Wednesday, September 24, 2025

Him (dir. Justin Tipping, 2025)

No film since David Fincher’s half-assed Fight Club has been more misconstrued by its intended audience than Justin Tipping’s latest movie Him, a supposed horror film that’s really more of a boner-inspiring (and boner-inspired) horror-comedy, and one which really only makes sense as the most intentionally homoerotic movie of our current century, at least so far. Almost nobody is seeing it in cinemas; I’ve now seen it four times and can therefore confirm that without a doubt. A product of Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw production company, Him has received nearly no promotion whatsoever for the aforementioned reasons. This is not a horror movie about football, though the physically stacked and questionably brain-damaged football player at its center (expertly rendered by Tyriq Withers, himself a former football player in a once-in-a-lifetime performance which I’ll never tire of watching) will convince 99.7% of viewers that Him is a movie about football. The other .3% will be gay and bisexual men who are sharp enough both to know the truth and to admit that truth to themselves.

I’m guessing that one of the reasons why Justin Tipping made this movie in the way he did is because on the level of its homoeroticism, it’s entirely unprecedented in the history of cinema since it revolves pretty much solely around a sports-mystique drama between two African-American men: Withers’ character Cameron Cade and his personal hero/coach (and daddy/tormentor) Isaiah White, played by Marlon Wayans in an immersive, incendiary role that would ideally garner Wayans an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in any just universe, which our own universe doesn’t happen to be. Without giving away too many of the plot details (none of them are earth-shaking anyway), Cam finds himself whisked off to formerly legendary and soon to be retired Isaiah White’s compound to retrain and rehabilitate himself after his head injury, subsequent to Isaiah’s own potentially career-ending injury many years before. Of course, it’s all part of a larger design for Cam to become Isaiah’s inheritor in a long-standing, quasi-corporate sponsorship where one star quarterback simply replaces the one before him who’s aged out of the game. The comical ugliness of the team’s owners, parodies of roles that those actors all play into with obvious relish (and too much of it), is all sheer Harmony Korine-esque nonsense for nonsensical moviegoers who bought a ticket for the wrong movie, I think because Tipping probably felt somewhat forced to add those standard horror & gore elements. The ending is particularly abysmal and unfunny, yet it’s also clearly kowtowing to figures like Jordan Peele and the powers that be, who hold the mainstream cinematic purse strings in order to prevent the movie from totally tanking at the box office. Tipping’s directorial intelligence makes the movie evade what would have been its artistic fate.

As a result, what’s extraordinary in spite of all this for my own movie dollars is that Tipping (and Withers, and Wayans) didn’t have to sacrifice the movie that I believe Tipping wanted to make, a relentless, rhythmic, and visually vibrant critique of masculinity that’s unafraid to look the most brutal arenas of homophobia fully in the face. We hear a steady stream of homophobic (moreover, effeminophobic) jokes and playful insults throughout the obstacle course of the film, mostly from Isaiah White as he physically and mentally shapes Cam to his own desires and specifications. Isaiah’s (and his team’s) wide-ranging yet narrowly focused fixations include: cock size, handjobs from male fitness trainers, buttholes, blowjobs (I suppose I should technically say bro-jobs), skin tone, Grindr, a naked physical exam in a fieldhouse full of highly curious older white sports professionals, masculine flirtations that border on intimate physical encounters that border on implied sexual intercourse. Marlon Wayans is winningly on board for all of it because he totally gets what Tipping’s film is aiming for, and so Wayans is the main player who helps it get to that place. As a result, he also gets top billing (yes, that’s also a pun), even though Withers is the one whose mechanically perfect body is put through the homoerotic wringer mercilessly throughout the movie’s entire 90-minute running time.

