By Beckett Flynn
The Jackass films contain more male nudity than any other piece of American mass culture. Where else is the male form stripped, penetrated, pissed on, bled, battered, and shat from so publicly than in these four movies? To say they are a Grand Guignol is not to do them justice. When the Grand Guignol opened in 1897, it was the smallest of all Paris theaters; to see the Id of the public gaped open like this, you had to go to the avant-garde. Not so with Jackass. These four films are mainstream cultural hits, as American as the marvel film. In the 50 stunts that make up the first jackass film, I counted at least 17 instances of male nudity or bondage. In a famous segment, Steve O fires a firework out of his asshole that’s tied to Chris Pontius’ boydick. A piece of ash falls off and lands in, as Steve O puts it, his corn hole. The camera zooms in on O aggressively rubbing his hole to try to quell the pain. It’s amazing that this borderline gay porn shot was in a mainstream film. It’s even more amazing that they hold up so well after all this time, when so many pieces of pop culture from the aughties have fallen by the wayside. But the collapse of the splendor of early Jackass films into the mainstream prankshowism of Bad Grandpa, Action Park, and Jackass Forever point to some key reasons those first three films stand as Great Cinema. Let’s look at some of the key transgressive qualities of the Jackass films and compare and contrast to the era’s other media, and from here, look at what’s missing from the later entries in the franchise to see what made early Jackass unique.
Because it’s not just the nudity. It’s the grossout, the junk, the trash TV of it all. The Y2K era is noted for its sleaze: the liberal use of words like faggot and retard, the sexist comedies, the frat bro bacchanalia. These were the days of “Crazy Bitch” by Buckcherry and “Something in Your Mouth” by Nickelback. Of The Jersey Shore, Jerry Springer, Steve Wilkos, Maury. On the grossout side, you have Fear Factor, Silent Library, the rancid parodies of Jason Freidberg and Aaron Seltzer. Jackass slides in nicely with these nasty bits of ephemera. Just look at Preston Lacy: the group's resident fat man. Lacy's large body is used as the series’s reservoir of bodily fluids.
In the second film, he farts into a tube hooked up to a glass orb on Steve O’s face, prompting Steve O to vomit all over the side of the orb. In the third film, he works out on a treadmill, collecting sweat in a suit so Steve O can drink it. Before O drinks the cocktail, Knoxville quips, “This is rinky-dink even for us”. Looked at just as a description of its grossest stunts, this Jackass is rinky-dink even for the American us.
And then there’s the pain, the torture, the blood. A sinister hawkishness descended on America in the wake of 9/11. Public support for the invasion of Iraq was high, the mask slipped off the American empire and the average middle-class white was filled with an appetite for destruction. Our media became violently fixated on a triumph of the will. Movies like Black Hawk Down and We Were Soldiers and The Hurt Locker and Saving Private Ryan glorified soldiers like war films of the fifties even as they hungered for blood like a snuff film. We got a gory Jesus movie, mainstream horror torture porn films, magicians who relied on edgy personas and body mutilation stunts. Even Neil Young, the liberal Canadian who used to write songs about protesters being killed by soldiers, wrote a rah-rah anthem called “Let’s Roll.” Comedy royalty Trey Parker and Matt Stone satirized the military in Team America, but ultimately came down on the side of supporting the troops. A lazy essayist could draw a parallel between Eli Roth, Abu Ghraib, and Jackass, citing the sadism of the era, but it doesn’t quite feel like that when you’re watching Jackass the way it does when you watch the gratuitous torture in 2005’s Hostel.
And so why not? And it’s not like these guys don’t play for keeps. Bones are broken, dicks are fractured, heads are shaved. You can head to YouTube now and see a podcast appearance where any member of the Jackass team explains all of the injuries they sustained. Jeff Tremaine’s camera in the first three films is shaky, low budget, making certain stunts feel like a snuff film, like something you shouldn’t be watching. The infamous Butterbean knockout of the first film comes to mind, when Knoxville hit his head so hard on the floor his body tried to make him swallow his tongue. The camera gets up close, shaky, leering, like something you’d find on Heavy R.
