Where the Wave Finally Broke

Premiering on October 1, 2000, the MTV prank and stunt show Jackass became an overnight success at a time when extreme sports had reached a pivotal point of transition from the alternative undergrounds of Generation X to the mainstream of millennial youth culture. Back then, the ESPN X Games had only been around for about five years, taking skateboarding, freestyle motorcross, and snowboarding out of niche regional circuits of competition and giving them their own Olympics, with the top talents of the day and their athletic achievements now legitimized by the branding of major corporate sponsorship. Only a year before the premiere of Jackass, Activision's Tony Hawk's Pro Skater brought the same legitimization to the extreme sports video game, centering their appeal not merely on racking up points for performing tricks in novel virtual environments replete with graffiti and dominated by punk and alt-metal soundtracks, but rather the ability to play as real-life professional athletes in the sport. And who could forget Rocket Power, which premiered on Nickelodeon in August, 1999? Created by Arlene Klasky and Gábor Csupó of Rugrats fame, this children's cartoon show about a gang of proactive So-Cal preteens and their sitcom adventures probably went further than any preceding or contemporary work in terms of ameliorating the slacker connotations of extreme sports.

Taken in context, Jackass appears even more so like the stomach-turning afterbirth of extreme sports' crowning achievement in the new millennium. Though its shocking, lowbrow, and often clearly alcohol- and drug-fueled programming continued to overlap with the more sanitized, "legitimate" world of professional extreme sports - celebrities of the latter becoming like ambassadors to the wretched third world of the former - it was clearly the lesser child of the compulsory adaptation of sports, music, and fashion subcultures to an increasingly centralized, corporate-dominated landscape of popular culture. It was the Cain to the X Games' Abel; or, better yet, the Hugo to its Bart Simpson. The latter analogy is more apt, because as was the case in that classic vignette from The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror VII," it would be the freakish, deprived, and attic-bound Hugo who would end up being redeemed. Though extreme sports continue to be popular, it is the unique combination of humorous self-abasement and technical ingenuity of the Jackass franchise that has proven to have the longer mainstream appeal and cultural salience. Candid camera pranks, non-professionals purposely recording themselves doing embarrassing performances for the ironic enjoyment of viewers, viral challenges; all of these have become prolific aspects of mainstream "cringe humor" in the age of the Internet as a decentralized medium for otherwise unskilled amateurs to create their own content and, potentially, to earn a living.

Created by Jeff Tremaine, Johnny Knoxville, and Spike Jonze, all of whom were veterans of the '80s and '90s skateboard magazine and underground tape scene, Jackass was produced on a shoestring budget, and many of its early sketches were cobbled together from materials that its participants had already shot for their own respective, go-nowhere ventures. The initial premise of the show was simply to depict its principal and, at first, virtually anonymous cast - Knoxville, Bam Margera, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Ryan Dunn, Dave England, Jason "Wee Man" Acuña, Ehren McGhehey, and Preston Lacy - engaging in poorly thought-out stunts and even more poorly thought-out public prank skits in an amateurishly taped and edited Grand Guignol of humiliation and injury.

But in a very short amount of time, just as the sense of intimacy, camaraderie, and cooperation between the creators grew, both behind the scenes and before the eyes of the show's key demo of preteen-to-college graduate males, the repertoire of Jackass and the technical sophistication of its spectacle rapidly expanded. Though evidently lacking in any professional stunt experience, minimal safety concerns, or engineering knowledge, the performers became more invested in not only mounting riskier and riskier stunts, not only in thinking up skits that featured more complicated set-ups and were more intensive in their humiliation of the participants, but more importantly in pushing the limits of the human body and mind when applied to a conceit that is so apparently pointless, stupid, and masochistic. In kind, the sense of para-social connection among the show's fans to its stars took on dimensions that went beyond laughing at their expense. By challenging themselves technically, the show's creators also expanded upon the fascinating potential of the show in ways that were not ignored by at least some mainstream critics. What was at first just "stupid" became strangely compelling and empathetic in its depictions of individuals who, without this outlet for their strange impulses, would have likely been swallowed up by the gaping maw of capitalism. In their own way, they were, just like their better peer-reviewed X Games counterparts, industrious and innovative heroes of the American Dream. Except the X Games and Tony Hawk Pro Skater merely conformed the extreme sports underground to technocratic systems of streamlined capital accumulation and financial investment. It was the spectacle of Jackass that proved to be uncannily artistic and intellectual. Its investigations of the margins of American society took up the mantle of New Journalism, Knoxville consciously positioning the team as the unacknowledged successors of classic Hollywood comedians and stuntmen, the resulting chaos bordering on a on-going social experiment, somewhere between the classic '70s documentary series An American Family and Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison role-play simulation.

