Of Semoitics and Steve-O

Originally Posted September 25th, 2006

So, over the weekend we checked out the great cinematic colossus that sits astride the great pillars of the domestic box office, the most anticipated sequel since Godfather Part II about guys who pierce their butt cheeks together, Jackass Number Two.

Now there are two camps on the subject of Jackass. If you are male and under 30, you will probably think this is the funniest thing since Cameron Diaz wound up styling her hair with Ben Stiller's spunk. If you are over 30, or female, you might not. Despite this deep critical divide, Jackass Number Two has racked up some of the best reviews of the year (61% fresh) besting overstuffed literary adaptations, (Black Dahlia, 32% Rotten and All the King's Men, 11% Rotten) feel-good football pictures (Gridiron Gang, 41% Rotten) and uplifting war epics (Flyboys, 28% Rotten). It's the best reviewed film of the year featuring a man unwittingly gluing his friends' pubic hair to his face in order to impersonate an Arab terrorist.

Admittedly, a film where Steve-O gives himself a beer enema might not have been what the Lumiere Brothers had in mind when they invented the cinema, but I'll be damned if its not fucking funny. Wait, the Lumieres did make a film where a gardener gets a comedic blast of water in the face, so maybe they did.

The formula is completely unchanged from the show and film that proceeded it: a bunch of drunk skate punks led by the grinning Johnny Knoxville perform dangerous, disastrously stupid stunts involving sharks, vomiting, fart masks, kicks to the balls, blindfolded rodeos, eating cow pies, and manually masturbating horses connected by simple dissolves and kept afloat by a pounding punk soundtrack kicked off by the Minutemen's jaunty Ommpa Loompa theme, "Corona." They hang around without shirts, tanned and (mostly) toned, bearing their tattoos, cradling beers, often curled up in the fetal position clutching the latest body part that they've inflicted searing pain upon. These guys are seriously comfortable with their sexuality, as they are constantly nude around one another. The two Jackass films contain more male full-frontal nudity than every non-porno film in the entire history of the cinema. Lottsa cocks in this one. And yet, despite how gay this all sounds, dude, it's totally not gay, I swear. Just like professional wrestling, the crucible of sadomasochistic violence burns away the obviousness gayness.

Perhaps it's my own need to find the intellectual underpinnings in even the feeblest of works of art, but while taking in the carnage, I drifted, thinking about what it all means.

Looking at the film from a pure genre history POV, we can place the Jackass boys in the context of reality pranksters like Allan Funt and DIY gross-out auteur like John Waters. In fact, Waters has a cameo dressed as a magician directing a hugely obese woman to smother a naked, grinning Wee Man. Add a dash of the S&M comedy of the Three Stooges, the exploitation documentary feel of Mondo Cane. Imagine if Moe really did rip out Larry's hair for real, shaved his ass and glued the hair back on while shoving Divine out of the way to hungrily scoop up that infamous dog turd wile Funt directed in some third world setting. That's what we're dealing with here.

I wonder if the Jackasses are emblematic of some lost youth movement, a bunch of suburban twentysomethings who have no job prospects, no demonstrable skills, who feel the need for personal expression, a need with no outlet except through self destruction. They uses their bodies as canvasses, their brushes the detritus of our consumer culture, crashing shopping carts into impossibly manicured shrubberies at high speeds.

As Ryan Dunn says in the movie when asked why the Jackasses performed a destructive stunt, "It was funny." Considering my throat was horse with laughter afterwards, it was.