As Freud suggests: (a) sublimation is always imperfect; and (b) it takes two to trauma.* Self-subcribed in the first-person-singular/plural: Jackass, in both title and persona, perfectly announces the idiot-savant identity of men who have no place in the official order of things. So goes the skate-video-as-tv-show-as-movie, making comically omnipresent the low bathos of pop culture, stripped of its comforting slickness and formal appeal, only to be re-glorified through a series of mini-spectacles structured around the scatological (i.e.: horse semen drinking, beer butt-chugging, ass-branding). To paraphrase Georges Bataille's critical hypothesizations of l'informe: what kind of idiot would dress his penis up like a mouse and feed it to a snake? Well here's proof that idiot exists.
Thus from the comic philosophy of Bataille to Groucho Marx, who asserted that there's nothing less funny than having a joke explained. Yet it is the super-backasswards pathology of Jackass Number 2 that unambiguously provokes a heightened consciousness towards the political unconscious of the movie. For indeed, Jackass provides the exceptionally rare example of popular culture succeeding on the negative terms of failure — with every scene/stunt scenario invariably organized around the trope of disaster-as-climax, and the film's 35mm cinematic bookends acting as an aesthetic reminder that the purposeful choice of recording the bulk of the movie in cheap video is as low as its formal/social ambitions.
This is, by compos mentis thinking, a beau ideal illustration of Julia Kristeva's formulation of the abject (i.e.: how abnormal behaviour disturbingly reveals the stable norms of a predominant symbolic order). Jackass does a lot to demonstrate Kristeva's theorem by upending not just the myraid categories of social convention, but in the critical disclosure of how impure, libidinous freedom might uncover how backwards those norms really are.
All of which leads to the question of: who's norms? Therein lies an unconscious knowingness, that by adapting an absurdly abject persona, Jackass oddly generates a dismantling of the conventional image of the masculine self (the primary agent of social control) by replacing its domination act with a playhouse of ineptitude and slapstick. By consistently representing various scenarios of failure, and by making a spectacle of broken images as though they are not to be ashamed of but celebrated, the film neutralizes, for a moment at least, an identification with its (a. average, b. white, c. male) archetype as not ascendant and in control, but excessively inable and incompetent. That is to say: we generally have no cultural images condoning the out-of-control incompetence Jackass suggests — though in practice, it may be that our society is out of control.
* Trauma and how it emanates from repetition: the first event apprehended as shock, the second time as catastrophe.
