Jackass.
With the triumphant return of the Jackass gang, one of the few true events of theatrical moviegoing in the pandemic era, the franchise built on absurd stunts, crass hijinks, and bruised cocks has at last been seriously accepted as the masterful trash it’s always been. Although much Jackass analysis revolves around the on-screen content—from the cinematic form of bold stunts to the interpersonal dynamics and bodies of the cast—the uniquely digital nature of the series is central to its reclamation. It’s that ramshackle camcorder aesthetic, bordering on snuff compared to glossy Hollywood productions, that gives the film series part of its distinct appeal. As much as the naked bodies and buttholes, the illicit sensation of going to a multiplex to watch MiniDV tape makes the first Jackass movie what it is—even as the image resolution and budget have increased, there’s an intimacy and immediacy to the blown-up GoPro footage featured throughout Jackass Forever. We’re shown the grotesque bruises and concussions of the cast, we see the flaws in the image too, blocky pixels and digital streaks magnified to epic proportions.
While it’s the acknowledged influence of Buster Keaton or Chuck Jones that have attracted many cinephiles to the franchise, the visual roots of Jackass still lie primarily in skate videos. Before it became an MTV-produced television show, there were two different video series that built the foundation of what Jackass would become: Bam Margera’s CKY movies, and Big Brother skate magazine’s series of stunt films, conceived by Jeff Tremaine and featuring future Jackass crew members like Knoxville, Chris Pontius, and Wee Man. In their own ways, both direct-to-video series stretched the limits of skate videos into a kind of hybrid filmmaking. CKY—an abbreviation for “Camp Kill Yourself”—is one part prank phone call, one part Trash Humpers, and one part Lars von Trier’s The Idiots, with some occasional skateboarding montages sprinkled in. Johnny Knoxville and Jeff Tremaine brought a sense of cinematic style to Jackass: the conceptual gags and costumes, the conscious lineage with Hollywood stunt work and daredevils like Evel Knievel, and a kinship with pioneering transgressors like John Waters. But Bam Margera, whose personal issues pushed him out of Jackass Forever, is truly the dirtbag MiniDV auteur at the heart of the series, all mean-spirited candid camera fuckery, suburban mind-rot, dust-off huffing, and shopping cart jousting. Knoxville’s work is about pushing the body beyond its limits, while Bam’s is fundamentally about a kind of depressive self-harm, hurting yourself for no reason other than what the hell else is there to do in West Chester, Pennsylvania at 2AM except jerk off or give your friends concussions in a TJ Maxx parking lot.
The "Medieval Shopping Carts" stunt from the first CKY movie.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the Big Brother films seemed to be more self-consciously striving for a kind of video art. If there’s any ancestor to “Self Defense,” the original infamous Knoxville stunt filmed for Big Brother and shown in the pilot episode of Jackass, it’s the work of a video pioneer like Chris Burden, who similarly harmed himself in 1971’s “Shoot.” The closest high-art antecedent for Knoxville’s play with stunt and spectacle is David Leslie, the self-styled “Impact Addict,” who similarly took influence from Evel Knievel in various performances that risked his life and limb. In front of New York gallery audiences, Leslie threw himself off buildings and blew himself up—years before Knoxville met Butterbean, the untrained Impact Addict threw himself into rounds with champion boxers and martial arts masters, and spoke in an MTV News interview about his desire to go up against Mike Tyson. There are echoes of Jackass in Leslie’s incorporation of camp as well; in his farewell performance, he dressed as Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music and scaled a fake mountain as “Climb Every Mountain” played, a spiritual parallel to the vaudevillian costumes worn in stunts like the “Flight of Icarus” in Jackass Forever.
The transition from a television series to a theatrical endeavor allowed Jackass to up the ante in terms of content and profanity. But it changed relatively little about the actual structure or form of Jackass, with the exception of the trademark hyper-cinematic set-pieces that bookend every film, riffing on musicals or monster movies. Cameos from Tony Hawk or Mat Hoffman aside, as Jackass mutated into its own unique form of spectacle, it developed a specific appeal to a larger audience beyond just Thrasher magazine subscribers. But even as skateboards became less conspicuous, Jackass has always taken something more existential from skate videos: the bumps. To grind a rail or launch yourself into the air involves accepting a certain amount of risk, which a skater obviously wants to avoid, but it’s hard to deny that part of the appeal of skate videos was not just seeing perfectly executed trips, but seeing nasty falls and total wipe-outs on loop. Like car crashes in NASCAR or hockey fights, accidents weren't the point, but it's hard to deny their contribution to the eruptive intensity and unpredictability of a sport—not to mention that it's hard not to be impressed by someone who takes a gnarly spill and picks themselves back up.
