The last thing that really made me happy was this Sunday’s episode of Jackass, specifically the long montage (scored to the Undertones’ rapturous “Teen-Age Kicks”) of various jackasses going off a high diving board on pogo sticks and Razor scooters and stilts and skateboards and BMX bikes.
Like everything executive producer Spike Jonze does–from his skateboarding short Eric Chaplin to Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice” video, where Christopher Walken gets a case of Astaire-grade happy feet–Jackass takes contagious pleasure in the way human movement looks on film (or, OK, tape). With its long takes and unself-consciously raw cinematography, it’s a Lumiere-esque island of minimalism amid the otherwise jackrabbity, mise en scène of MTV. Also, it’s funny when they fall down.
I’m not the only one who likes this show, obviously. Two more kids got hurt yesterday while shooting a Jackass-style stunt in Kentucky. A 17-year-old hit his 16-year-old friend with a car while two other kids watched, camcorders in hand, hoping (despite the warning at the end of every Jackass where it says they won’t even look at submissions from viewers) that the tape would get them on the show. The 16-year-old suffered a broken leg (which will probably just cement his status as the coolest kid in school, but I digress).
My local Fox affiliate showed the footage last night–you see a couple of practice runs, where the kid jumps out of the way at the last second, then the real stunt, where he tries to jump up and clear the car, slams into the windshield and flies over the back of the car. They showed it on a loop, back and to the left, back and to the left, like the Zapruder film. (At one point, somebody in the control room screwed up and the loop ran behind the anchors while they introduced a segment on Robert “No, Wait, NOW I’m Scraping Bottom” Downey Jr.–a nice visual icon for RDJ’s truly jackassed self-destruction. Always crashing in the same car, y’know?)
After a while, the clip sort of becomes abstract, the kid as a Roger Rabbit blur above the car, the shower of glass that falls into the lap of the guy in the passenger seat. This is starting to read like dime-store DeLillo, I know. But doesn’t the fact that practically every stupid thing anybody does now ends up on tape and on the news make us all into characters from Underworld: The Director’s Cut?
Doing really, really dumb things, after all, is sort of a fixture of American adolescence. But at the same time, while I’m as creeped out by Joe Lieberman’s soft-spoken moral watchdog routine as anybody who values their right to make choices vis-à-vis entertainment ought to be, I recognize that Jackass does make masochism look fun/cool. And that if you want a 16-year-old to try something, the best way to do it is to sternly warn him not to.
Andy, you’re the reality TV guy–you can speak to this, I hope.
AP
