JACKASS (3D)

Here I go. Here I go. Here I go again. Girls, what’s my weakness?

Men!

Okay, then. Afterwards, at the bar, Dawn and Stephanie and Carley and I have serious trouble coming up with a female version that wouldn’t shade immediately into exploitation and porn. Though one could make a case for Marina Abramovic as an honorary member of the crew. Like her recent show, this movie premiered at MoMA, a masterstroke of critique that helps us re-read the high modernism housed in that shiny tower for what it is: a succession of dumb dares (I know the feeling). Still, why pass up the chance to see it with a hundred crazed teens. Sorry MPAA. These kids crave the unsettling drama of endurance art, they too want to seize the means of production, plumb male erotics, and thrill to the anarchic energy of the carnivalesque as manifested in suburban subculture. What warning label would dare forbid them that?

If you introduce a dildo bazooka in act one, etc. Johnny Knoxville, as leader, we note, is obliged to endure the most explicit pain—buffalo and bull both slam him full-on and leave a crumpled and groaning, unimpeachable example for the rest. Bam’s the most likely mutineer. Anxious—he gets cranky in the snakepit—he’s the father-killer, the sneaker-upper who likes to play funny fate. So it’s ironic he falls conspicuous victim to the enormous high-five that is really God’s hand—reached out to us in kindness, it always clobbers us nonetheless. Steve-O is the substance-specialist, drinking (and gagging on) a cup of sweat, taking a ride in a port-a-potty full of shit. His own realistic face, tattooed on his back, says fate has its limits, too, wherever true presence abides. Chris Pontius, when he ties his dick to a remote-control helicopter, utters the crucial line: “Get it over with.” Phrase whispered, of course, by Caesar, Christ, and Jesse James. He presides as dentist when they pull their buddy’s tooth by tying it to the rear bumper of a Lamborghini that speeds off and: yank. Our pain is miniscule, pointless, and brief, and our machines expansive beasts whose capacities we can’t imagine how to test.

In the final shot, all await the inevitable, climactic sneak-attack, but when the entire set explodes and is deluged by an enormous wave it’s so total that their expectation means nothing, there’s no transfiguration, you’re bound to a few friends too crazy for you to understand, they can’t understand you, you’re forever on your guard. But come up smiling every time. Dawn and Stephanie both slapped me really hard, the other night. Get it over with, break, and be happy for once.