| I Don't Get Any of This
I guess this is where I'm supposed to say how brilliant Spirited
Away is. I mean, it is at one-hundred percent on the Tomatometer—who
am I to spoil that? Personally, I'm at a loss. I am a much
bigger fan of hand-drawn than computer animation for sure,
but I've yet to see the point of making a fetish of watching
ass cheeks pendulate, which I see in nearly every anime movie.
And besides, I'm probably completely missing the point, but
Spirited Away smelled a little too xenophobic for my
tastes: Did I miss something, or was that giant talking frog
wearing a beret, smoking a long thin cigarette, and overseeing
factory slave work?
Spirited Away is the story of Chihiro, a ten-year-old
girl whose parents are moving to the suburbs. On the way,
her dad takes a short cut along a dirt road. They discover
an abandoned amusement park, which went south after the economy
bust. Soon Mom, fussy and thin, and Dad, with gravel in his
voice, gut billowing over his belt, and a cinder block for
a jaw, come upon a restaurant of sorts. Chihiro Senses Danger:
"The wind is blowing us in!" "Let's not go!"
she pines. But they do, and Mom and Dad scarf down the food.
"Don't worry, Daddy's here. He's got credit cards and
cash." They glutton themselves and, low and behold, turn
into pigs. American Pigs.
The rest of the movie is an Alice in Wonderland journey
through the dreamscape of Japanese mythology. Usually I can
offer as complex a deconstruction as you want (see The Ring),
but you'll have to go to some anime fan page for that. My
view of this film is probably juvenile and reductionist, but
the animation looks flat without a digital projector, the
dubbed lines are spoken in that robotic English common to
Japanese film, and there are so many ethnic stereotypes I
got lost in my notes: The French Frogs, The Fat Polynesian,
The Slave-Driving Eastern-European Factory Boss, the evil
Russian Witch, the American Pigs. I did, however, enjoy the
little balls of soot that eat Lucky Charms. Also, the Giant
Shit Monster from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back shows
up. And the Eyes Wide Shut and/or Scream monster
chases Chihiro around as the little dingleberries of soot
hide her shoes. This gives her a break from begging for a
job from the evil Phyllis Diller-looking bathhouse witch who
nurses a giant baby. Sorry, y'all—I give up. I just kept
wishing that someone would tell the American Dad that he has
"a very big penis" and Trey Parker's band would
play the "Chinpokomon" theme song. I'm sure it's
as deep and textured as I've been reading, but then again,
I thought that Watto thing in Star Wars was a big flying
blue Jew, and that kind of stuff in a kid's movie throws me
off. As Chihiro herself asks her rescuer Haku, the river god,
"What's going on?" "Something you wouldn't
recognize." I know how you feel, sister.
A bit bewildered, from Spirited Away I wandered over
to the midnight, opening night showing of Jackass,
just for shits and giggles. Not expecting a lot of giggles,
I was mostly there for the shits, and Jackass delivers
in spades. The Jackass crowd filled the theater by
eleven thirty, smelling of Marlboro-soaked denim jackets and
Evan Williams, buzzing as if awaiting the demolition derby
main event. I would know—from year to year, you can count
on about a half dozen Himes in the opening heats of the Henry
County Fair Derby. Just from the buzz in that theater alone,
I could predict a twenty-five million dollar opening weekend.
You see, I've got my grubby little fingers on the pulse of
America. Do you think Roger Ebert was at the opening night
midnight show of Jackass? Or J. Hoberman? How about
Elvis Mitchell and Jonathan Rosenbaum? No, they weren't. They
can be spirited far, far away for all I care; the spectacle
of Jackass is deserving of investigation, and shouldn't
simply be passed off as a juvenile, masochistic spectacle—not
when it's making this much money and inciting riots in the
under-thirty crowd like nothing I've ever seen. And after
having my mind bollixed by anime, I indulged a little revenge
fantasy by watching white trash wreck havoc on unsuspecting
Japanese (even if the stunt had already been pulled by Tom
Green). After Spirited Away, Jackass felt like
a Wasabi Snooter for the soul. Don't ask.
