#17: Jackass Forever
Guest post by Nikhil Vyas on Jackass, its influences and what's it's influenced - from Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett to Woodstock '99
[Editor’s note: sincere apologies to Nikhil for being the scheduling victim of one of my big, once every few years scatterbrained moments wrt the loss of phone and having to devote time to that rather than uploading.]
At the start of the year I watched Woodstock 99: Peace, Love And Rage, an investigation into the misjudged and mishandled titular music festival. As I saw Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst harangue a crowd of disaffected college bros, I felt startled. For all the documentary’s sneering at the attempt to revive the Flower Power movement for a pre-9/11, post-Columbine America, all I could see was the ways in which our own cultural industries are resuscitating Durst and his milieu.
The long reach of the noughties can be detected everywhere - from the skater boi theatrics of Machine Gun Kelly to My Chemical Romance’s Reunion Tour. It can certainly be seen in the graffiti art apery of NFTs, in cargo pants and Ugg boots, in the Sex and the City reboot, in Bennifer. The popular reformation in morals that has passed in the subsequent years seemingly conceals a yearning to just break stuff.
Against this zombified backdrop of pop culture, it is perhaps inevitable that Jackass was to be remade in 2022. Jackass packaged the simplest of premises - a pack of colourful misfits, led by the inimitable Johnny Knoxville, trafficking in one self-destructive prank after another, stitched together only by their camaraderie and the editing prowess of Windows Media Player - into a franchise spanning over a decade, earning almost $250 million worldwide. What turns out to be totally unexpected is how the remake - Jackass Forever - would pose more intriguing questions than any other of the current crop.
Jackass Forever opens with an image as startling as the much more lurid ones to follow - a promo for MTV Films. MTV’s decline is well documented, and the direct programming output the company is still responsible for is negligible. In fact, MTV Entertainment's last film was the previous sequel Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa, a decade ago. From the very beginning, we are thus watching a phantasm - a last hurrah for the corporation that engineered a generation, now evaporating out of culture.
This sense of discontinuity continues for the rest of the running time. The form that Knoxville and his co-founders Chris Tremaine and Spike Jonze pioneered - a technique of decontextualised, short-form, clip-based slapstick comedy- paved the way for the Internet’s current model of video consumption. Jackass anticipated not only YouTube (the medium in which, ironically, I first watched it as a 13-year-old, alongside searches for ‘South Park funniest bits’) but Vine, Instagram Reels and Tiktok. The kinds of Content which now form the backbone of virality in 2022 - for instance, the now-beloved clip of a gaggle of British lads, downing vodka, kissing each other and battering each other with chairs- would barely make the blooper reel of Jackass film.
Yet, rather than invalidate Jackass Forever, the evolution of our media culture rewards the experience of watching it to a far greater degree now than were it released earlier. It is a durational art project as much as a film, not only in its content and in its process, but in its form. Watching it in a cinema, I felt both battered into submission and elevated by its non-stop barrage of grotesqueries, punctuated only by the agonised gasps of the audience. It felt beautifully apparent that no other release in the past two years has been as dependent on a sense of collective, embodied encounter as this film- that somehow, Jackass Forever is a more convincing love letter to cinema than anything Steven Spielberg could manage.
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Little about Jackass’ modus operandi has evolved over the years. The film swiftly introduces us to the crew of returners - Knoxville, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Dave England, Wee Man, Danger Ehren, Preston Lacy- through a Godzilla parody, where the kaiju is depicted by Pontius’ latex-covered penis. They have whittled down over the years. Replacing old members Bam Mergera and Ryan Dunn, Jackass Forever subtly introduces new faces - Eric Manaka, Jasper, Zach Holmes and Rachel Wolfson, subtly diversifying the all-white all-male spine of the crew. Wee Man, interviewed by The New York Times, stated “When we first started…we didn’t think it was funny for girls to get hurt”, but Wolfson is gamely involved, including receiving ‘Scorpion Botox’ at one memorable juncture.
One need not mistake this affirmative action for any wider remit of progressive remodelling the franchise has undergone, however. Attempting a feminist framing of Jackass Forever is futile - Wolfson, the lone female performer, is still very much a background character, the film’s audiences were 68% male, and phallocentrism is coded into every single frame. However, in its own unassuming way, Jackass Forever goes surprisingly far in disrupting traditional masculinities and forging alternative ones.
