A-List: Modern Performance Art
By Josh Spiegel
October 14, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Still, what Knoxville, Steve-O, Bam Margera and everyone else in the Jackass team do could be considered performance art of some kind. Don’t believe me? Did you know the new movie was being shown at the Museum of Modern Art this past weekend? Of course, that doesn’t automatically qualify Jackass 3D or any Jackass movie as performance art, but think of what such art is meant to do: incite the audience, surprise them, confront them. Even in the most childish, immature, raunchy fashion, this is what the Jackass films do. This week’s A-List will cover five recent bits of high-profile performance art, from the obvious to the somewhat surprising, as it should be. Jackass is just the tip of the iceberg for modern performance art in film, so let’s get moving with this week’s list.
I’m Still Here
What is more surprising, that Joaquin Phoenix was faking his “I’m a heavily bearded rapper now, not a moderately respected and Oscar-nominated actor!” ruse, or that so many people (including venerated critic Roger Ebert) thought he was for real? I don’t want to turn this section of the column into a baffled bit of boasting - though I probably dedicated all of one minute to thinking about it, I never bought Phoenix’s prank - but I am genuinely shocked that film journalists and other people were snookered in by I’m Still Here, the mockumentary directed by Phoenix’s brother-in-law, Casey Affleck, who dropped the other shoe on the situation just in time for Phoenix to return to David Letterman’s show, where the mischief all really started. Phoenix’s career doesn’t appear to be hurting, as he’s rumored to be co-starring in Clint Eastwood’s biopic about J. Edgar Hoover.
Having said that, I still think I’m Still Here, at least as it ended playing out, was a dumb, if bold, choice from Phoenix. Sure, his career’s not actually over, and sure, you could argue that the last two years of Phoenix’s life have garnered him the most media attention. But is it the right kind of attention? Making fun of celebrity and media in the 21st century is a popular and ripe topic, but some people just won’t be able to take him seriously anymore. Joaquin Phoenix was always thought of as a serious actor, someone whose work should be admired and appreciated. Maybe part of why everyone was thrown off is because he seems like the last guy to pull a prank like this. Whatever the case is, Phoenix’s performance art may have backfired: I’m Still Here was not successful, and Phoenix is once again barely considered by most people who only knew him as the whack job from Letterman.
Jackass
As you’ll see with the next entry, MTV really knew what it was getting into with various shows that hit around 2000. With Jackass, the concept was simple: a bunch of guys do a bunch of stupid crap. One of the most curious elements of the series has been the involvement of one Spike Jonze. Yes, the Spike Jonze of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Where The Wild Things Are is one of the people who’s been a producer of Jackass since the very beginning. How do we relate Jonze’s superior directing work over the past decade with the lowbrow goofing off that takes place on Jackass? Who’s to say, aside from the simple, unavoidable and somewhat embarrassing fact that…yeah, Jackass is stupid, crass, idiotic, and so on, but it can also be really, really funny.
I’m still somewhat surprised that there’s a third Jackass movie being released. I remember seeing the first one in the fall of 2002 as a freshman in college. I was at the local theater with one of my roommates on a Friday night, the night it opened. We were two of maybe ten people in the audience. We both ate it up (and having seen the first two, I still think the first is best, by being disgusting but not too cringe-worthy), but I figured it would flop. Of course, by costing very little and making back enough to be profitable, Jackass is now a trilogy of films. Performance art comes in many, demented forms, and even if they’re not intentionally trying to be this way, the people behind Jackass are performance artists. They’re the court jesters of performance art, but it’s still what they are.
