God Found Herself Thru ‘Jackass’

If the point of life is for the Creator to experience everything, could 'Jackass' be humanity's pinnacle expression?

To say the final Jackass movie made a big impression on me would be an understatement - here at Kill Pretty we were sobbing by the end and blithering about how it’s the highest art form and ultimate expression of divinity.

At the insistence of my creative partner and founder of the insane platform you currently find yourself on, Tyler Nacho, I raced across town opening weekend to see Jackass: Best and Last. We saw it just after I was finishing up my latest Tetragrammaton essay on God’s true nature. Having just spent the last few hours contemplating the perspective of The Supreme Creator, it’s fair to say that I came into the theater with a different perspective than most.

Surely I was also emotional watching it because Jackass was so influential when I was a kid, and I had a deep emotional attachment not only to the guys left standing in the final movie, but even more to the ones who aren’t around. Bam was IT for 15-year-old-me, and his big brother’s band CKY (Camp Kill Yourself) that soundtracked all the CKY skate videos was the first underground music I was ever a fan of in the early, super Wild West days of the Internet. He couldn’t get sober in time to film the movie, and my other favorite Ryan Dunn wrapped his car around a tree in 2011 and died.

Think about this for a second - if you’re the original source of consciousness and creator of all there is, you’re going to want to experience everything possible, right? And so much of the hype around becoming enlightened is about transcending physical form and being able to live in both human and divine consciousness at the same time, so what greater expression of this concept is there than Jackass? Being willing not just to go beyond the limitations of the physical body, but completely disregarding those limitations as an art form in order to make themselves and others laugh, may very well be ultimate expression of God-consciousness in human beings.

Like, I’m sorry - compared to all you guru-chortlers out there who think meditating in a cave your whole life or denying yourself physical pleasures are cool paths to enlightenment, that shit is boring AF. Not only is Jackass is WAY more interesting, it’s not cool! At all! It’s breathtakingly stupid. And the more stupid it is, the more funny it is, and the more funny it is the more we’re laughing and raising our vibration up to pure joy. What’s more divine than that?!

The movie opens with an unreleased video of Johnny Knoxville, who I always regarded as the pretty-boy starlet they used as a face to sell the show, assuming he wasn’t nearly as hardcore as Steve-O or the other guys, but this video is the most crazy and simultaneously casual thing I’ve ever seen. In a one-man stunt that became the impetus for the Jackass TV show, he put on a bulletproof vest, stuffed it with Hustler magazines and shot himself from a few inches away with the single bullet in a .38 caliber revolver. But first he had to click through the five empty chambers while his friends filming begged him not to do it, and when the gun finally went off he didn’t even fall over! The innocence in his confidence is mesmerizing and deeply endearing.

You can watch him do it here, and if you see Jackass: Best and Last, you’ll get to see how different than innocent confidence presents nearly 30 years later. Watching him at 55 years old ride a furious bull for a second time cause he wants to get a better shot of himself getting thrown off and trampled almost unanimously elicits a, “PLEASE NO, DON’T DO IT!” from the audience. But that’s us watching it from the perspective of mere mortals. If we zoom up to our God perspective, he’s doing exactly what the Creator wants - experiencing everything possible. And look at that shot!

Zooming up to God-mode made the movie a lot more watchable, I’ll tell ya that - and fun. Like wow, look at God just RIDING IT as hard as she possibly can through these fools. And it’s easy to forget that Spike Jonze helped bring Jackass to MTV cause he was friends with the franchise’s co-creator Jeff Tremaine, but boy does this movie make you remember. He directed the opening and ending sequences, which served to remind me that all dick and poop-bits aside - this is high art.

And just before that final sequence wraps the movie, we’re left with the words of a very young Johnny Knoxville talking to Jeff Tremaine, who was concerned about a stunt not going the way they wanted and putting Johnny in danger. “That’s exactly what I didn’t want,” Jeff says with regret. Then Johnny looks right at the camera with a smile that will crack your heart wide open no matter how stupid you think this shit is (and it is!). With that same innocent confidence I’ve come to believe is the pure embodiment of God consciousness itself, he says: “No, but it’s exactly what I wanted.”

That was the moment I burst into tears. My heart was overflowing with love and reverence and gratitude that could no longer be contained. No one’s brain would ever allow them to do the crazy shit these guys did, it could only come from the heart.

Jackass is exactly what God wanted.