Needless to say, despite gratuitous efforts to caution viewers against imitating the stunts performed on the show, Jackass inspired a legion of masochistic imitators worldwide, both on- and off-screen. Just as with Saturday Night Fever and disco dance competitions, The Mack and Player's Balls, or Fight Club and underground fight clubs, it's hard to know to what extent Jackass inaugurated a wave of spectacular self-harm and cringe humor among its millennial fanbase, soon to take that inspiration to the wild west markets of the worldwide web, and to what extent it was merely the cipher for a growing tumult of self-destructive and anti-social nihilism in American youth culture. Suffice it to say, Jackass became the subject of a moral panic, and subsequent seasons were more tightly regulated by Viacom, MTV's parent-company. Behind-the-scenes, the camaraderie of the team was being eroded by feelings among the cast that they were not being payed enough for the risks they were taking, and that certain members were not getting sufficient creative input under Tremaine and Knoxville's dictatorial control. Bam Margera quit the show midway through its third and final season, taking the rest of his CKY ("Camp Kill Yourself") crew to start his own show, Viva La Bam. Tremaine, Steve-O, and Chris Pontius, in turn, created Wildboyz, which adapted the Jackass format to that of a travel and nature show, placing its performers in more exotic locales and organizing segments around interactions with wild animals. For their own part, Tremaine, Knoxville, and Jonze envisioned expanding Jackass into a feature-film franchise, banking on the bigger budget, better pay, superior equipment, and leniency of censorship that the silver screen could afford. The first film, Jackass: The Movie, premiered on October 25, 2002, followed by Jackass Number Two in 2006, and Jackass 3D in 2010.

Each film in the Jackass franchise - with the exception of the borderline-narrative spin-off Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa - has been released to an increasingly positive critical evaluation. This is in part due to the simple fact that film critics, despite remaining deeply divided overall, have been forced to acknowledge the increasing technical ambition, craftsmanship, and ingeniousness of the franchise's particular brand of spectacle. Furthermore, one cannot discount the reality that many contemporary film critics had come of age with the franchise, and therefore had a more charitable appreciation of and identification with its narrow, juvenile sense of humor. But most importantly, each Jackass film has been endowed with a sense of pathos that tracks the progression in the personal lives and relationships of its creators, to say nothing of the emotional maturation of its diehard fanbase. Audiences and critics alike have followed the Jackass crew not only through their spectacular injuries, but also through their arrested coming-of-age, each film marked by a melancholy observation of the cast's wrinkling skin and graying hair far more than their concussions, broken bones, and mangled genitals.

Jackass Number Two remains the high watermark of the franchise in terms of the imaginativeness of its stunts and its comedic consistency. But even back in 2006, the ongoing story of the series, with Knoxville as its star, was overwritten by a sense of forced optimism that failed the mask the ephemeral sadness of what Jackass had become. "I'm Johnny Knoxville and this is... The End," he said, before leading the gang in a hilarious and transcendent rendition of "The Best of Times" from the Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein musical La Cage aux Folles. It was sequences like this that led at least some critics to recognize both the transgressive homoeroticism of the franchise - pretenses of masculine broggadocio pushed to extremes of self-parody - as well as the profound, even uncomfortable nakedness of intimacy between these young men throwing themselves into a veritably primal pageant of Dionysian impulse. It was also, however, a foreshadowing of the sun setting on the horizon, of these ironic young heroes of the human spirit themselves reaching the threshold of demise and irrelevancy.

