In praise of the Jackass trilogy | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

In praise of the Jack­ass trilogy

28 Aug 2017

Words by James Slaymaker

A person wearing a red shirt and jeans stands in an enclosure facing a large black bull.
A person wearing a red shirt and jeans stands in an enclosure facing a large black bull.
Out­ra­geous and for­mal­ly auda­cious, these are among the finest Amer­i­can come­dies of the cur­rent century.

The final sequence of Jack­ass Num­ber Two sees John­ny Knoxville play­ful­ly recre­ate one of Buster Keaton’s most icon­ic stunts: the sequence in which the front wall of a mul­ti-storey house col­laps­es to the ground sur­round­ing Keaton, only leav­ing him unscathed because he is posi­tioned per­fect­ly so as to fit neat­ly through the open attic win­dow. The film­ing of the scene was noto­ri­ous­ly risky.

Keaton shot it in one take, with a real house, and if the mea­sure­ments of the win­dow had been off even by a few inch­es it would have like­ly result­ed in seri­ous injury, per­haps even death. Knoxville didn’t stop at imi­tat­ing this famous piece of Hol­ly­wood lore though, he one-upped it. After safe­ly mak­ing it through the win­dow of the falling saloon, Knoxville is hit by a huge wreck­ing ball that knocks him vio­lent­ly out of shot.

This allu­sion explic­it­ly acknowl­edges the debt the Jack­ass series owes to the great slap­stick come­di­ans of silent cin­e­ma, while also reveal­ing some­thing of its own dis­tinct brand of com­ic spec­ta­cle. If the likes of Keaton, Char­lie Chap­lin ad Harold Lloyd sim­i­lar­ly mined humour by plac­ing the human body in harm’s way, they also grant­ed the view­er relief by ulti­mate­ly reliev­ing this ten­sion, leav­ing the per­former unharmed. The dex­ter­i­ty of these performer’s bod­ies enabled them to get per­ilous­ly close to dan­ger while still being able to escape it at the last minute. The grace­ful body of the star thus appeared inde­struc­tible, almost superhuman.

Jack­ass, by con­trast, is a study of the many ways in which the body can be tor­tured, maimed, degrad­ed, des­e­crat­ed. Blood, vom­it, sperm, fae­ces and sali­va are all fore­ground­ed in a glee­ful­ly car­ni­va­lesque exhi­bi­tion of grotes­queries: apples are dan­gled from but­tocks to feed a hun­gry pig; a fish hook is pierced through a cheek; but­tocks are brand­ed with a red-hot iron. As the gang stage these absurd rit­u­als, push­ing against the nat­ur­al bio­log­i­cal func­tions of the human body, the implic­it ques­tion becomes just how much pain can some­one endure?

Jack­ass Num­ber Two opens with a wide tableau of a placid, arti­fi­cial­ly con­struct­ed sub­ur­ban street, with smoke com­ing to fill the screen in slow-motion. Out of the rub­ble emerge Knoxville and co, their cos­tumed forms par­tial­ly obscured by smoke, who pro­ceed to run towards the cam­era. Ennio Morricone’s The Ecsta­sy of Gold’ swells up as each cast mem­ber is intro­duced via a mock-hero­ic close-up. Final­ly, we see that they are being chased by a stam­pede of bulls. It’s a scene that lit­er­alis­es the posi­tion­ing of the series as the vio­lent unleash­ing of the Amer­i­can id with­in a repressed West­ern cul­ture – the series cre­ates a safe lim­i­nal space in which tra­di­tion­al social bound­aries and con­cep­tions of pro­pri­ety are bro­ken down in a series of absur­dist, self-immo­lat­ing acts.

In Jack­ass, plea­sure is insep­a­ra­ble from pain, just as hor­ror is inter­twined with com­e­dy (is it any coin­ci­dence that Knoxville’s laugh and scream sound almost iden­ti­cal?). Mas­cu­line hon­our is claimed through will­ing­ly fac­ing great dan­ger, endur­ing the result­ing pain, then laugh­ing it off. Every prat­fall is punc­tu­at­ed by a graph­ic assess­ment of the gang’s wounds, which are proud­ly shown off like bat­tle wounds.