It is because of the deep sense of lightness that pervades the Jackass films. There’s sex jokes sure, but there isn’t a sexual energy coming off of the boys in Jackass. It all adds up to feeling more like Beavis and Butt-Head than Animal House. These boys don’t talk much about girls and there aren’t naked women dancing around with their titties out. They are naughty but never dirty, at least in the context of these films. As the camera captures them, they are always in motion, always caught in the middle of the hangout before the stunt. When you first see them, in whichever film you see first (and let’s be real, it’s probably not the first one), you probably think, “wait, what are these guys from again?”. The camera settles on them easily, like you’re recognizing a familiar face. But unless you were a fan of skate compilations in the late nineties, these are just the guys from Jackass. This is a carefully constructed hangout film tactic; if every hangout film gave you introductions to each of these characters or their life stories, it would put you on the outside. The Jackass films feel like hanging out with someone you have always known. It makes them endlessly rewatchable, like a video game without a tutorial bogging down your experience.
The lightness creeps into the film's visual aesthetic too. Knoxville is open about his love for Buster Keaton, Evel Knievel, and Looney Tunes. While there’s a grossout, punk rock, skater quality to the films, these guys are never trying to look cool. Many segments feature elaborate costumes and sets. When Johnny Knoxville takes his bull hit in Jackass 3, he’s standing in front of a wall painted with a scene of a tree and a rainbow. He himself is painted up like the set so he can blend into it and avoid the bull. When the bull inevitably hits him and sends him flying through the air, the color sequencing is thrown out of whack, emphasizing the pain. When Knoxville gets up, he’s covered in mud, no longer able to blend into the background. The guys see that a mud trace from his shoe has splattered above the painting of the rainbow, and they quip that Knoxville went “over the rainbow”, a perfect synthesis of the show's visual and hangout-y elements. The music helps too, a perfectly curated selection of punk songs and punk feeling country, rap, and indie rock. There aren’t always songs from the era, the films are full of needle drops featuring Black Flag, Misfits, Public Enemy, Roger Alan Wade, etc. The highlight for me is the “Sophisticated Bitch” sequence in the first film, which features a particularly obscure and grimy Public Enemy song over the dudes skating around in fat suits. It’s not a prank or a stunt per se, but it’s incredibly fun. You get the sense that this is music these guys would actually listen to. The lightness of aesthetic comes to its conclusion at the end of the second film, which features an elaborate musical number full of choreography, stunts, and costumes, finishing with Knoxville recreating Keaton's iconic house falling down stunt.
And there’s the much-talked-about heart of the show. The guys clearly like each other a lot and their quips get as much screentime as the stunts and pranks. But I think it’s a lot more specific than this, otherwise you could pop out Jackass clones like boy bands. The thisness of these boys is largely the doing of Bam Margera. Jackass was originally born out of merging of Knoxville and his friends with CKY, a skate-doofus series created by the already famous Bam Margera and his buds. Bam supplies not just skate tricks to the movies, but a Whole Sick Crew of strange, lovable losers that make up the background cast, often participating in only one or two stunts to the film, but adding to the whole thing's ratty mise-en-scène. Loomis Fall, Raab Himself, Brandon DiCamillio, and a seemingly endless parade of skate park freaks help our buds on their road to destruction. But it goes deeper. Bam Margera is best friends with another core cast member, Ryan Dunn. Several of the guys were friends before the show and movies started, but these are the only two that go all the way back. And Bam’s parents, Phil and April, are featured prominently in the first three films, constantly pranked and joked at. One of the best sequences in the series is the “Super Mighty Glue” segment from Jackass Three. All three of Bam’s key players are important here. Bam covers his hand in “super mighty glue” and sticks it to Phil and Preston’s chest. Phil’s body particularly hairy, which gives us the perverse image of Bam pulling his hand off his father’s chest and now having a hand so covered with hair that he looks like the wolfman, prompting him to go “eeeeeeeuuuEEEEWWW” a double dip scream that goes up there with the best in the franchise. When he covers his hand in glue and quips about Ryan Dunn’s ZZ Top beard before grabbing said beard, Dunn's eyes fill with horror and the rest of the guys collapse in mirth. These two best friends are able to prank each other in a way more intimate than the rest, and the other dudes are there like a Greek Chorus to laugh along with us.
But all that’s silver turns to slop. We live in the era of franchise mania, of sequel mania, of marvel movies and back to the future musicals and DC TV shows and the never-ending Star Wars of it all. Of live-action remakes. Boundless theme parks. The great Ready-Player-Oneification of the world. Your favorite movies, now plastered across the sky (or on a sphere – now with AI!). No matter the care and love put into the original product, the brakes are off now. Any idea will be fed into the sausage machine. Spin it, spin it, spin it in the grinder. Eat, eat, eat what comes out. Since Jackass 3, the death of Ryan Dunn, the departure of Bam, the rise of social media, we have entered the Jackass Slop Era. With Bam and the CKY crowd, you get Jackass. Without, you get Bad Grandpa.