It was always the queer intimacy, the poetic vulgarity of Jackass, more so than the ritual self-abasement, that made it so attractive to a certain generation. Just as one of Knoxville's idols, Hunter S. Thompson, had observed the wave of '60s counterculture, they were watching yet another wave of youth counterculture as it was breaking against the rock of the reactionary status quo, and was about to roll back. ESPN, Activision, Nickelodeon, and Chuck E. Cheese "legitimized" extreme sports, but only insofar as they embraced its superficial content as another vector for capitalizing upon and reinforcing hierarchal structures that prize exceptionalism of achievement and conformity to a sanitized, broadly accessible vision of what youth culture ought to be and ought to cultivate. We could be talking about Big Brother or Dirt, the skateboarding and humor magazines for which Tremaine, Jonze, Pontius, and Knoxville were contributors; or we could be talking about Bam Margera's CKY video series, produced just as much to promote his brother's sludge rock band of the same name as it was to document the puerile antics of himself and the rest of his spoiled, middle-class West Chester friends. In both cases, the creators of Jackass had come out of the ephemeral margins surrounding extreme sports culture, rather than from its center. They were either primarily commenting upon it in the case of the former, or, in the case of the latter, they were mostly amateurs and losers who had little hope of making it in the professional leagues. In other words, they were the fuck-ups at the fringes of a subculture traditionally associated with slackers and fuck-ups, but which was already being rapidly commodified and sanitized of its anti-establishment put-on. They were fuck-ups, but they were also satisfied being fuck-ups, because being a part of that subculture was more important than making it pay, if that meant that it would only end with them being pulled towards the mainstream, rather than pulling the mainstream towards them. Jackass was the last gasp of that street culture ephemera before it was choked off by the very reality T.V. "cringe humor" spectacle that it courted in a final act of audacity, if not defiance. It was the high-water mark of its snottiest, least ambitious, but also most closely knit and spiritually invested participants. You can still see the high-water mark, but at the end of the day, there's no denying that the overarching narrative of Jackass is of a wave that was broken, and has rolled back.

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When Jackass Forever premiered this Thursday, it was accompanied bu "bonus content" curated especially for its early preview audience. Those who were expecting supplemental materials not included in the final film were no doubt disappointed to discover that this "bonus content" amounted to little more than a roundtable discussion between Tremaine and the cast. In addition to all the film's principal players - with the exception of Bam Margera - the roundtable was also opened up to some freshly added members of the franchise. Out of the five, four have previously worked with the Jackass team in some capacity. Sean "Poopies" McInerny, for instance, was the co-star of a Red Bull-produced webseries involving travel, extreme sports, and stupid stunts, and was already effectively introduced to the cast via a Discovery Channel T.V. special, Jackass Shark Week, in July of last year. Zach Holmes, who promoted his own stupid stunt videos on YouTube and Instagram, was the star of his own late-term, short-lived Jackass knockoff for MTV, Too Stupid to Die from 2018. Jasper Dolphin, a founding member and hype man of the Hip Hop collective Odd Future, was also in the main cast of Odd Future's sketch show Loiter Squad for Cartoon Network's AdultSwim, produced by Jeff Tremaine's Dickhouse Productions. Eric Manaka got his first credited film role in Knoxville's Action Point, a borderline-narrative feature in the vein of Bad Grandpa. The odd person out is one Rachel Wolfson, a corporate comedian and influencer (see, "brand ambassador") who is, tellingly, virtually non-existent in the film, with even Jasper's father, Compston "Darkshark" Wilson, getting more screen time and being more involved in the production.

The addition of these new cast members, has, of course, been a selling point of Jackass Forever from the beginning. As the old gang only gets older, rallying them all together for another run through the gauntlet only gets more logistically complicated, as do questions of their personal safety and their responsibility to their loved ones. Knoxville himself has claimed that this will be his final film for the franchise. With a title implying the passing of the torch to a new generation of up-and-coming cringe humorists, the production has culled this crop of useful idiots together in such a way that suggests the logical continuity between its founders' own distorted version of entrepreneurial drive to the new media and gig economy of the present day.

The problem is that, with the debatable exception of Jasper Dolphin and Odd Future, these participants have only found their way to Jackass. They have not, however, found their way to themselves as icons in the making, as discrete members of an underground or subculture who can connect with a spectator because of the spirit of what they do, rather than the superficial content. The very nature of online "cringe humor" is that, even in its virality, it seeks to produce niche content for the ironic enjoyment of viewers who are viewing them in the context of a market dependent on their attentions never being fixed for too long, constantly clicking and scrolling through what is effectively free programming for platforms in order to generate as many micro-transactions for sponsors as possible. This couldn't be farther from the earnest identification and para-social phenomenon that Jackass was able to cultivate by being broadcast on a single major network, within a fixed time slot, as a top-line program that was, however cheaply, specifically curated.

