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pinelife3 · 7 years ago

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Pain Is Love

‘Twas the modern poet Ja Rule who said “Pain is Love” - and he proved his point by getting it tattooed on his tit.

What I particularly admire is the subtle font styles he’s opted for here - slimer for ‘pain’ and romantic cursive for ‘love’. Really captures the duality of man: part slimer, part romantic - all hairless, nipple-free pectoral.

Anyway.

Sit down, ash your cigarette on your mum’s carpet, crack that can of sugarfree Red Bull and let me pitch you a show: a show where Academy Award winners collaborate with authentic amateur performers. A show that combines drama, comedy, and spectacular CGI-free stunts to conjure a profound message about the state of modern masculinity and the importance of brotherhood in the face of adversity. Is this the sequel to Band of Brothers?, you may be thinking, am I about to have my heart and mind touched by HBO’s newest masterwork? Close. We’re talking about Jackass.

Academy Award winner Spike Jonze co-created the TV show Jackass c. 1999. Jonze was freshly married to Sofia Coppola and had just released the indie boner pill Being John Malkovich. Chock full of highbrow cred (I can only assume that being married to a Coppola opens pretty heavy doors in the film industry), he tied his fate to a rambunctious bunch of stunt performers and created a TV show that would horrify lameos across the planet. (Obviously Johnny Knoxville and Jeff Tremaine were also instrumental in founding Jackass - but that angle doesn’t play as well).

Quick Jackass filmography:

Jackass TV show (2000 - 2002)

Jackass: The Movie (2002)

Jackass Number Two (2006)

Jackass 3D (2010)

If you’re curious about the history or cultural significance of Jackass (you mean you didn’t live it in the 2000s?), Wikipedia and any Reddit thread about Steve-O or Ryan Dunn will cover that for you. I’ve got an argument: Jackass is profound because these dudes love pain and enjoy suffering for each other - and all of that has secured them a place in the pantheon of eternal public adoration. Of course, this is all based on you buying into my original Ja Rule-based premise that pain is love. If you’re not with me on that, I can’t be bothered to persuade you so seeya.

Cast your mind back to the year two thousand, to a show which specialised in revolting, brain-dead comedy and stunts designed to humiliate and hurt their stars for the audience’s amusement, and significantly, for the amusement of the star’s friends. Babies born that year are just now becoming legal romantic prospects. New York still had two towers. Clinton was still president (FYI: the jizz on Lewinsky’s dress had dried more than three years ago). Monster energy drinks were just a glimmer in the eye of Monster Beverage Corp. - which is actually a real shame because the Jackass aesthetic seems very similar to Monster’s: a bunch of guys standing around bare chested in low rise jeans with bad tattoos, all attempting to whack each other in the balls, braying like donkeys and waiting for something interesting to happen.

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A lot of the guys in Jackass were trained stunt performers or had attended clown school type places - they were really great at falling over and basically forged a career in getting their asses kicked. Most people probably would be hesitant to staple something to their friend. These guys relish it. There’s some kind of twilight Jackass zone where doing something stupid and violent to your friend has no negative impact on your relationship.

They were also creatively revolting. Who in their high school days didn’t see a guy snort a shot of wasabi and then vomit out his eyes, brain exploding from his ass as his toenails popped off from the shock of the spice? Who amongst us didn’t pay their friend $4 (this was 2007, so work that into your inflation calculations) to see how many rotten Four‘n Twenty pies he could eat in a minute? These are common forms of disgustingness, the kind of disgustingness which any bored teenager can conjure. No, on Jackass they invented an elaborate rig to facilitate drinking each others’ ball sweat.

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Another attraction of the show: in addition to seeing some great creative minds at work (Spike Jonze, Lance Bangs, Brad Pitt, the genius who thought of the flying portaloo) you can also see those great minds become violently ill when confronted with the bodily fluids of their coworkers. Lance Bangs in particular (camera dude in the video above with the wicked sun visor) seemed to develop a rep as an easy puker. Anytime something gross is going on, cameras are on the billed stars - and also on Lance to see if he’ll puke. It’s important that we see him puke.

I think what differentiates Jackass from other gross-out, stupid comedies is the relationship between the dudes. When writing Superbad (a really great, filthy film) the jizz jokes came easily to Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, but they have admitted it took some time to add ‘heart’ to the movie:

Apatow kept steering them toward a stronger emotional story. The script had always had a decent arc for Seth and Evan in terms of the girlfriend quest, as they eventually learned some lessons from the night’s disasters, but nothing satisfying for the pair of young men themselves.

Rogen says, “As we got older, we started realizing [the story] needed more, and Judd helped with planting the seed of that, I have to say. We just were thinking what could be funny and kind of relatable.

“We thought it would be funny to have a sweet movie, a sweet story going on in the midst of the filthy sexuality of it all. That was something we thought would play well against it and would add more layers to the movie.”

With prodding from Apatow, and through many conversations, they made the primary plot an unlikely love story between the two buddies.

“We always view our movies as male love stories in a weird kind of way. Which is funny, because Evan and I are totally not like that at all. We don’t hug each other. It’s always amusing to us.

“It’s like any other movie with a man and a woman, we just want to see them tell each other how much they love each other. And I think we may have even started there and thought what other kinds of things these guys could be going through, and the whole college Dartmouth thing was what we thought would work best for the movie,” says Rogen.

In the case of Jackass, the heart is implied. Surely you could only be so awful to someone you really loved. (See also: divorce, Othello, The Staircase.)

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Johnny Knoxville is the closest thing to the show’s straight man (in that he is the most conventionally attractive and seems to eat it less than the others) but other than that it’s 100% fool. A lot of gay jokes (calling someone a cocksucker is the worst insult because, as we all know, there is nothing more terrible and degrading in life than sucking a dick). A lot of self-deprecation. A lot of ball whacking. A lot of falling over. A lot of laughing. It’s relentless. Like I mentioned earlier, the comments section of Reddit and YouTube (and possibly the world at large) have a lot of affection for the cast of Jackass, based essentially on their willingness to humiliate themselves and eat shit for our amusement.

Watch Steve-O smash everything he owns for your entertainment:

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In some way there is an undercurrent of sadness that they need to kick their asses like this. It’s really bordering on self-flagellation at times. They egg each other on so much - yeah do it, man, decapitate yourself, it’ll be hilarious.

Danny Brown fired off the tweets below c. 2014 and I remember being really moved by them. He was trying to quit lean (which he refers to as ‘po’ below) and went on the bleakest Twitter spree:

(Apologies if it looks a bit janky - I patchworked it together in MS Paint.)

As time has passed many of the people from Jackass have had issues. Ryan Dunn died in a drink driving accident. Steve-O had terrible substance abuse problems but is straight-edge now. Bam Margera got scammed by a mail order bride or something. Johnny Knoxville voiced Leonardo in the 2014 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie and was then replaced in the sequel :’(

So many lives torn apart.

But not uncommon for people who make a fool of themselves for the enjoyment of others.

#Jackass #Spike Jonze #Lance Bangs #Brad Pitt #the joker #alan moore #Danny Brown #superbad #seth rogen #evan goldeberg #judd apatow #johnny knoxville #ryan dunn #bam margera #steve-o

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