For a spectacle whose subjectivity probably ranks alongside The Human Centipede or Salo, or 120 Days in Sodom, it is the film’s tenderness that differentiates it. While the image of laddish self-destruction in pursuit of an audience has remained popular, Jackass Forever forsakes the inherent nastiness that often sours this kind of media. Even as they attempt to destroy each other’s penises, or battle with venomous creatures, or successfully ignite their farts, there is a poignant camaraderie that underpins everything. There is plenty of machismo and competitivity, but also a quiet humility underpinning everything – a sense that when a task goes genuinely too far for somebody and they wish to tap out, this will be OK, and that they will be looked after. The crew have worked together for over 20 years and the physical intimacy that comes from this is on full display: they are constantly slapping, tickling, hugging, fondling, clambering over one another. When Preston Lacy’s testicles need to be squeezed into a box, Danger Ehren unquestioningly wiggles them into place with his hands.
Given that the franchise originated alongside a canon of noughties homophobia that included nu-metal and Eminem, the crew’s dependence on such affective modes of interpersonal exchange is surprising. The temptation to write the words ‘QUEER SUBTEXT’ into the film’s margins and triple-underline it is great, yet it seems to come more from a sense of resilience in the face of ageing. Knoxville, with his glasses and grey hairs that are visible even through the frosted tips, resembles a headteacher more than a virtuoso of self-destruction, while Steve-O jokes about his ongoing meditation practice. A sense of bodily decay and arthritic deterioration creeps through the scenes. Each gasp of pain feels more strained, and the camera lingers on reddened faces struggling to breathe and recover. The split second of the gang’s concern at whether a stunt has really caused damage before erupting into laughter slowly lasts longer and longer
The 20- plus years since the origin have not been wholly kind to the crew. Several crew members have battled substance abuse, including Steve-O (who had to be admitted to psychiatric care), Bam Mergera, (who was struck off the production after breaking his sobriety) and most tragically, Ryan Dunn, who died in a drunk driving accident ten years ago. Knoxville has been in therapy for years, but is reticent about the post-traumatic impact of working on Jackass. It is impossible not to watch with this context, and it lends a particular poignancy to the fumbling ways in which they foreground care on-screen, and to the determination with which they pursue their tasks, as if their life- and death-drives have become indistinguishable.
The question of age is central to the film. Like the wider cultural landscape it is part of, Jackass Forever is acutely interested in revival. Iconic old stunts are re-attempted, with footage of the originals spliced in, yet now the crew have the means, budget and clout to rope in more aggressively ambitious and outrageous set pieces- and co-stars. Thus, the ‘cup game’, which originated in the form of Knoxville wearing a cup and being hit in the balls by some kids in a backyard, has evolved into a triathlon of world class athletes viciously attacking Danger Ehren’s flimsy cup. Fans of the original show, who would grow up to carry the torch of shock comedy the show pioneered, hang around as onlookers and participants - like Eric Andre, Tyler the Creator, and aforementioned Machine Gun Kelly. A film that is constantly, implicitly asking itself ‘why are we doing this?’ finds its answers through pointing to its legacy, through committing to the bit, through its guys just hanging out.
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But while the film’s temporal slipperiness and meta- commentaries are intriguing to note while watching, they form only part of its appeal. For all the insistence of its makers- and critics-that it’s ‘never not funny to see someone get hit in the nuts’, Jackass has always been deeply interested in the aestheticisation of pain. In and amongst the smashing of penises is interwoven a rich thread of pastiche and art-historical referencing, from its opening tribute to Gojira, continuing throughout in ways both conscious and accidental.
While Knoxville assiduously denies any foregrounding of fine art contexts in the planning of his stunts, Knoxville and Tremaine have long paid tribute to the antecedents of slapstick that date back to the silent era - the Three Stooges, Jerry Lewis, and especially Buster Keaton. Indeed, Jackass Forever reverses Keaton’s infamous gag of a house falling on him: in one clip, Knoxville is ejected through the roof of a shopping mall. Looney Tunes looms large in the visual imagination of the show, too - one brilliant sequence features Knoxville blasted out of a cannon as Wile E Coyote would do, stretching out for the sun like Icarus.
