movie, which is not bad for non-union performers. They’re basically young males who enjoy the idea of inflicting grievous bodily harm on themselves and others. And we get to watch.
The opening shot of Jackass the Movie is a hoot. A parody of all those gladiator/war movies that feature Carl Orff’s majestic Carmina Burana chorus, the cast emerges in a cloud of smoke riding an enormous shopping cart in slow motion. Soon they are blasted from all sides by cannons firing rocks and chunks of concrete. They continue like this, crossing a bridge amid a barrage of unfriendly fire. It’s hard not to watch this sequence without thinking of CNN footage of tanks crossing the Iraqi desert. Which is possibly the point.
Jackass the Movie came out before the war in Iraq, and it doesn’t explicitly make light of war, but it does say something, I think, about the war that exists inside men. Basically, men are hooked on violence. It’s part of our nature, I suspect. Some people say it’s eating meat that makes us so aggressive, but I’ve met a few vegetarians who were also assholes. No, I fear it’s something deeper than one’s choice of food.
Watching Jackass the Movie, you might conclude that males are just dangerously maladaptive. Why else would they intentionally drive golf carts straight into walls? Why else would they attach electrodes to their nipples and genitals and turn up the juice while the cameras are rolling? Let’s face it, you don’t find this kind of behavior elsewhere in the animal kingdom.
Watching Jackass and the war coverage side-by-side, you can’t help noticing a bit of the jackass spirit operating in Iraq. Note the young US captain who proclaimed, a little prematurely but with typical American bravado when entering Baghdad, "I do believe this city is ours."
American soldiers, brave as they are, do seem a bit trigger-happy at times. What about the tank attack on the Baghdad hotel housing journalists? Nothing funny there – people died – but some say the US was deliberately targeting the media. If this is so (and it’s highly unlikely), then it was a prank truly worthy of Jackass.
And for those wondering why Americans are the way they are, I respectfully submit two films for immediate study: Michael Moore’s documentary Bowling for Columbine, and Jackass the Movie. In laughter, there is sometimes truth.
Back to the movie. Certainly, it is not for all tastes. A film that starts with a sequence called "Bungee Wedgies" (men plunging from tree limbs suspended only by their cotton briefs) is not going to sit too well with Mom and Pop. And there’s no plot to Jackass, other than that they filmed much of it in Japan (which allows "Party Boy" Chris Pontius to freak out a few staid Japanese by stripping down to his jockstrap and bowtie and dancing in their faces). Some stunts work well, others kind of go on too long, just like the half-hour TV show. In truth, a little of this stuff goes a long way. The first hour may leave you invigorated, slightly intoxicated with laughter, but by the end you may be feeling the effects of a powerful hangover.
And there is this strange gay subtext to Jackass. Many of the stunts involve stuffing things inside men’s butts – as Steve-O memorably does with a lit cherry bomb, but declines to do with a Matchbox car inside a condom. Vomiting, peeing, shitting – all the bodily fluids except the most obvious one are exploited. But to theorize that the members of Jackass are latent homosexuals is kind of an insult to homosexuals. They simply are what they are: jackasses.
What spawns such strange behavior? A lifetime of trick or treat mischief and high school pranks, a steady diet of America’s Funniest (And Most Violent) Home Videos, and an impish belief that upsetting the accepted order of things is sometimes healthy, or at least good for a laugh. These are the things that drive the cast members of Jackass to attach a baby alligator’s teeth to their nipples (Knoxville), set off a thousand fireworks in their sleeping parent’s bedroom (Margera), or snort a huge line of wasabi (Steve-O).
Forget Fear Factor, The Amazing Race and all that reality TV crap. These guys aren’t doing it for the money. They’re bona fide crazy, but that’s something that brings a level of reality to Jackass that’s almost hard to watch. What kind of guy, on a dare, will pee into a snow cone and then eat it on camera? A jackass, obviously. What kind of idiot would put a pound of live shrimp down his swim trunks and then leap into the water next to a school of whale sharks? You know the answer.
Seriously, those who crave a viewing experience that’s a dozen times funnier than Austin Powers: Goldmember and every Adam Sandler movie combined should check out Jackass the Movie –though you may have to hunt it down on video; it’s unlikely to screen in Manila in one piece.
And when the video’s over, and you’ve practically wet yourself from laughing – well, there’s always the war to switch back to for human drama.