While flipping channels Friday night I happened to notice the Jesse James show Motorcycle Mania 3. This was essentially “A Year In The Life of Jesse James” and covered 2003, when Jesse dated, married, and dumped Janine. I’m not into Jesse or this entire shop-show genre but I watched it to see how Janine was treated.

Janine got a lot of face time early on, shot while they were dating. The marriage ceremony was shown. Tera Patrick was at the wedding and was ID’d by that name. No mention was made of either Janine’s or Tera’s porn past.

Interestingly Janine was portrayed sympathetically, and no doubt is left Jesse is responsible for the breakup. It’s pretty odd for Hollywood to portray their star this way, but it was is in keeping with the basic theme of the show “juvenile delinquent / loser is OK after all”. The producers don’t need to show Jesse in a positive light except to loudly claim at every chance that he is the best bike builder, ever, anywhere. Whatever.

Speaking of which: Jesse alluded to his past in one line where he mentioned stealing cars. A casual viewer might not realize he wasn’t kidding. No mention was made of the fact that he was arrested and did time for this.

There was also a short segment where Jesse states he’s not racist. This came completely out of the blue and had no context in the show: it must have been added to refute rumors about Jesse. His says he’s not racist because he ran an ad with a black guy. That’s an interesting claim since the ad probably was arranged and run by Karla James, not Jesse – he may never have even seen it until afterwards. I’ve never seen a black guy working in the West Coast Choppers shop.

No mention at all was made of Karla, Jesse’s first wife. She was in the very first year of the show and then vanished when they divorced, at roughly the same time the show moved out of the motorcycle shop. Karla was clearly the one that ran the business. I’ve never see any mention of who runs the business now. I suspect any honest biography would put Karla very high on the list of reasons he’s not in jail or a trailer park right now.

In short: Jesse is, at heart, white trash / juvenile delinquent and it shows. Janine gets very favorable treatment, but it seems to me she fell into the all-to-common trap of believing that a guy can be saved, reformed, whatever. Janine is interviewed (prior to the breakup) both solo and with Jesse about their relationship. Janine is not shown in the later part of the show after Janine and Jesse split up.

Great post, jrv. I always enjoy reading your thoughts.