Outrageously Self-Centered Movie Review - Jackass: Best & Last
They actually had to censor genitals in this one, assumedly because way too much of the frame depicted the genitals. Jackass: Best & Last is a funny movie that made me cry. It is a film that is explicitly about aging, with a tenderness that should come as no surprise to anyone who has kept up with the franchise. After I saw it, I listened to a podcast with star Johnny Knoxville. He spoke with pride about how nobody in the crew went to college, save director Jeff Tremaine. And yet, to twist this review into something meaningful, I am forced to discuss my masters degree.
Education walks a goat’s path. I didn’t start college until I was 23, or I might have been 24. Then in 2015, while a graduate student at the University of Texas, I was sent to London as an exchange student with the Royal College of Art. It was my first, and to this point only, trip overseas.
The RCA sent a representative to meet me at Heathrow and bring me into the city. This was Jordan Baseman, an American man in all black with a shaved head and an eyepatch; not at all what I’d expected from “England.” Jordan was a kind, incisive, and emotionally rich conversationalist. He understood I had no idea where I was but seemed to be rooting for me. Before we even got on the train from the airport to my first British coffee, Jordan gave me the most valuable and lasting nugget of wisdom that I would receive during my four month stay in London. It only took me eleven years to notice.
Almost immediately, for some reason, we got on the subject of performance art. He more or less waved away the practice, but not before offering one passing compliment: the best and most significant performance art was made by Andy Kaufman and Jackass. This was not a dismissal, but an appreciation. Both acts eschewed the pretense of their genre in favor of popular appeal, and each said something instructive about their particular eras of American life. More importantly, it’s possible that neither would have immediately been identified as “performance art.” I’ve come to echo Jordan’s opinion here (I’d now throw in Julio Torres as well). Even back in 2015, Kaufman was right at the top of my mind. I’d been watching his Midnight Special performance a lot. But Jordan’s evocation of Jackass loosened a serious pebble in my subconscious. I swear I felt a small psychic fissure in that moment, but didn’t pay it much mind. I had a whole London to explore! I had to go to the London Review of Books Cake Shop!
In 2001, as a young and dedicated skateboarder in the Phoenix suburbs, I had a poster of Johnny Knoxville on my bedroom wall. There once existed a digital8 tape with footage of a teenage me praying before said poster. I hurt my knees doing things the network-mandated warning before Johnny’s show implored me not to do. But 2015 was a fallow time for both Jackass and my appreciation of the franchise. I hadn’t even bothered with 2010’s Jackass 3D, the most recent movie in the series at that point. It had been a decade since I’d engaged with the troupe’s antics, and, meaningfully, nearly that long since I’d stepped away from my life as a skateboarder due to burnout with both the scene and my identity.
I am a white, college-educated American millennial. In the second half of the 2000s I was exposed to lots of ukuleles. This was exacerbated by my questionable decision to distance myself from skateboarding. Logos on t-shirts were no longer ok, David Ignatow was. Young poets told me I was supposed to like a certain kind of coffee. I was supposed to watch Truffaut, not Tremaine. Somehow Spike Jonze was still ok. What a tightrope that guy’s walked for his entire damn life.
Recently, I’ve noticed a bunch of op-eds about that era of suspendered boys. I even read a few of them; I’m old enough to feel nostalgia like a slap in the face. Many of the editorials I came across argued that while the whole “indie” culture of the late 2000s was lame, it was at least sincere. I question a lot of that sincerity, but for the sake of not wading in thinkpiecey waters for too long I’m gonna move on.
By the time Jackass Forever (2022) came out I was an adult in my mid-thirties somehow surviving as a studio assistant in Brooklyn, New York. James and I walked to the Nitehawk to see the new entry, were horrified, had a fantastic time. I actually felt dazed walking back up through Prospect Park. Over the next month or so, Maxine and I streamed the entire franchise, none of which I’d seen in adulthood. It was all still devastatingly funny, oddly nourishing.
Now I live in Knoxville-the-place. My house is walking distance from Knoxville-the-man’s old high school and, in the other direction, a Regal movie theater. One morning this past week I went down and over the bridge for a matinee screening of Jackass: Best and Last. I was the only one in the theater, which is a profoundly bonkers way to consume 90 minutes of big-screen male nudity and pop scatology. In the movie, the crew gets emotional about their intent to close up shop for good. Then they karate chop each other in the crotch. I left the cinema all full of feelings.
It was on the walk home that Jordan’s comment from a decade prior came back to my mind. Whether or not he knew it (I didn’t) he had shown me that I had always had permission to like what I liked. Ironic that someone had to tell me it was OK to not be told what to do, but that’s how I’m wired. Maybe the classmate who’d once told me it was unsavory to mention skateboarding in an art setting was horribly wrong. Maybe I could be funny, make art that did something other than gesture vaguely at someone else’s fear of nuclear war. There was no immediate shift, but I can confidently mark that moment in London as when my thinking about self and art began gradually to shed affect and pretense, to become mine. Best and Last clarified this point.
Other people are probably better at intellectually dissecting Jackass. I get genuine joy from the series, but the only reason I wrote this is because they’re aging, and I’m aging maybe fifteen years behind them. It’s amazing that almost all of these guys got to wrap up the project on their own terms. As artists, this should be among our primary objectives.