Knoxville and his demented Looney Tunes antics are clearly only half of the formula, and Margera’s and Dunn’s absence from the fourth film hangs over it like a thundercloud. Dunn’s death is the most obvious tragedy, so obvious that the film pays direct tribute to him in the final shot. But Bam’s absence, while not quite as tragic, is deeply felt. Prior to the filming of the fourth film, Bam’s problems with drugs and money got so bad that he was publicly embroiled in controversies with his management and some of the cast. Bam is acting irresponsibly, but Dunn, who died in a drunk driving accident, was acting irresponsibly as well. Steve O has had very public problems with drugs, but he’s changed his lifestyle for the better. The lack of Bam emphasizes more than any of the grey hair just how much time has passed, that these guys can no longer do things they used to do, be things they used to be. It’s also a stark reminder that our culture is not suited to handle the ways addiction causes someone to act; our moral system causes us to look down on these folks until they have recovered and disavowed their addictions or left earth. One cannot help but feel the absence of Dunn inside the absence of Bam. Knowing why Bam left, the effect of Dunn’s passing becomes clear. Without you here, what’s the point of getting better at all? It’s almost a cosmic joke, then, how Bam and Dunn’s appearance changes the most out of anyone in these films while Knoxville and Steve O seem to remain forever young. It’s also a huge misstep to include Bam in the background of one stunt while not acknowledging him, like a ghost who flits through the frame without being materially present. The film can memorialize Dunn, but although it can show us him getting hurt in the background, it cannot wish Bam well.
The heartagram-shaped hole in the film is filled with cash, cash, cash. You don’t have your boys anymore but look! Eric Andre is here. So is Rob Dierdreck. That punk rocker faker Machine Gun Kelley is here! Hey check it out! Tyler the Creator! Don’t you love that guy? The procession of celebrities quells the confusion of who the fuck are these guys? that comes with the first three films, but it doesn’t appeal to the hardcore fan who likes getting to know these personalities over repeated watchings. And it affects the quality of the product. The worst a guy like MGK is going to do is get smacked into a pool of water by a giant hand. Loomis, in the third film, throws himself in front of a jet engine with an open umbrella and gets his 90-pound frame flung so far he separates his collarbone. The new cast members, like Zach and Poopies and Jasper, are fine, but they feel like tulpas of the young men we saw in the original films, trying to capture that whimsy and magic in an age that just doesn’t have it anymore. And there’s another concession to contemporary sensibilities: a woman, Rachel Wolfson, doing some of the stunts. The guys clearly aren’t going to bully her or hurt her when she doesn’t expect it, so she seems far too safe for the chaos of what a Jackass film is supposed to be, even when she’s participating in painful stunts. They can’t have a running prank like the surprise buzz cut in the first film or the pissing on people in the second film or the boxing glove that punches people in the face in the third without that deep bond. Forever is Jackass on easy mode, Jackass with the crusts cut off. Jackass films have Johnny Knoxville and Steve O and gross out and pain stunts right? That’s what Jackass is, right? By treating the heart of the Jackass films like a disposable side project rather than the main course, Jackass 4 becomes a pale ghost of Jackass. It looks like Jackass. It sounds like Jackass. But it’s not Jackass. The final film coast on the franchise's legacy like a bloated indie rock band from the Meet Me In the Bathroom era playing the hits at Bonaroo with Benson Boon doing backflips in the background.
I’m not sure what there is to be learned from this. It is going to keep happening, and there’s nothing better the Jackass boys could have done. Perhaps, paradoxically, all we can wish for is an early breakup: some of the pieces of art that have the most perfect shine are emo and indie rock bands like Marietta, Grandview, and Dear and the Headlights that only put out one or two albums. Nothing to be done then but pray for something between fade away and burn out that keeps our stars intact without turning them into merchandise of themselves.
Beckett Flynn (she/they) is a transgender writer in Brooklyn. Her writing has been published (some under her erstwhile name), in Oh Reader, Horror Press, Culture Sonar, Dot Esports, Rebellion Lit, 13 Tracks, Scorched Earth Press, Typebar Magazine, and Cusper Magazine. Her play Everyone in New York is Beautiful won the Cypress Productions New Play award in 2024, and her play Crisis was part of the 2025 Road Theatre New Works Festival. She is a two time O'Neill NPC Semi-Finalist for her plays. Her plays have been produced in six states. She likes heavy metal, kung fu movies, and her friends.