It’s not at all coincidental how the making of this film unfolded during the extremely public courtroom trial of Sean “Diddy” (or didn’t he?) Combs, who was accused of doing everything that Wayans’ character very unashamedly does and gets away with, all the way up to the film’s confrontational climax between Isaiah and Cam. Nothing is surprising or unique about the movie’s typically genre trappings. The jock somewhat brainlessly suffers and endures his twisted mentor’s torturous advances until he uses his muscle (plus a whole lot of blood, including Isaiah’s and other people’s) to turn the tables in a riveting red-lit sequence that’s brilliantly conveyed as the camera circles around the actors and also follows them both individually as Cam prowls around and around and around Isaiah in a dizzying slow-motion circle. The aura of that scene and numerous others is blatantly ritualistic, a clever move to circumscribe the ruthless rituals of masculinity (“FOOTBALL!” Isaiah screams) so tightly within the context of actual rituals: social, financial, homoerotically heterosexual, homosocial (female characters are almost utterly and quite purposefully expunged), semi-religious, and pagan. Critics like the late Eve Sedgwick wrote seminally and unforgettably about how closely the homoerotic and homosocial must parallel one another while also dying (literally) yet trying hard not to intertwine. Knowingly, Justin Tipping’s film explores that exact tension in ways are as daring and memorable visually as Sedgwick’s cultural critiques themselves were theoretically. Critiques of gender by contemporary philosophers like Judith Butler also figure into what Tipping is doing, partly by accident and partly by design. Butler has often written about how gender uses blunt violence (or at least the ongoing threat of it) to keep social gender roles in check.

But the way that femininity gets completely trounced, ridiculed, and abandoned in Him, alongside the incessantly seductive/destructive meat-machine that masculinity becomes, is also what rather innocuously highlights Tyriq Withers’ performance as almost entirely unique in the history of cinema, particularly in the history of hypermasculine (and hyper-str8) representations of African-American men in the cinema of this country since its very inception. (I’ll refrain from more thoroughly invoking the far-too-obvious origins of such tropes with D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, not to mention its recent and much-maligned remake.) What gives Withers’ portrayal of Cam Coleman its rocket fuel, however, is the way in which he controls what would otherwise by a full-scale of his distinctive face and body. As most gay/bi men out there will understand from the inside out, he controls that level of scrutiny and objectification by submitting to it as an actor, and the fact that Justin Tipping elicited such a consummate, flawless performance from him (former football player or not) is beyond commendable. I was reminded by Withers’ willingness to lend his body to the camera for the film’s particular purposes of Karl Glusman’s equally astounding (and pretty much ignored) central, body-baring performance in Gaspar Noé’s Love from a decade ago now. What Withers’ and Glusman’s uncompromising performances amply display is still where so-called manhood or maleness now currently stands.

To close, I’d also like to consider the angles from which Him is a bit too retro or outdated, something that I think Justin Tipping was also aware of, so he amped it up even further for that reason. The casual manner with which Grindr and bro-jobs trip off the tongue of Marlon Wayans’ character more than suggests that such formerly “gay” acts and territories have now been somewhat more openly embraced by bi and str8 men, not just as quick means of pleasure but as occasionally more active pursuits, or intensive curiosities, or even overt enthusiasms. (Go ahead and google “gooning” at your own risk.) Wayans’ mock-fellating the barrel of a gun in heavy jest may not exactly be new, but a few key other things are; for instance, how queerness extends to include whoever might self-identify with it, to the extent that queerness will one day no longer even be “queer” perhaps. For me that’s the real significance of Him, as a sign of instrumental cultural progress. When the once-hegemonic category of str8 male cisgender heteronormativity has been loosened or destabilized to the point where it’s now relaxed enough to be able to question its own implicit power (Isaiah’s body, blood, and psyche are basically subsumed by the movie’s finale directly into Cam Cade’s own, and then Cam obliterates not only Isaiah’s but ALL of the useless corresponding bodies around him), then we kind of know for certain that the earnest goals of the politics surrounding gender identity and various forms of queerness over the past fifty years have now been partially achieved.


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