In the Flesh: HIM

Director Justin Tipping handles HIM, his feature-length debut, like the unholy love child of a Nike ad and a military recruitment promo reel. Thermal imaged skeletons smash together with concussive force, flesh and viscera quivering within their grayish outlines. We are shoved against Cam Cade’s (Tyriq Withers) sculpted frame and exquisitely beautiful features, watching his muscles move like independent organisms, watching his pale hazel eyes flicker back and forth in panic as he heaves for breath and navigates the sea of bodies on the practice field, buffeted and beaten. Notably, HIM never shows Cam actually play a game, because as Tipping’s visual style suggests, his perfection, his excellence, his monomaniacal devotion to the sport is a product for the league’s withered white oligarchs to market, not a talent to be exercised. The Haxan Cloak's sublime soundtrack hammers home the ethereal, dissociative feeling of this state of affairs, layering the bright, faint sound of bells over skirls of dreamlike strings.

Shot in cool jewel and desert tones, in part to emphasize the lightness of Cam’s skin next to Isaiah White’s (Marlon Wayans), of which much in-text mention is made, HIM is unfalteringly gorgeous, a frenetic onslaught of light and sound. We are forced into Cam’s helmet as he fails a drill again and again, his breath thundering in our ears, his world a narrow, constricted bar of light into which White thrusts his face. Wayans, it must be said, has never been better than he is here as a superstar quarterback on the verge of retirement, a man at once standing godlike over a literal cult of followers and so ravaged by insecurity and the terrible cost his years of greatness have exacted from his body that he can’t tolerate even the slightest whiff of chemistry between his wife, Elsie (Julia Fox), and Cam, showing up in the younger player’s bedroom with a loaded handgun on a hunch and rambling at him about infidelity. 

For all White’s deadly seriousness when he tells Cam, reluctant to cheat on his high school sweetheart, a “real killer” doesn’t care whose feelings he hurts on his way to greatness, it’s clear that his own feelings have suffered incredible damage. “I had a similar childhood. Probably worse,” may be a staggeringly narcissistic way to react to another man sharing his childhood trauma with you, but it’s honest in its own sick way. Fame has broken White. It has eaten him out like dry rot. Pain and the infliction of pain has become a ritual to him, not a cost of playing the game he claims to love. He bathes every night in recorded adulation, staring up at a panoramic view of his fans applauding him, chanting his name. The game is nowhere to be seen. He tortures a player with an automatic passing machine — the facade of his compound is pointedly built to evoke this same piece of equipment— by launching footballs into the man’s face at fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour every time Cam misses a beat.

Fighter jets trailing red, white, and blue smoke roar over stadiums full of men giving one another CTE. A father forces his young son to watch footage of a gruesome injury to instill in him that this is what makes a real man, this willingness to sacrifice everything. Its final ten minutes may suffer from weak and unpolished writing and consequently exaggerated pacing issues, but HIM is a ferocious debut, a look at America’s most violent and jingoistic pastime as a full-fledged death cult, the kind of system that crushes and devours Black bodies, that incentivizes them to destroy themselves, that posits the pinnacle of success as living in a vast, empty house in the shape of a machine built for inflicting cranial trauma over, and over, and over until, through the haze of lethal migraines, weeping tears of blood, the whole squalid enterprise finally makes sense.