Crit­ic Fer­nan­do F Croce observed that the Jack­ass project can be seen as new mil­len­ni­um recon­fig­u­ra­tion of Mack Sen­nett”. Indeed, the delight­ful­ly sim­ple struc­tures of these films (essen­tial­ly a string of self-con­tained skits, each last­ing just a few min­utes and intro­duced with the par­tic­i­pat­ing cast mem­ber plain­ly look­ing into the cam­era to state their name and the title of the seg­ment) recalls the mechan­ics of ear­ly spec­ta­cle cin­e­ma as read­i­ly as cir­cus freak shows. Added to this sideshow vibe, each stunt is per­formed in front of the oth­er cast mem­bers, who active­ly laugh and wince and egg each oth­er on. Rit­u­al humil­i­a­tion and sear­ing pain is trans­formed into a series of gid­di­ly per­verse per­for­mances, car­ried out in a series of pri­vate the­atre spaces.

The appeal of the Jack­ass crew is large­ly down to their abil­i­ty to appear simul­ta­ne­ous­ly as com­plete buf­foons and the smartest guys in the room. With their wide-eyed enthu­si­asm, relent­less ener­gy, effort­less cama­raderie and obses­sion with the scat­o­log­i­cal (despite seem­ing to be asex­u­al), their devel­op­ment seems to have been arrest­ed at the age of 12 or 13. The end cred­its mon­tage of Jack­ass 3D, fit­ting­ly, sees the var­i­ous mem­bers cred­it­ed along­side their high school pho­tos, sug­gest­ing the long­ing for the naïve anar­chism of youth that dri­ves the jubi­lant atmos­phere of the series.

Their brand of idio­cy is less naïve than Chaplin’s, less for­lorn than Keaton’s, less fussy than Jacques Tati’s and less fre­net­ic than Lar­ry Semon’s – it’s clos­er to that of Jer­ry Lewis, anoth­er over­grown pre-ado­les­cent. Indeed, the sketch­book qual­i­ty of the Jack­ass movies recalls the late films of Lewis, which sim­i­lar­ly craft scat­ter­shot col­lages com­bin­ing the slap­stick and the psy­cho­path­ic, the exhi­bi­tion­is­tic and the masochistic.

Because of the doc­u­men­tary nature of the shoot­ing style, the Jack­ass visu­al aes­thet­ic pre­cludes rig­or­ous, pre­cise for­mal­ism. Each set-piece is cap­tured by fill­ing the space with as many cam­eras as pos­si­ble (some con­sumer grade, some high qual­i­ty), then piec­ing the footage togeth­er in post. The result – which favours tex­ture over pre­ci­sion and vis­cer­al impact over coher­ence – is a Boschi­an max­i­mal­ism, rapid­ly flit­ting between strik­ing images and reac­tion shots with lit­tle regard for tra­di­tion­al notions of con­ti­nu­ity edit­ing and con­sis­ten­cy of on-screen space.

The fran­chise start­ed out as a micro-bud­get tele­vi­su­al curio, and the DIY qual­i­ty of the stunts remained even while the bud­gets began to swell. Com­plex sets and con­trap­tions are pieced togeth­er with sta­ples, mark­er pens, card­board and string. As the films progress, the increased scales devot­ed to such infan­tile ideas become part of the joke.

Dur­ing a delet­ed scene from Jack­ass 3D, Bam Marg­era explains to his moth­er, April, his plan to insert anal beads on a pub­lic beach and tie a kite to the oth­er end. A dis­traught April asks how they could pos­si­bly get the per­mits required to do that. Bam shrugs and sim­ply replies: Para­mount”. The Jack­ass series is per­haps the fullest expres­sion of Orson Welles’ max­im that Hol­ly­wood is The biggest elec­tric train set any boy ever had.”

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