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Our sick-genius, 30-something finds inspiration in Jackass
by Zak Weisfeld
The shot is of the dark lawn outside a suburban house. A boy in his late teens stands in the center of the frame. In his right hand he holds a Budweiser longneck. He grips the bottle tightly and his face takes on a look of intense concentration. Then he hits himself in the head with the bottle. Hard. The bottle makes a hollow THOCK as it hits the kid's skull. The kid yelps, curses, and drops to his knees. Laughter can be heard offscreen. There's a cut, and then another kid is standing in the center of the frame, holding a Budweiser beer bottle in his hand. And on it goes.
In a gallery in SoHo, it would be considered performance art. Deep in the Venezuelan jungle, it would be a right of passage. Done at a bus stop by a homeless person, it would be a call for help. But done in the suburbs, videotaped by middle-class males, it's entertainment.
This was an underground tape made by skateboarders sometime in the mid-1990s. It was hilarious and compelling and documented, in its crude and drunken way, the strange new rituals of our youth.
Five years later, this kind of tape spawned the television show Jackass and turned a rarely employed actor named Johnny Knoxville—our own P.J. Clapp from Vestal—into the poster boy for a new kind of extreme sport: Extreme Stupidity. And it worked. Along the way it became MTV's most popular show.
The reason Jackass is so successful is because it's hilarious to watch relatively healthy young men hurt themselves in strange ways. It is certainly the finest (and probably the most important) show ever to air on MTV and one of the funniest ever to air on television, period. If you like that sort of thing.
And if you like that sort of thing you'll like Jackass: The Movie. The movie wisely chose to avoid the gimmick of a plot or any overriding structure. Instead, it's just Johnny and Bam and Steve O and the boys crashing golf carts, electrocuting themselves, shitting their pants, getting gummed by whale sharks and stuffing toy cars up their butts. Oh, and lots of disclaimers.
But walking out of the theater and seeing the kids lined up at the ticket window for the next showing, I had a vision. While the old guard and the money men and the hipsters and the fixers argue about what Knoxville is, and how to lure people here from Vegas or San Diego or even Pigeon Forge, the people have spoken.
This is our legacy. This is our attraction. I propose Universe Johnny Knoxville.
Oh, it may not attract the people we think we want. But it will attract the people we should. Remember, Disneyland isn't really aimed at grownups either—and it's the biggest tourist attraction in the world. So, while their parents wander like stunned cattle through the outlet wasteland of Pigeon Forge or the pancakes and religious kitsch of Gatlinburg, their children will be with us. In Knoxville. Hurting themselves.
Our new attraction should be a collection of crummy buildings filled with skate parks, tattoo parlors, fireworks, anal lubricants, fetid pools of water, coolers of Miller High Life and upended porta potties. And the entire complex should stand in something we have lots of in Knoxville: parking lots the size of inland seas where shopping carts stand ready to inflict grievous bodily harm on their users. This is something we could do. Something we could
Johnny and Knoxville. I'm sure there are those who would prefer that the image most associated with the word Knoxville not be that of a semi-charming, 30-some-year old dipshit who's made a career out off hurting himself. They'd remind us of James Agee or Cormac McCarthy or Patricia Neal or, even, David Keith.
David Keith may be a fine actor but few people will drive across town to see him perform, let alone across the country. James Agee may have been twice the movie critic that Pauline Kael ever was but his legacy to Knoxville is now a hole in the ground and a poem quickly forgotten by dozens of American schoolchildren. Even Cormac McCarthy had the sense to get out as quickly as he could. And no one read him until he did. Which leaves us with what? All that remains is the debased, cornpone, aww shucks obesity, and the '50s nostalgia trip of Dollywood. Here's a chance for Knoxville to have its own thing.
Because for my money nobody is more Knoxville than Johnny. Not only has he made the name Knoxville cool (no easy task), but he's associated it with the real Knoxville. Scruffy, gritty, unglamorous, annoying, funny and more than a little embarrassing. But it's true. And it's ours. And it's being advertised throughout the world right now. Knoxville could become the ür-city of our nation's aimless youth. It could stand in for every crappy, sprawling, charmless, mid-sized, middle-American city that spawned Johnny and his legions. The time is now! Stand up, Knoxville, and smile as you intentionally get a papercut on your nuts.
October 31, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 44
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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