It was only when I started getting older and more self-aware that I began looking back into my memories with a critical eye. Aging, for me, was the slow realization that my past self was a myopic, shit-starting, privileged white skater kid living in a suburban oyster-world. That is to say, I was completely free. Free to skate in circles around a parking lot from dusk to dawn, free to steal shopping carts from ShopRite and fling my friends around in them (off curbs and into bushes), free to set off illegal fireworks at passing houses from the backseat of a sedan, free to scale my middle school's fire escape only to toss boxes of shingles off the roof. Not a list of regrets, not at all, but an itemization of the shining ecstatic points of light that are my memories of that time (unbound, careless, reckless freedom). The idea was that anything could happen, and that I could do anything.
Now, to return momentarily to the memories of fireworks, shopping carts, skateboards... These were hi-jinx inspired by a perceived discord with my mundane, white-suburban surroundings, yet nevertheless performed beneath the warm blanket of privilege and in the secure darkness of ignorance. Inspired, as well, by Johnny Knoxville and the Jackass crew, who we deemed the highest-profile members of our reckless movement. These were the daredevils of idiocy, who pushed the limits of white male adolescent discord, showed it to a national audience, and gave depth to our self-inflicted pain (skinning our knees, running into walls, bashing each other with cardboard and styrofoam).
And now Knoxville, 40 years old with two kids, along with the rest of Jackass, has returned with another film, replete with reckless suffering and adolescent naivete. And if only I could leave it at that, to simply say that this is a forced, last-ditch attempt to squeeze out some more money for an aging franchise, and a sad cry for help from a bunch of overgrown boys. But the film resonates. Not because, watching it, I felt sad for old Knoxville as a bull pummeled into his chest. But because this new Jackass, by introducing the element of age, is crafting a new argument altogether: the straight-white-American-suburb-raised-anger-filled-privileged-boy, as he grows older, is doomed to a state of backwards-looking; to a time when his reckless freedom was justifiable; to a time when his life was a neat constellation of bright-burning memories, and not the complex night-sky that is a modern and aware existence.
I give all the credit in the world to Knoxville for refusing to change, for refusing to compromise to the standards of a "normal" and "good" way of life. In that sense, he's a martyr for the rest of us ex-angry-skaters, for he bluntly points out to everyone that a "normal" and "good" ("white" and "male") suburban upbringing can be pretty fucked up. Why shouldn't we want to crawl back into the oyster, back underneath our blankets, to the original sense of security? Why? Because we have Knoxville to try that for us, in 3D widescreen, to teach us that we are raised with a sense of reckless freedom, but that we cannot and should not spend our lives trying to get it back. He engenders in us our second self, our observer self, our self aware, who is capable of bringing us outside the oyster, and then pointing out how that very oyster rests safely in the palm of monolithic Americana. We cannot go back to our simple-selves, to our closed-off world, but must strive towards awareness, seeing, and the complexity it brings.
