Football nightmare flick Him is not the shitshow critics claim. How we watch movies may be the issue.
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When a director combines horror with the American sport of football, the possibilities for story and audience impact seem endless. If this is a low-risk recipe for success, padded by football’s longstanding cultural fanaticism and collective love for fright, why do most watchers and critics, alike, believe this film is bad? [Editor’s note: Yes, that’s a whopping 29% score on RottenTomatoes. Oh. It went down to 28% as we edited this. Well, there you go.]
The answer can be found in the theater seats we occupy as consumers and the prescriptive role of the producers—one of which is notably Jordan Peele, architect of acclaimed horror films Get Out, Us, and Nope.
Justin Tipping’s comically horrifying Him may be a marker of a changing relationship between film and the expectations of the modern viewer, shifting away from routine narrative to offbeat storytelling that leaves viewers disoriented and dissatisfied. Studios should take heed if they want to reach audiences in a material way; Peele’s celebrity, and that of other artists, may not continue to be enough to pique the interest of familiar fans to come out to the theater.
Him’s vaguely harrowing tale centers around Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers), a rising-rookie football star, with an adopted admiration for the football “GOAT,” quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), a member of his and his late father’s favorite team, the San Antonio Saviors. Cade, ahead of a scouting combine, is met with the unforeseen circumstance of a targeted attack that results in a traumatic brain injury, affecting his chances of being drafted. Cade’s agent, Tom (Tim Heidecker), pitches to spend a week with White at his New Mexico dungeon-esque compound to train and vie for the spot of quarterback for the Saviors. Once Cade arrives, that’s when the film really begins.
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At this point in the film, you find a solid premise. We understand the end goal of the protagonist and sit in anticipation to see how it unfolds. The plot’s unraveling is where, in some ways, the film went wrong. Its puzzling, unorthodox structure disrupts the audience’s place in the world of the film. So much so, it borders on experimental—like its unconventional, ribbon-tying climactic ending—rather than the anticipated traditional studio film that watchers are subconsciously trained to ingest. This phenomenon ungraciously pushes the viewer to call upon a literacy for visual language that they may not have, causing the well-intentioned aims of the film to go right over the consumer’s head. Wayan’s claims about the movie’s innovation not being “embraced” fall short when the people you make the film for are not in mind.
The visual iconography staged in the film—the reimagination of “The Last Supper,” a portrait of Wayans donning a painted halo, the public examination of Cade’s body—come up as mere thematic references rather than meaningful narrative historical portraiture, leaving an uncleanly connection to the film’s overarching theme of “God, Family, and Football.”
Audiences leave the theater questioning what The Last Supper really has to do with the plot, beyond the religiosity of the sport. The allusion to members of the press as disciples, flirtation with a possible crucifixion, and tags of betrayal throughout the film are lost on the watcher. It’s not that these connections can’t be drawn by the average viewer, it’s just hard to ground these conclusions into the plot because they’re loosely connected by the haphazard portrayal.
The film’s crafted compositions, such as the Saviors’ shrine of football paraphernalia in the opening scenes, become dull, suppressing the once powerful motifs into half-baked themes. A once clear conviction stumbles into a scramble of big ideas.
We also see this with the ritualistic examination of a naked Cade. Beyond the explicit depiction of the inflicted dehumanization and indoctrination of Cade, this image mirrors that of markets where enslaved people were bought and broken into submission. Knowledge of this context strengthens the author’s nod to football as a modern form of slavery, but as it stands, it is just a static depiction.
Thus, Tipping’s desired storytelling falls short when these powerful messages with solid visual cues end up becoming nearly impossible to spot easter eggs, only to be revealed with what seems to be prerequisite literacy.
These audience-unfriendly cues become directionless commentary about the athletic institution that floats in limbo out of audience reach, unable to have meaning drawn from them without the proper historical context in concert with narrative guidance. In this film, the prompted inquisition isn’t fruitful because of the many disjointed themes and visual markers, all stuffed in its 96 minutes on the screen.
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This expected knowledge has become, sadly, in my opinion, a high bar for movie-goers that requires actual “innovative” solutions.
In a culture where social media content has become king, intellectualism has been shaped by a structure of fast-paced content production and consumption stilted upon and driven by cursory aestheticism. This cultural transformation has quietly shaped the way people watch films in theaters today. Although in some cases, emotions still arise from a filmmaker’s cinematic intentions, spectators can only name them through skin-deep scenes association and a shaky understanding of historical relevance.
Him’s containing theme of self-destruction and rebirth, which Tipping wants the audience also to experience, is unrealistic through an out-of-the-box plot structure that hopes to be saved by the gloss and appeal of sporty aestheticism.