There is also, of course, no novelty to what these new cast members bring to the table. For better or worse, Jackass emerged from the work of individuals at the margins of popular culture inspired to make something that they hadn't seen before. But one need only take a look at the Jackass logo tattooed on Holmes's to realize that the same sense of inspiration isn't driving or motivating these young proteges. They have gotten to where they are by regressing to the familiar, by banking on what has already worked, and, reflecting more poorly upon the old Jackass crew than themselves, sucking up to authority. They are joining the ranks of the hero idiots, but in their own context have not dared to do anything particularly idiotic. They have, quite the contrary, been very attentive, astute, and calculating. Especially with McInerny and Wolfson, the stink of the influencer is all over them. The content they generate is neither particularly ingenious or funny, nor does it create a sense of uncomfortable closeness and intimacy. It is highly alienating, pandering instead to aspirational fantasies of passive wealth for just being oneself, without even the minimal demand of oneself having an identifiable or interesting personality.

This may come off as incredibly cruel and mean-spirited, so let me emphasize that I'm sure all of these kids are, indeed, very nice, well-meaning people. But, again, that's precisely the problem.

The roundtable discussion between Tremaine and the cast members didn't contain any particular incites about the development and production of the film. When attentions turned to the new cast members, their prompts tended to be with regards to the influence that Jackass had on them, or their favorite moments from the production, and the responses were predictably nervous and shallow. Though this segment was ostensibly prepared especially for fans, it should do very little to assure them that the younger cast is prepared to carry on the legacy, if not the literal brand, of Jackass. Apparently, nobody behind the scenes seemed to think it particularly important to elaborate to older diehards on who the Hell these kids were, not even so much as a juxtaposition between their interviews and some of their own content. But, then again, that might be the most telling aspect of the whole affair, not only this throwaway "bonus content" but also the film as a whole. The ending of the roundtable is quite abrupt and anticlimactic, as if the chemistry between the old and new cast, and the ability of the new cast to express themselves at all is so limited that there wasn't even enough material to support a thematically coherent interview. Having already said all they have to say, without touching on anything that makes everyone too uncomfortable, the old heads turn to the newbies and ask them to contribute, and they've got nothing. Because they didn't really contribute. This isn't their movie. These aren't artists. They're interns.

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Where Jackass Forever ranks in the gang's tetralogy of films really depends upon one's patience for its inherent compromises. Personally speaking, no work of "reality cinema" has a hope in Hell of coming close to Jackass Number Two, which, despite being, like all the Jackass films, effectively an extended special episode of the show, I consider something of a comedic masterpiece. I would at least put Jackass Forever over Jackass 3D, but those who have less of a stomach for this fourth film's overtures of nostalgia and denouement may disagree. There are, indeed, several stunts in the film that are actually callbacks to, repeats of, or more extreme variations of what has come before, so Jackass Forever sometimes feels more like their version of Monty Python's And Now for Something Completely Different, a belated greatest hits rather than its own fully-formed cinematic venture. But even in this regard, I'd argue that the overarching narrative of the franchise, following these ingenious morons through the past two decades, remains incredibly effective in its own peculiar way. There's something genuinely thrilling and beautiful, for instance, about the boys finally realizing their long dream of successfully lighting a fart underwater.

The fact is that, despite the apparent theme of the fraternity of dunces persevering through thick and thin, the path of Jackass Forever to the silver screen has been surprisingly troubled. Even if one is not particularly familiar with the behind-the-scenes minutia, one cannot escape the extent to which this has resulted in a final film where even the funniest, most brilliant moments feel somewhat compensatory.

Ryan Dunn, to whom Jackass Forever is dedicated, died in a drunk-driving incident that also took the life of his passenger, a production assistant named Zachary Hartwell, on June 20, 2011. Having previously been convicted of drunk driving in 2005, it's hard to determine if alcoholism was a contributing factor in the event. What we do know is that, during the filming of the finale of Jackass Number Two in 2006, Dunn sustained a life-threatening injury, and in the aftermath cut off all ties with his friends and co-workers for nearly two years, apparently in a state of deep depression. Dunn did return for Jackass 3D, but his sudden death within only a week of its release on home video has left an unhappy imprint on the franchise's legacy. The same can be said for cast member Steve-O's own struggles with depression and substance abuse. Steve-O has been sober since late-2008, and subsequent Jackass productions have been done on "clean sets" where no drugs or alcohol are available. The absence of synthetic courage hasn't deterred the former flea-market clown's tenacity for extreme stunts and, indeed, in a particular scene in Jackass Forever, he even gets to show off a more subtle side of his personality and performing abilities when he and two other cast members dress up as mimes, and he outclasses both of them in playing the part. But it's difficult to not reflect upon those ten long years preceding Jackass 3D and not reckon with the extent to which intoxication was a common, invisible component of the cast's ability to do what they did, all the while doing it in an environment where there was a constant atmosphere of being at risk of both emotional and physical pain, much of which was orchestrated by more powerful members of the group - whether Tremaine, Knoxville, or Margera - without the knowledge of their co-workers, and with the expectation that they were just supposed to take it in stride for the sake of the franchise. Despite what is certainly more than just a veneer of camaraderie, intimacy, and love among the Jackass cast and crew, the show and movies are also exemplary of hegemonic masculinity, as well as the toxic consequences of it, which are, like much of the drug- and alcohol-abuse itself, rendered invisible. Most of the crew seems to have passed through that two decade crucible of fire and filth with enough living brain cells to move on from it at their own discretion. The same can't be said for Dunn or, for that matter, Zachary Hartwell, who fell prey to the conspicuous cultural acceptance of men doing stupid shit because they're men, and the incredible hegemonic pressures to mask or self-medicate for the internal traumas they sustain.

