Decades of glorious self-destruction
Niko Stratis on Jackass: Best and Last
The great Niko Stratis joins us today to write about the new and final Jackass film, and the gang's delightfully dangerous, hilarious and heartwarming legacy. You'll need to be a paid subscriber to read it in full. Here is a very big discount!
Read an excerpt from her book The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman on Hell World here and a talk we had about it here. Niko also wrote about her favorite R.E.M. songs here.
Luke O’Neil
Luke O’Neil
In other news I had four new pieces go up at Flaming Hydra the other day. You can read one or two below.
Luke O’Neil
And be sure to read this excerpt from s.e. smith's brand new book All My Dead Cats and Other Losses if you missed it.
Luke O’Neil
Decades of glorious self-destruction
by Niko Stratis
I saw Jackass: Best and Last alone on opening day, in a mostly empty theatre in Toronto in the mid-afternoon. When I arrived, there was only one other person present, a man sitting dead centre in the first row playing a game in landscape mode on his phone. I sat in my assigned seat, close to the back of the theatre on the aisle, and texted everyone I know to tell them I had made a mistake. I wanted the theatre to be full, and raucous, and loud. I wanted my laughter to feel drowned out by the voices of many, as it has always been for these movies. As the pre-show commercials rolled on, bodies slowly shuffled in. A woman by herself sat in the second row, then another on the opposite end. Another woman found seats close to me, and before too long was joined by a man, who produced a couple of tall cans he had smuggled into the theatre. We waited in our chosen spots, largely alone but together in spirit, as if we were seated in the pews waiting for the final sermon to be delivered.
I suppose then this will be about death, but only in that every end is about death in its way, and this is the price we pay for being here. Not just alive, a passive thing, but living. A dance someone chooses to learn the steps of. And so this is about death because it is about living, and it is about what happens between those two poles. It’s fitting, then, that one of the first things we see, in what will be the last of the Jackass films, is Johnny Knoxville shooting himself in the chest with a .38 revolver.
This is previously unaired footage, well before he had adopted the name we all know him by (there are multiple instances of people referring to Knoxville as PJ in the film, the initials of his birth name Philip John Clapp). We watch a young Knoxville gather a bulletproof vest, a hastily loaded revolver, and a stack of dog-eared porn magazines to act as additional padding between flesh and certain death. He drives out to a secluded spot, away from any potentially concerned onlookers, presses the gun against his chest, and after some understandable hesitation, pulls the trigger. Click. The chamber is empty. A voice from offscreen tells him “Well now you have to go through the chamber and find where the bullet is,” which feels like the last words the devil ever whispers. He pulls the trigger again. Click. Again. Click. It’s a harder scene to watch than one that appears later, where grown men wear see-through pants and drink heavy laxatives to slosh around in their own shit. When the gun finally fires, Knoxville is shocked, but delighted, and runs to his friends and their waiting car, the gun left smoking on the ground, laughing maniacally as he leaps in and drives away.
It’s his laugh that disarms it. It’s his laugh that disarms everything, as if it alone is what stops bullets. There is no real Jackass without it and without him specifically wielding it, and it’s only natural that it’s hard to say farewell to it ringing in our ears. I have been raised by Jackass, buying CKY tapes at a local skate shop and sharing bootlegs of the original MTV Jackass series aired in 2000 when I was 18 years old. They showed me a better example of masculinity than I had ever seen before, and modeled a creative use for self-destructive desires, that they might lead to glorious self-expression. That I never ended up being a man at all is no one's fault, it’s just that I wanted to stop being alive, and start living, and to do so meant learning to do a controlled explosion of the self.