Other intriguing throughlines can be noticed. Arguably the film’s most brazenly horrific moment is when Steve-O is induced to have a beehive constructed onto his penis. The queen bee is placed in a box and attached to the tip, and more and more bees added till a writhing totem is hanging off the end of his dick. The camera closely tracks his face, contorted in agony, eyes bulging in their sockets, cutting in and out of the bee-suited ensemble calmly smothering his genitals, until the scene resembles a David Cronenberg body horror. Like him, Knoxville is acutely interested in the moment in which the human body is transformed to resemble something else.
Whether it is set pieces like this, tributes to The Silence Of The Lambs, or a scene with a man trapped in a room with a bear in a deranged sequel to Joseph Beueys’ I Like America and America Likes Me, the dissembling tendencies of Knoxville, Tremaine and Jonze exist in and extend a long tradition. It is less surprising, then, that in 2010, New York’s Museum of Modern Art screened the then-newly released Jackass 3D, that critical anthologies of the Jackass series exist, that performance artists openly acknowledge their indebtedness to the series. What, then, does this film have to say critically about us now?
Partly, it is because the fanbase has grown up, too. The dirtbags who watched this as teenagers now have leftist podcasts and New Yorker columns. We are primed to intellectualise the pop culture that formed our childhoods, whether it is Jackass, or Family Guy, or The Inbetweeeners.
However, what has always differentiated Jackass from other gross-out body-endangering game-TV is that the games are almost never designed as showcases of strength or prowess. Very often, victory is down to dumb luck rather than strategy. And thus, the same message that one of Buster Keaton’s most adoring fans saw in his work, is what we might glean today.
That fan was Samuel Beckett, who would create his only moving image work (aptly titled Film) with Keaton as its central actor. Beckett saw the profound in Keaton’s mundane - the perfect articulation for the condition of a modern human grappling with their mortality. Towards the end of Jackass Forever, this concern emerges more and more urgently.
The crew start collapsing, and tapping out of tasks more. Danger Ehren is wracked by fear, without a modicum of humour, by the bear sniffing at his genitals, Dave England is soaked in pig cum before sliding his way to freedom, and Knoxville is severely injured in another iteration of his long-running attempt to ride a bull successfully. There is a Beckettian sense of despair underpinning the final clips, of watching a group of ppl spinning out the same routine and it not being quite as funny as what we have been watching till that point.
Jackass Forever ends with ‘The Vomitron’, the most impressive set piece of the film. Half the crew are strapped to a high-speed merry-go-round, drinking milk again and again till they are throwing up violently, while the other half gather in an ambush, with dozens of extras. They then charge, setting off explosions, and machine-gunning the dizzy, vomiting crew with paintballs. in another curious convergence of the avant-garde and the lowbrow, another film released later in the year, Ruben Ostlund’s Triangle Of Sadness, framed its second act around a protracted spectacle of vomiting. But Jackass Forever takes that mantle and runs with it, past the hills and into the sunset.
The film’s final task may well be this current crew’s, too. While another iteration may emerge, it is unclear whether Knoxville et al will perform or if the mantle will be passed to the newcomers, especially given the scale of injuries this film inflicted on its participants. Knoxville received a brain haemorrhage as a result of his bull stunt, Danger Ehren’s testicle was ruptured, Dave England burned, Steve-O hospitalized.
In her treatise Powers Of Horror, Julia Kristeva outlined the ‘abject’ as an object that holds the subject in a unique relationship. The abject is defined by ‘brutish suffering’, a feeling in which a subject both recognises itself and recognises what it is trying to distance itself from. The abject is a particularly potent literary device due to how it holds within itself the capacity to transgress and disrupt our commonly understood social orders: ‘It is thus not the lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, and order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.’
I watched Jackass Forever on Valentine’s Day; in the week of a festival I had planned to have a show staged at. That festival had been cancelled due to COVID fears, and watching the film, it felt borderline miraculous to experience that feeling of abjection - to see something so committed to reviving a spirit of trespass, of risk, of disrespect to borders, position and rules. It is not to say that this spirit is an uncomplicatedly good thing, but that the film allows us to unburden something in our collective psyche, to remind ourselves that certain urges need to be pushed to an extreme. At the end, my companion turned to me and said ‘Dudes fucking rock’, and for once, it was impossible not to agree.