Bam Margera, Dunn's best friend, is conspicuously absent from Jackass Forever with the exception of one sketch. Though principal photography for the film began in January, 2020, production was shut down a month later due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Production recommenced that September, but by the following year, Margera, battling his own isolation, depression, and addiction, was fired from the project after failing a sobriety test. Margera was always the Black Sheep of the Jackass crew. Alongside Knoxville and Steve-O, he was always the second or third most prominent member of the cast, and was a key figure in the development of its sketches, pranks, and stunts. But his centrality to the franchise always carried with it a considerable degree of mean-spiritedness that, if only in contrast to Steve-O as the guileless clown and Knoxville's more compelling persona as an ingenious stinker, often came off as simply bullying. Time, however, has proven that Margera was always a deeply troubled individual, whose body of work from CKY to Jackass to Viva La Bam reflects a greater fragility of ego, as well as a more pathological investment in a spectacle that grants him a sense of purpose while at the same time having constantly abused and taken advantage of his detachment from physical and emotional self-interest. You may not have ever particularly liked Bam, but his summary cutting from Jackass Forever, and the decision of the filmmakers to soldier on without him, cannot help but come off as at least a little cruel. His sudden departure from the project so late into production leaves the final film with a sense of piercing absence, which is inexplicable except that one can only say that Jackass Forever never really feels like a whole product, as if so many limitations put on the project by its aging central cast, and last minute changes due to unforeseen circumstances, have taken their toll.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and the new health and safety protocols that became necessary in order to complete the film, have necessarily strained what the filmmakers could accomplish. Taking the production around the world or across the country, as had been done in the three previous films, was of course out of the question. This means that greater emphasis has been placed on sketches and stunts that can be produced "in house." And while the production team have put together some truly ingenious set-pieces and contraptions, the candid camera pranks pulled on unsuspecting non-performers fall flat, one of them in particular coming off as conspicuously staged and inauthentic. There's no doubt hundreds of hours of material laying around on the cutting room floor, just as there has been for every iteration of Jackass. But the question remains to what extent such material will counteract the sense that the old gang are rapidly reaching the conceptual limits of what their brand of extreme slapstick has to offer, and, further, to what extent the franchise is actually prepared to hand off those challenges to a newer generation, whose own background in "cringe humor" is far more intensive rather than extensive, as well as being much less ingenious.

As a self-conscious passing of the torch, Jackass Forever is evidently lacking in either its cultivation of its newer cast members or their direct creative input, which is the ultimate failing of the film despite its many inspired and hilarious bits. Having matured in some ways, the old guard under Knoxville's leadership have clearly not taken the adequate amount of time to reach a point of emotional maturity where certain necessities for proceeding with another film would be clearer. The challenge is not simply to make another Jackass movie, but to make another kind of Jackass movie, one that could serve more as a collective diary about the newer cast members getting to participate more proactively in the creation of bits rather than just standing around at the periphery of most of them. One can complain all one wants about this new generation's lack of distinctive personality, but at the end of the day the fault lies with the veterans for simply not challenging them enough and, thus, not really challenging themselves either. Needless to say, Wolfson, the lone female intern, ends up being the most neglected and under-appreciated, her inclusion in the film coming off as the most awkward and forced.

