When Johnny Knoxville made the cover of Rolling Stone last year, he wore a jockstrap over his jeans, his wrists were lashed with rope to a red-and-white target, and there was a large bull’s-eye painted on his bare chest. Knoxville, the star of Jackass: The Movie, which pulled in $22.7 million when it opened last weekend, may look like Donny Osmond on a bender, but there’s no denying his star power. You just have to see him in action–getting shot in the chest with a 120,000-volt stun gun, say–to know that he’s headed for the top. The question is, What kind of shape will he be in when he gets there?
What unites these half dozen or so men behaving badly is the infliction of pain–specifically, the infliction of pain upon oneself. Not since Leopold von Sacher-Masoch collected material for his scandalous 19th-century novel Venus in Furs–whence the term “masochism” was coined–have gentlemen derived so much pleasure from abusing and debasing their bodies. And make no mistake about it: Jackass is erotic–homoerotic. Knoxville and his crew spend a lot of time in their underwear, and they seem stuck in the polymorphous I’ll-try-anything-once perversity of early puberty. And like most polymorphous perverts, they have no shame–or rather, they’re shameless in their willingness to shame themselves.
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“The new mantra of reality TV is no shame, no fame,” Matthew Felling of the Center for Media and Public Affairs told Entertainment Weekly recently. He was referring not only to such shows as Survivor and Big Brother, where contestants vie for the privilege of humiliating one another before millions of viewers, but also to those like Fear Factor and Spy TV, where they vie for the privilege of humiliating themselves. (The folks on Spy TV don’t know they’re being humiliated while it’s happening, but they do sign the waivers later.) Television has been selling this bar of soap for decades, from You Bet Your Life to I Bet You Will. But the text, if not the subtext, has shifted. In the old shows, suffering was the by-product. (You had to have suffered to be crowned “Queen for a Day.”) Today, it’s the product. Instead of grace under pressure, audiences now crave disgrace under pressure.
Hollywood is said to be looking for a new action hero. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone haven’t flexed much muscle at the box office lately. Bruce Willis hasn’t Died Hard in a while. And Mel Gibson seems content to rewrite American history in films like The Patriot and We Were Soldiers. Besides, these guys are all pushing or pulling 50. Where’s the dude who can chase down a bad guy without stopping every five minutes to catch his breath? Keanu Reeves? Too Zen. The Rock? Too much a (pint-size) Schwarzenegger clone. Tobey Maguire? A lovely idea that will never get past the Spider-Man sequels. Vin Diesel? The most likely to succeed, I’d say, given his “extreme” turns in last summer’s The Fast and the Furious and this summer’s XXX. With his turbocharged musculature and blown-carburetor voice, Diesel could become the point man for the action-traction crowd.
And make no mistake about it: Fight Club is erotic–homoerotic. You only have to gaze at Pitt’s washboard stomach to figure that out. There’s also the intimacy of fist fighting, men’s traditional way of getting up close and personal. And there are plenty of hugs to go around–Fincher’s jab at Iron John and the men’s movement. Perhaps the most arresting image in Fight Club is of Norton burying his face in Meat Loaf’s massive breasts, a result of steroid abuse that also brought on testicular cancer. Weepy and needy, Meat Loaf’s character is supposed to represent the worst-case scenario for American manhood–womanhood. As such, he’s akin to the out-of-work lads in The Full Monty, who had to comport themselves like Vegas strippers to put food on the table. Hard times have supposedly left American men “stiffed,” to borrow the title of Susan Faludi’s book on the subject. As a bumper sticker that was going around for a while put it: Save the Males.
Take Stelarc, real name Stelios Arcardiou. Interested in transcending his body’s evolutionary limitations, the Greek-born artist performed “suspension events,” like the time he pierced his back with 18 fish hooks, attached 18 rings and, via a pulley system, floated over East 11th Street between Avenue B and Avenue C. Better yet, take Chris Burden, who did various things to his body as a way of capturing a jaded art world’s attention. In Doorway to Heaven (1976) he pushed two wires into his chest. In Through the Night Softly (1973) he crawled naked through broken glass. And in Shoot (1975), which Johnny Knoxville may or may not have heard about, he had himself shot in the arm. His description of this last work reads like the wall documentation in a museum show: “At 7:45 PM I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket .22 long rifle. My friend was standing about 15 feet from me.” No mention of a Kevlar suit, or even a Hustler armband.
For the past ten years or so, pain has been the central principle of that life. In The Culture of Pain, David Morris suggests that we’re in the middle of a pain epidemic. What used to be considered a symptom is now considered a sickness, and dozens of pain clinics have sprung up all over the country to treat what Morris calls “the defining illness of our…self-absorbed era.”