Freddy Got Fingered
It might hurt you to remember, but there was once a time when Tom Green was one of the most popular people in America. Of course, these were back in the days when making fun of MTV for not showing music videos anymore was just barely becoming obnoxious. Jersey Shore was nowhere near showing up on anyone’s radar; Tom Green in the movies was meant to be a big box office draw. And then his first starring role, Freddy Got Fingered, came out in theaters. The movie didn’t flop nearly as hard as you might think: its budget was $14 million and made just about that much money at the domestic box office. But the reviews were almost universally horrible, and Green’s career tumbled afterwards. Whether you like the movie, you hate it, or like most people, you haven’t seen it, we can agree that Tom Green became popular as a performance artist.
Most performance artists often want to get as much attention as possible; how else do you know when they’re working? They’re not often truly well-known (Joaquin Phoenix and James Franco, during his General Hospital stint, are among the more recently famous), but they do a lot to get noticed. These days, MTV is a great place for performance artists to get their time in the sun - because that’s what Jersey Shore is, right? - and Tom Green may have been the smartest, most self-aware of all. For what ended up only being a couple of years, but felt a lot longer, he was able to become one of the network’s biggest stars by being as outrageous as possible. Many people will talk about how far they’ll go for a joke, but Green went far just to get a reaction. Freddy Got Fingered was not financially successful, but you get the feeling that Green was happy just seeing people react to the movie at all.
Borat
Sacha Baron Cohen can probably never go as deep undercover into a character as he did with Borat, a journalist from Kazakhstan who’s doing reports on American culture. Borat, as seen in the film of the same name and Da Ali G Show, was a well-intentioned idiot, someone who seemed to know nothing about America but was able to embarrass all of his famous subjects once the cameras turned on. Since the 2006 film was such a wild success, Cohen has kind of faded away from the public eye. In the summer of 2009, his follow-up film, Bruno, faltered critically and commercially. There are laughs to be had in Bruno, but there’s something to be said for a lack of surprise. Most people who saw Borat genuinely had no idea that Sacha Baron Cohen was playing a character, or even that he had just appeared in Talladega Nights as the villain.
Whatever has happened to Cohen’s career since Borat (I’m a fan of his turn in Sweeney Todd), there’s no mistaking that Borat is a genuinely hilarious film. Like most outlandish and puerile comedies, the story comes, oh, just about last (if I remember correctly, Borat wants to shack up with Pamela Anderson, hence a personal reason for traveling across the country). There are, however, enough memorable setpieces and big laughs, most notably a naked wrestling match in the middle of a hotel filled with confused onlookers. Cohen’s clearly a very talented performer and writer, but Borat was both a wildly famous film and one that damned him from never successfully pulling the wool over people’s eyes again. Cohen’s a performance artist of the highest order, but his most intense performance is his downfall. Who won’t recognize him now, no matter what voice or wig he puts on? Two films was one too many.
Pirates of the Caribbean
No, not the ride. Yes, the movie. What exactly about Pirates of the Caribbean constitutes modern performance art? Nowadays, we think of Johnny Depp as one of the biggest movie stars of the last 10 years. Alongside people like George Clooney and Brad Pitt, Depp sets people off in the best way possible. And yet it’s worth remembering that only a few years ago, executives at Walt Disney Pictures were stricken with fear. They were spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a movie based on a theme park ride, and the leading man was playing a pirate via a mix of Keith Richards and Pepe Le Pew? We all love Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow - okay, not everyone does, though I’m of the mind that the second and third films weren’t great, but Depp remains hilarious - but his performance could have easily fallen flat.
The way I prefer to see it is that Johnny Depp did what a few other actors in the past decade have done, most specifically John Turturro in the Transformers films. Depp signs a contract to play Jack Sparrow, is paid his allotted fee, and then says, “Wait, this is the check? And you can’t take it back? So I get to do whatever the hell I want? And you’ve already paid me to do so? Okay then.” Getting paid to make a fool of yourself is pretty much what acting is (at least from my cynical point of view), and what Johnny Depp does in the Pirates of the Caribbean films is have fun being the biggest fool of all. Performance art doesn’t always work, but Captain Jack Sparrow is arguably the most profitable piece of performance art in the past decade.