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When we talk about streaming culture, we’re usually enthusing about what’s new, but one of the best things about streaming is how it’s made old and obscure cult hits available to a new generation. Presenting Cult Corner: your weekly look into hidden gems and long-lost curiosities that you can find on streaming.
Dumb: The Story of Big Brother Magazine certainly isn’t for everyone. The documentary about the rise and fall of the alternative skateboarding magazine that helped shape modern entertainment while offending everyone in sight is sure to be objectionable to many. There are many nudity-filled scenes, featuring both men and women, and it’s not unusual to see actual crap. Dumb is truly a best (and worst) hits list for a magazine that took pride in pushing the envelope, but it’s also a surprisingly watchable tale of talented, dumb people doing impressively dumb things.
Though it was technically a skateboarding magazine, Big Brother quickly transitioned into a publication about counter culture through its no rules editorial policy. Director Patrick O’Dell makes it clear how graphic that no rules rule could be. Talking head footage of Big Brother’s founders, writers, and photographers as well as the celebrities who were inspired by the publication are intercut with clips from the magazine. More often than not, these clips are highly graphic, so this isn’t a documentary I’d recommend watching with parents. However, as Dumb goes through Big Brother’s history, it’s hard not to see how the magazine has influenced pop culture. There are the obvious parallels, namely how Steve-O and Johnny Knoxville were contributors to the magazine before they transitioned to Jackass, but there are other traces of the magazine’s influence. At one point VICE co-founder Gavin McInnes credits Big Brother for influencing the tone of his own widely-read media company. Even the idea transforming writers into personalities for the brand rather than strict reporters is reminiscent of the personal essay-heavy editorial landscape of today.
That being said, as a viewer and not a collaborator for the magazine, it’s easy to be skeptical of the reverent tone of the documentary. Throughout its publication history, Big Brother was riddled with controversy, from ads featuring female genitalia that were too graphic for printers to run to an article entitled “How to Kill Yourself” that evoked national outrage. The documentary also explores the always-explicit Big Brother’s decision to run a Kids Issue, something that left its later owner Hustler founder Larry Flynt speechless. At times when subjects of the documentary are asked to defend these journalistic choices, they’re unable to, cringing as they try to rationalize a decisions that may look more questionable with age. However, that same recklessness is what connected the magazine to its audience of teenagers and contributed to the head-of-fire stunt that launched Steve-O’s career. The article that captured this first stunt included the sentence “Steve-O is pathetic,” a fittingly harsh rebuke.
The unfortunate part of Dumb is that the documentary spends so much time glorifying the magazine’s founding, it rushes through its downfall. Big Brother came to an end for reasons far more mundane than the controversial magazine likely deserved. Once skateboarding became a profitable mainstream pastime, the idea of advertising in a vulgar, counter culture magazine became less appealing to companies. Put in a blunter way, photographer Atiba Jefferson sums it up well when he says, “Dicks and sh-t definitely, probably, you know, hung them.”
Dumb will probably offend some viewers. It was offensive to me at times, and I had to stop eating my lunch after the third story of a poo-related prank. It’s often as tasteless and sexist as you would expect a documentary celebrating a ‘90s gross-out mag to be. However, for fans of stories about sticking it to the establishment or people interested in the origins of the Jackass franchise, it’s an entertaining watch.