The opening is one of the funniest scenes thus far this year:
The Jackass crew are piled into an oversized shopping
cart, careening downhill but filmed in slow motion, giving
each member a chance to mug for the camera (and the crowd
to chant his name) before having garbage shot at them from
cannons. Really, it's a metaphor for the whole Jackass
phenomenon: A marketing campaign speeding out-of-control,
firing trash at the masses. There are a few scenes that I
think we could all agree are funny, the sort in which snarling
rogues enact revenge on bourgeois privilege and comfort; here
involving an airhorn on a golf course and convenience store
jousting. Mostly, though, Jackass stunts revolve around
four central aspects of human physiology: 1) The rectum, 2)
The scrotum, 3) Vomiting, 4) Feces and/or urine. Really, once
the movie presents itself as a masochistically homo-erotic
vomitorium, the opening shopping cart scene is shown to announce:
The Roman Circus Has Arrived.
Steve-O seemed to be the crowd favorite, but Johnny Knoxville
is the impresario of this Circus Maximus—in the shrewd
masterstroke, he offers himself as both Christian and Lion.
For the daring but less heroic efforts (read: the stunts performed
while drunk), Knoxville mostly prods the action like a zoo
keeper with a stick in snake cage; Knoxville's crew's orificial
onslaught involves anally-launched bottle rockets, vicious
bungee-enhanced wedgies, and a particularly inspired sequence
involving a tube of anal lube, a matchbox car, and some wince-inducing
X-rays. But for the truly gladiatorial stunts, Knoxville steps
up to take a rubber bullet to the abs or crash it up at a
demolition derby. An impressive spectacle, really; I couldn't
help but think that Ridley Scott would find all this self-torture
the feel-good comedy hit of the year. It's the sort of exquisite
sadism that would make Nero proud, a spectacle for the mob—and
make no mistake, there's quite a mob, especially young, under-educated
American males.
So what does any of this mean? For one, underneath the appeased
Beavis-ian chuckles and Butthead-ian guffaws of the mob lies
a genuine bloodthirst. For all the violence of the Roman Circus,
it never matched that of the streets, and I think the same
can be said for the Jackass audience: As painful as
the electric shock to Steve-O's balls seems, it is far less
so than what's felt by the meth-cooking, whiskey-soaked, wife-beating
Midwestern and Southern masses. Roman emperors generated such
grotesque spectacles to appease the mob and distract from
the underlying social and economic problems; similarly, there's
a genuine powderkeg cased in the hardships of those thirty-five
percent of Americans who live at or below the poverty line.
Sure, suburban kids love stuff like Jackass, but more
out of the same ghetto chic that gave rise to Parental Advisory
warnings. Try sitting through an opening night, midnight showing
of Jackass thirty miles from Arkansas and see if you
don't start to feel the anger and discontent of poor America
spilling safely onto the theater floor, like the angry mullet
behind me who fumbled his flask of Jack Green Label. Couple
that with the culture of fear that Michael Moore articulates
in Bowling for Columbine, and one begins to sense that
politicians of Red America are currying the favor of the masses
(especially in the months before an election) by appealing
to their basest instincts by peddling a war that will be experienced
in the same way one might watch others play "Grand Theft
Auto." Or, for that matter, watching an episode of "Jackass."
Is there any wonder why half the country is clamoring for
a placating war that will be consumed in the same medium as
its Roman Circus? This is certainly not to say that Spike
Jonez, Jeff Tremaine, and Johnny Knoxville are evil masterminds—they're
merely exploiting larger social trends for fun and profit—and,
to be fair, Jonez's wheelie on a Rascal is pretty impressive.
However, it still stands that Jackass may just be a
sign of the fall of Western Civilization.
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