The resulting chasm between the practiced chemistry of the old cast and the un-tutored meandering of the new kids is best expressed in a bit that, in the "bonus content" appending the film, director Jeff Tremaine highlighted as a particularly novel take on the Jackass prank formula, in that it emphasizes psychological torture more than physical. A classic technique of Jackass is for the ringleaders to lead their fellow cast members under the pretense of performing one kind of scene, only to sucker punch them with something completely different. In this case, pairs of the cast are corralled into a room where Knoxville will apparently be handling a highly venomous snake. Instead, no snake is present, but the doors are locked, the lights turned out, and the crew, equipped with night-vision cameras, do some old fashioned haunted house fright gags, capped off with some nicely laid traps as the participants scramble to escape. With pairings of the cast undergoing the same tortures and juxtaposed in editing, one is instantly impressed by how much less interesting the reactions of McInerny and Holmes are compared to those of Dave England and Ehren McGhehey. The distress of the former just doesn't have nearly the same impact. McInerny and Holmes may be paired together, but there's no standing relationship or years of shared experience between them. They come off as weirdly isolated from not only one another, but also from the bit itself as a time for them to perform for the audience. They try in vain to avoid harm and to escape the room, but they just aren't suited to thinking on their feet in terms of what would be a creative way to respond to a given situation. That kind of semi-conscious commitment to the bit, an instinctual switch that gets flipped in one's head where very real fears nonetheless serve as motivation for a more exaggerated performance, where it's legitimately hard for the audience to tell the difference between the natural and the unnatural in such a completely unnatural and downright absurd context; that's the kind of thing that you only get out of substantial experience and more intimate involvement in what you're doing. England and McGhehey certainly didn't have it when Jackass first started airing over two decades ago. But, whether they're conscious of it or not, all that time of both doing these kinds of performances, and then being able to watch them back, to internalize what it is that they are doing, has ingrained in their minds a greater depth to not just being acted upon, but of acting, of inhabiting a role and connecting to their performance and, thus, connecting to the audience. It's all there in McGhehey's petrified face as he sits huddled in a corner under a table, using a couch cushion as a shield like a child afraid of monsters under his bed, eyes wide in the impenetrable darkness. It's all there in England's manic anxiety when the bit is over, and Knoxville is trying to get him to leave the room, but England refuses to trust him. "I'm staying here. This room is my home, now." That's comedy gold.

Put aside the question of the extent to which this class of Jackass interns were creatively involved in the film. But has anybody ever gotten these kids hip to the fact that Johnny Knoxville is an actor? At heart, that's the main thing separating the new generation of cringe humorist from the daredevil clowns that inspired them: They just don't know how to perform. They are too used to cameras and the panopticon of social media in their lives. They don't need the condescension of a bunch of old fogies assuring them, like all bosses in an internship program, that the lumps they receive are all going to amount to valuable experience and connection-building. They need basic exercises in imagination, like playing catch with an invisible ball or something.

One can't get too caught up in stuff like this. Jackass Forever is still a very funny movie and despite its failings, it still resonates at that all important, intimate, emotional level. But if handing the torch to this befuddled quintet comes off as poorly as it does, it's merely illustrative of the extent to which the visionaries behind Jackass have gotten lost in their own illusions. Even as their critical appraisal has improved, they still largely conceive of the franchise as a niche phenomenon that stands apart from a legitimate art form. Hence, the pathos of the franchise has progressed to the point where we can observe the predictable complexes built up in aging, veteran artists. Like lots of artists, they can never fully appreciate their art in the same ways as their audience. Like many artists who reach a point of commercial success and critical praise that they are afforded more or less total creative control, they become consumed by an undue confidence in their craft, and fail to really challenge themselves. And like all veteran artists from a time in which their particular vision was in some sense transgressive, their practice has become absorbed into a monoculture that now inhibits the cultivation and production of something new to truly assume its mantle in spirit, as opposed to just repeating its superficial content.

All in all, the effect of Jackass Forever, beyond the immediate laughter, is a sense of the franchise as a whole as a strange memory immortalized in the lo-fi production values of its debut. It came out of a very special time and place at the turn of the millennium, and while history can be hard to know, it seems entirely reasonable to think that it really did represent the long fine flash of a whole generation, though nobody at the time could really understand it or, in retrospect, adequately explain how it actually happened. How long has it really been since the autumn of 2000? Has it really only been twenty years? When one watches Jackass Forever, it certainly feels like it's been a lot longer. And, in a small way, that's probably the ultimate spiritual aim and triumph of the film, stalwartly carrying the torch of that prevailing energy and sense of indefinable meaning, the social experiment of Jackass still wreaking its grotesque, painful, stupid, beautiful havoc. For what it's worth, with the right kind of eyes, you can still see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.