50 Shanken / The Sublime “Jackass” is now an immense aggregation of commercial areas and office buildings. But it remains unincorporated, its political structure mirroring its inde- terminate morphology. Many suburban and exurban areas, edge cities, and areas of sprawl share this ambiguity of governance and physical boundary. That they also share an abundance of neglected and remaindered spaces makes them attractive places for adolescent play. This enormous ring of ordinary environments dwarfs the conventional centralized city. Its scale alone resists easy comprehension, and its spatial indeterminacy intensifies the effect of encountering the unbeholdable. Part of this ambiguity is socioeconomic: the same forces that created sprawl— laissez-faire development—apply to its management and oversight. We have a bloating belt of lawlessness in the unmonitored areas outside our cities. Much of “Jackass” takes place in these areas—in parking lots, alleys, and fragments in and between sub- urbs—exploiting their openness, both practically and aesthetically. “Jackass” as a Form of Culture The epic opening shot to the first Jackass film plays on this landscape. We see the Jackasses loaded into a Brobdingnagian shopping cart as it hurtles down a stretch of asphalt. Eight men hold on desperately as explosions threaten, until the cart finally crashes into a vegetable stand, sending them into the air. Here in condensed form are all the elements of the more modestly financed television show: the felicitous use of ordinary props (the shopping cart), speed, the chance of injury, an ambiguous and seemingly empty land- scape, and the violent camaraderie of daredevils egging one another on. The aesthetic is one of young male possible without the spaces that foster their play. Even though some of the scenes take place in cities, the show’s creative crucible is the sub- urb—and in particular, its apotheosis in postwar California. Here, sun, expansive subdivisions, light-indus- trial and business parks, and ambigu- ously bounded spaces have produced some of America’s finest athletes and delinquents. But “Jackass” speaks to a more generic geography, as well, one where the suburb uneasily abuts the commercial and industrial, or leaches out to a nonurban frontier. These spaces are “sublime” in mul- tiple ways that contributed to a spe- cific postwar culture of play that, in turn, produced “Jackass.” A Space for Jackasses This generic topos, the ill-defined realm between city and country, helps explain the easy way “Jackass” taps into the cultural potential of the suburbs. Depending on context and period, these indeterminate areas have been variously defined as exurban, edge city, and sprawl. As early as 1955, A.C. Spectorsky’s The Exur- banites drew attention to villages on the fringes of cities that were being claimed as places of escape by urban elites. 1 But with postwar prosperity and national investment in highways, areas like Long Island’s Garden City slowly filled with subdivisions and commercial developments. In 1991, the journalist Joel Garreau coined the term “edge city” to describe more recent developments around suburban highway inter- changes, where malls, business parks, subdivisions, and in some cases, entire “crystal cities” have sprung up to take advantage of cheap land and changes in telecommunications and regional traffic flow. 2 Tysons Corner, Virginia, a mere village a couple of decades ago, A fire hose dangles from a massive crane that sits like a monumental mechanical giraffe in a desolate, parched landscape. A man clings to the hose, which is turned on full blast, causing its force to whip him around like a fly on a string. As the hose snaps back and forth, the camera pulls back and pans the horizon, highlighting the puniness of the man’s body amid endless brown hills. The glimpse reveals recent bulldozer tracks, and the raggedy body (out of which we hear screams) seems to mirror this dramatically denuded land. All the while the crew behind the camera laughs. The devastation of it all is brought home when the viewer real- izes the crane and water hose may be a contraption assembled precisely to wash these hills away. This scene is one segment from the show “Jackass,” an MTV production carried around the world and made into two feature-length films (2002 and 2006), in which a group of young men perform short stunts, some just seconds in duration. Many are simple, involving a skateboard, a stretch of concrete, and random props drawn from the environment. The perverse fascination of “Jackass” comes, in part, from the way it layers social, bodily and geographical transgression with elements of performance art, classic forms of physical humor, and modes of play common to the post–World War II suburbs. That the producers tumble together a volatile mixture of conventional comedic tropes, familiar categories of aesthetic experience, and “generation x” sensibility misses the point. “Jackass” roams this terrain with unconscious delight. For all of its staging, the essential facts of “Jackass” couldn’t be simpler: adolescent male group experimenta- tion, a video camera, and an audi- ence. And yet, none of it would be The Sublime “Jackass”: Transgression and Play in the Inner Suburbs Andrew M. Shanken