As much as it is about aerodynamics, skateboarding is thus about “taking a bump,” a central concept in professional wrestling, another form of “sports entertainment” that has a unique, if less obvious, connection with Jackass. Of course, there are some literal connections between the two worlds: Johnny Knoxville appeared in this year’s WWE Royal Rumble and is slated to compete in the Intercontinental Title Match at this year’s WrestleMania, and Steve-O and Chris Pontius of the Jackass crew had a brief feud with Samoan powerhouse Umaga on Monday Night Raw in 2007. Given that Knoxville was growing up in Tennessee during the final days of the old-school territorial era of Southern wrasslin, and Bam was a teen outside Philadelphia during the heyday of the city’s foul-mouthed, ultraviolet, and endlessly influential Extreme Championship Wrestling, it’s not hard to imagine the young Jackass crew being wrestling fans. One can so easily imagine a baby-faced Knoxville eating up tapes of Abdullah the Butcher taking a fork to someone’s face, or Bam getting inspiration for his own antics from ECW’s infamous “Fans Bring the Weapons” matches, in which competitors bruised each other with toaster ovens and rolling pins.
A WWF trading card for "Raven's Shopping Cart"
Despite the centrality of taking bumps to both skating and wrestling, there is a central difference between the two forms: in wrestling, you have to take bumps, and it’s an ability that you sharpen over time, whereas in skateboarding you’ve accepted that accidents will inevitably happen but you’re not necessarily trying to eat shit. Jackass takes skateboarding—and stunt-work in general, since it’s a medium in which you’re trying to make controlled situations look like accidents—to a wrestling-like level, where the skill of skating is no longer relevant and it’s only the bruises, bangs, and bumps that matter. Though Bam might have been a pro skater, he was never near the athletic level of a Tony Hawk—it was more his daredevilry and give-no-fucks persona that made him an icon. And Johnny Knoxville’s skateboarding ability has always been fairly laughable, the explicit punchline of the “Grinding the Rail” gag in Jackass: The Movie (2002).
Skating and wrestling alike have a complex relationship to the camera. In both mediums, filming began as a form of performance capture, but would over time evolve into a more purposeful and self-aware artistic tool, with more aesthetic effects, like the iconic fish-eye lens of so many skate videos, as well as more montage. They were not necessarily intended to be archived, but devoted fans of both wrestling and skating eventually developed a culture based around tape bootlegging, an almost cinephilic-like practice of consumption and amateur archival work that in many ways mimics film torrenting today. As the internet exploded, skate enthusiasts and wrestling marks found community on the internet, and soon physical videotape would be replaced by YouTube uploads, MEGA folders, and Google drives. In both mediums, shortcomings in quality and fidelity became prized features; there’s a tangibly different feeling to watching a skate video filmed on tape versus one filmed on a DSLR, just like there’s a very different feeling to watching a video rip of some obscure Japanese deathmatch than there is watching a 4K livestream of the same event. Both wrestling and skating stretch the limits of athleticism, legality, and good taste, so they’re uniquely suited to a medium that feels inherently bootlegged.
In Jackass, it’s not just the performers that take bumps, but the camera too, and the audience by proxy. The camera becomes a potential object of destruction and mayhem just like the human body, and at times even becomes a structural part of the gag itself. The “Vomatorium” finale of Jackass Forever is structured around a super-charged playground roundabout—several cast members are strapped in and instructed to chug milk as they’re spun in circles. Attached to the center post of the roundabout is a circle of GoPro cameras, forcing us to sit directly in front of our miserable subjects as they evict the contents of their stomachs, the lenses and our perspective smeared in puke and goop. Despite the documentary-like qualities of Jackass and its unique kind of performance capture, the lens isn’t an impartial Bazinian observer or a straight man to the comic performers. The camera is an active and crucial participant in the shenanigans, pushed beyond its accepted uses just as the Jackass crew stretch their own bodies beyond normal human limits of pain and discomfort.