By Michael Marano

“HIM” works incredibly well as a Grotesque, and by that I mean the film takes the incipient, creepy ideologies of pro football and blows them up to terrifying and absurd proportions.

HIM, directed by Justin Tipping. Screening in cinemas throughout New England

Marlon Wayans in HIM.

In all seriousness, I have to warn people with issues like epilepsy not to see HIM, the new, allegorical horror movie about football by Justin Tipping, produced by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions. There’s praise within that warning. Traumatic Brain Injury is central to this movie’s plot, and the movie does, literally, a bang-up job of feeling, looking, and sounding like the effects of a brain injury. HIM induces neurological unease and physical discomfort with flashing lights, weird colors, and auditory bombardment. If you’ve ever been concussed, or just taken a hefty blow to the noggin, HIM will feel unpleasantly familiar. It takes impressive filmmaking chops to make the audience itch with the need to rush out for a quick MRI, and Mr. Tipping gets props for that.

Having said that, I have to say that HIM works incredibly well as a Grotesque, and by that I mean the film takes the incipient, creepy ideologies of pro football and blows them up to terrifying and absurd proportions.

What kinds of incipient, creepy ideologies? The militaristic fascism, including, but not limited to, the use of fly-bys of fighter jets and imagery right out of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia. There’s also the exploitation of Black bodies to their breaking points as a commercial enterprise. The conflation of said commercial enterprise with religion, Manifest Destiny, and American cultural identity. The fact that “fan” is a shortening of “fanatic,” with all the spiritual and psychological dysfunction implied within that word. And the fact that traumatic brain injury is now pretty much a feature, not a bug, of the sport.

The grotesqueries of HIM are great, smart, and insightful. I just wish there was a great movie to go with them. But, sort of like it was with Coppola’s Megalopolis, you just have to admire that Tipping went all-out and broke every cinematic–and for that matter, commercial–rule to bring his vision to the screen. Like it or not, this is auteur cinema. I like the ambition much more than the results, but dear Lord, how I admire the ambition.

HIM is the story of up-and-coming football prodigy Cameron (Tyriq Withers) who gets the chance to train for a week with his idol, Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). If Cam can last the week, he’ll get a big contract with an organization that, for legal reasons, can’t be named as the “NFL” in the film. White has a private training compound in the desert that comes across as if Michelangelo Antonioni shot a Buckminster Fuller redesign of the Astrodome on Arrakis.

In a deeply messed up way, HIM is a companion piece to The Long Walk, also out in theaters now. Both movies are about masculine bonding in the context of taking the body to its extreme physical limits to create spectacles that reinforce fascist ideologies. With The Long Walk, the bonding is counter to toxic masculinity and in defiance of fascism. In HIM, the bonding is purely toxic and in the service of fascism. But it’s pretty fascinating that these two flicks are coming out now, while Trump is soiling the zeitgeist just as surely as he’s soiling his visibly overcrowded adult diapers.

And it’s also fascinating that such an overwhelmingly visual movie was co-written by Tipping with Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie, two guys mostly known for writing radio and podcast dramas. The movie is a carpet bombing of the optic nerve. It comes across as if David Lynch directed The Natural … but edited as if fed through a paper shredder. Says one character in HIM, “Human skulls are not designed to smash into each other.” HIM takes full advantage of the results of that design flaw, showing us in a visceral way the results having a brain scrambled by blunt force trauma. The colors are pure, hyper-saturated giallo colors, to the point that you expect a pair of gloved Argento-esque hands holding a knife to show up at any moment. A number of scenes use the “X-Ray Cam” technique that show us characters’ bones as they break, famously first used in Sonny Chiba Street Fighter movies and then embraced as a motif in lots of hyper violent anime. And the religious imagery doesn’t go from the sublime to the ridiculous, but is sublime in its ridiculousness.

A scene from HIM.

And maybe ridicule is central to what Tipping is trying to pull off here, by showing us such distorted representations of American iconography. “God, Family, and Football!” is a central mantra in HIM, and the movie shows how kind of weird it is to conflate these three things that bind so many American households. The name of the team that Cam and his family essentially… no, literally… worship is the San Antonio Saviors. Subtle? No. Cam’s mentor, Isaiah, is like the Biblical prophet of the same name, heralding the advent of a new savior of the game, who may, or may not be, Cam. Did I say savior of the game? That’s not right. Cam might be the savior of a newly fascist America, with the blessings of football’s corporate masters.

Off this premise, HIM becomes a Fisher King riff… will Cam defeat the current GOAT and take his place?

But HIM collapses under its own metaphoric weight. Cam is groomed as a new Quarterback Messiah, and once you get into that territory, you need a Passion Play, or a scouring of the Temple, or a “Get Thee Behind Me” moment of temptation with Satan, or a moment of doubt in the Garden, or some form of divine intervention. HIM has all of these, squished into the last 15 minutes or so.

HIM is a movie about mentorship. And I kind of wish Tipping with this, his first really big feature, had more mentorship when it came to mastering the craft. With more control and restraint, this film could have been something amazing. It is a fascinating train wreck that would be a great “What the fuck?!” double feature with Megalopolis. But as a movie unto itself, it’s not great… despite its truly awesome ambitions.

Author, critic, life-long athlete and personal trainer Michael Marano was really delighted to see push-ups executed in this movie with perfect form. He’s gone nuts seeing crappy push-ups done on TV and in other movies. ( www.GetOffMyLawnFitness.com )