Before I had even left the theater Sunday night, I tweeted, “Was surprisingly easy to keep up with JACKASS 3D in spite of not having seen the first two.” In hindsight this was actually an embarrassingly uncritical and reductive look at the movie. In fact two interesting things about the movie would be better informed had I seen the first two, which I still have not. These two aspects include male-on-male relationships and aging. One: how, if at all, have the characters’ relationship with each other changed over time? Two: have the characters always displayed reluctance to get hurt, and, if yes, then to what degree? It seems to me that over 3 movies, some type of narrative emerges and that the franchise would require more than a tweet for just analysis, but rather something akin to Barthean semiology a la Mythologies.

Also, a fun bit of trivia, Spike Jonze makes an appearance in the film. Spike Jonze directed a skateboarding video for Blind Skateboards in 1991 called Video Days that featured this song by Jackass director Jeff Tremaine’s band Milk that played over the part of Jason Lee. As far as I’ve read online, this song actually appears in the first Jackass movie.