From the self-destructive Jackass to the ultraviolent XFL, in-your-face boy culture is all the rage
If you're a grownup of a certain age, there's nothing to make you feel ready for cultural glue factory like MTV's stunt comedy show Jackass.You see its young male pranksters riding and crashing shopping carts; getting turned upside down in a sloshing full portable toilet; swallowing a goldfish and puking it into a bowl; dressing up like a disabled person and getting pushed off a wheelchair. And you think- and you know how this sounds even as you think it-This is funny?
Which is to say, you have entered the environs of Knoxville- as in Jackass star Johnny Knoxville, the alias of P.J. Clapp, 29, who started on the road to fame by sending MTV a video in which he had gassed himself with pepper spray and shot with a Taser. (He and MTV agreed not to air a segment of the video in which he put on a bulletproof vest and shot himself.) And if you're non-plussed- and maybe a tad defensive about being non-plussed ("But I'm cool! I liked Beavis and Butt-Head!")- Knoxville is only doing his job. The show is suceeding well enough without you to capture more than 2 million young viewers a week.
Knoxville could be the poster child for the Rude Boy phenomenon: the gross, aggressive, self-mutilating young-male mode of rebellion du jour that is crashing its shopping cart head on into the mainstream. Jackass is the most successful cable launch of the season. Gross-out comedy rules at the movie box office and online, where Web animators exploit the Internet's seemingly limitless tolerance for vomit and poop jokes (for instance, at Doodie.com). This weekend NBC and UPN start airing the XFL, a football league created by the World Wrestling Federation's Vince McMahon and designed for ultraviolence (fair catches aren't allowed, but roughing the passer is.) The G.O.P. courted the Rude Boy vote by putting the WWF wrestler the Rock onstage at its 2000 convention. And after selling more than 11 million copies of The Marshall Mathers LP, rapper Eminem not only garnered a best-album Grammy nomination for his tales of homophobia and misogynist violence, but he even performed with Elton John at the Feb. 21st awards show.
Youth rebellions are old stories. But today's rebel has to figure out how alienate today's been-there, smoked-that elders, so the Rude Boys aim straight at the squishy heart of baby-boom values. On the simplest level, this means offending boomer tolerance: there's Eminem; there's Mr.Wong, the animated series at Icebox.com about an elderly Chinese houseboy, which, depending on whom you ask,
cleverly subverts or shamelessly perpetuates an ethnic stereotype. But these insurgents also attack the cult of
self-esteem, the notion, advanced in the protest and therapy movements, that everyone has dignity,
that positive self-image is the key to sucess, happiness, and perhaps world peace. Rude Boy culture has a determined
self-loathing streak. Jackass's jokes are sometimes directed at others, obnoxiously, ingeniously or both (a guy in
a football uniform runs through a fast-food drive-thru lane, "intercepts" somebody's bagged meal, spikes it,
and does an end-zone dance.) But besides the self-effacing title, the show is at heart about self-flagellation. When Knoxville becomes a human "poo cocktail" in the inverted
portable toliet, the joke is that someone would want to do this to himself. Likewise, Comedy Central's paleoandro variety series The Man Show treats women as sex objects- they jump half-naked on trampolines in its closing credits- while implying that men are morons.
Or take Eminem. There's a lot to criticize in his woman- and gay-bashing lyrics, but without excusing him, it's hard to say that he makes himself look good delivering the message. In his most violent
songs, like Kim, he comes off as an unbalanced, whiny creep brutalizing women(his wife, his mother) out of weakness. He can barely issue a boast ("Shady will fuckin' kill you") without undermining it with a pathetic image ("I'm like a mummy at night.../ Frightened with five little white Vicodin pills bitin' him").
Why this dance between crotch-grabbing and self-abuse? Part of the answer seems to involve deep personal issues with women. But one shouldn't underestimate the Vanilla Ice effect- the defensiveness, plain on Eminem's records, of the white rapper. Certainly "Caucasians" have no monopoly on Rude Boy culture- {note from the Dragon: HAHAH! OBVIOUSLY...JUST TURN ON BET!}
last summer the Wayans brothers out-Farrellyed the Farrely brothers with the $157 million gross-out hit Scary Movie. And the Rock is African American and Samoan. But there's an undeniable white-boyness to much of this trend- {note from Dragon: I disagree! I deny it!} that familiar envy, from the '50s and on back, of the roguish cool that comes from being societally on the outs. So the white {enough with the "white" crap...} Rude Boy lashs out in Enimem self-described "white trash" anger or embraces, while deprecating, his declasse alpha-maledom. Hence South Park's white{no he's PURPLE I TELL YOU!} Eric Cartman, one of whose trademark lines is, "Kiss my black ass!"
There's even a root uneasiness with maleness itself in some Rude Boy culture. The Man Show theme- "Quit your job and light a fart/ Yank your favorite private part" - gives the show a pitiable, twilight-of-empire feeling: The patriarchy ain't what it used to be, kid, so shut up, scratch yourself, and check out the jugs on this girl.
Nor are things what they once were for the grunts of the XFL, who, the league promises, will get hit harder than their NFL colleagues for far less money while having to wear mikes and get pestered by reporters midgame. If not intentionally, the XFL is a little like Harold in Harold and Maude, feigning bloodlust to repulse his militaristic uncle; it holds a funhouse mirror
up to your father's game, exaggerating everything unsettling about it and daring fans of the orginal to take offense. {note from Dragon: most of the XFL's cheerleader's are "ex" whore and stippers.}
So after this Jockerdammerung, who's left for young guys to worship? Perfomers like Knoxville seem to be staking out an alternative jockdom, a macho loserhood. Getting knocked out by a pro boxer, showing off his scrawny, bruised and welted body, Knoxville shows us he's man enough to get his butt kicked. Witness too the fad among teenage boys, in Fight Club fashion, stage their own real-life amateur-wrestling contests in their backyards, complete with deliberate cuts and chair smashing, in which the point is how much abuse you can take, not mete out. MTV, however, announces on Jackass
that it won't accept stunt videos from home viewers. (It's not as if doing that ever got anyone his own TV show.)
In a sense, Knoxville and his cohort are the 21st century answer to '70s and '80s punks{NOTE FROM DRAGON:I DISAGREE!}, who created a sort of poison-pill culture, adopting anti-social poses that couldn't be appropriated by the mainstream and praciticing self-mutialing rites like safety pin piercing, too gross or painful for the masses.{It's called BODY PIERCING, and it has been appropraited by the masses!}In Jackass's case, the connection is more than theoretical: Knoxville first made his Taser video for the skateboarding magazine Big Brother-the skate and punk communities have a long, symbiotic relationship- and many of his show's stunts are straight out of skate-punk culture.{What, are you forgetting all those drunk Guidos on Long Island, and all the idiotic and dangerous things they do?!} The big difference is that theirs is a highly corporate punk rock, eagerly appropriated, encouraged and even created by giant entertainment companies.
Which means that these Rude Boys may be vunerable to their fickle young markets's tendency to grow jaded. Eventually we'll even see the day when their kids will have to figure out how to shock them. For now, however, we all live in Knoxville. {I protest use of the term of "Rude Boy" in this manner- it's a ska term. "Bad Boy" would be more appropriate I think.Ok, enough of my commentary. :P }