Hey guys,
In addition, Alex, to that being a drool-inducing piece of writing, you’ve also reintroduced the dangerous cool of a show like Jackass to our discussion. The show, as you and I have rhapsodized away from “The Breakfast Table,” resituates comedy in a highly organic but artful context that’s almost the beautiful antithesis of the MTV aesthetic. There are no blazing, head-aching edits; every episode looks homemade, almost like it was picked up by MTV at a thrift store (are we seeing this on MTV only because shabby is chic?); and that soundtrack–Jesus, it’s so mercifully anti-TRL. Though I wonder what effect the show would have if these pranks were rigged to, say, Samantha Mumba as opposed to Built To Spill. This is to say that the show would speak to an entirely different audience with a mere shuffle of the tunes.
But I think what Alex was arriving at was the way Jackass and its copycat jackasses are covered–with painstaking detail. Whoever missed the show late Sunday stood a pretty good chance of seeing the stunt at 6:30 like I did over and over. Whatever admiration I have for Johnny Knoxville and his traveling circus is tempered with the awareness that it’s perceived as a direct cause of stupid adolescent behavior, the kind that’s been going for decades. This all changes when you throw in a Sony handheld and a country teeming with news program lusting after another sensational teen tragedy. (Incidentally, Alex, I think that media nightmare you referenced so eloquently is from White Noise, but DeLillo’s miasma of cultural dread wafts from the pages of one text to the other, so my memory may have fuzzed over, in which case I’m out of line.) Anyway, it’s a highly flammable combo and that show, which admittedly is not that innocent, should lie somewhere outside the borders of blame but has the human for capacity responsibility. With that in mind, that kid’s insistence the networks take a chill pill is heartbreaking and hilarious.
But Andy, don’t drop your stuff out the window; someone will say you stole that from the last movie that sent a TV into a swimming pool. You guys make both make startlingly thorough points. Unfortunately, I have to run to a screening. But before I go, chew on this. We no longer have dreams because the culture dreams harder; we no longer own our behavior because the culture behaves first; our thoughts, our ideas, our suspicions belong to a Zeitgeist that will forever be our escape clause. The cultural oversaturation plea will replace the one for insanity. This, Andy, is what happen when the media go down on themselves.
Where is my mind? I expect an answer when I get back. Btw: Are we are all postmodernism’s bitches?
