Torturous Bodybuilding Drama Magazine Dreams Wastes a Never-Better Jonathan Majors
It’s not uncommon for a single-minded and inelegant movie to leave its star, giving everything they possibly can, out to dry. As Jesse Hassenger noted in reference to Brendan Fraser’s turn in The Whale, transformative and off-putting performances of commitment have been successfully carrying unworthy films to critical acclaim for so long that it’s become a bit of a stereotype. “Sometimes, you give the performance of a career, by turns heartbreaking, searing, gentle and risky, and the movie kind of sucks,” he writes. What’s true for so many of those bad movies, where a suffering character is single-mindedly pushed into pain for our pleasure, is true of Magazine Dreams, Elijah Bynum’s vulgar and tortuous look at a devastatingly sad amateur bodybuilder. Yet, what star Jonathan Majors does with this tragedy is just as virtuosic as any of the perverse pieces of vainglory his movie admires, their weathered posters plastering its walls.
But there’s one movie that Magazine Dreams truly wants to emulate. If Bynum’s debut, Hot Summer Nights, took much of its inspiration from The Virgin Suicides and the Andersons (Wes and Paul Thomas), his sophomore feature swerves hard into Taxi Driver. The unrelenting failure and sadness afflicting Killian Maddox (Majors) is just as isolating as Travis Bickle’s; his desire for muscular perfection just as myopically consuming as Bickle’s desire for morally superior vigilantism. His mental health is just as suspect; his eventual dreamy fate is just as unclear. Mirrors, sex workers and guns play major roles. Majors even gives us a brief taste of De Niro’s finger pistol. Bynum isn’t subtle in his—to put it politely—admiration for the Martin Scorsese masterpiece, but his striving drama is just as unflattering a comparison (similar to Joker, another “admirer”) as the meatheads exacerbating Maddox’s body issues.
It’s because Magazine Dreams always feels a step removed from reality, a bit further into the fantastically miserable and a bit further from saying anything about its pet topics. Maddox’s hellish descent—starting with a baseline of “angry, scraping-by, orphaned caretaker of a Vietnam vet grandpa”—relishes in deprivation.
Themes are brushed aside as Magazine Dreams blitzes through its painful gauntlet. It could say something about the crushing social and psychological effects of poverty (or even how it can transport you back in time, stopping you in your tracks as the rest of the world forges forward), but there’s almost nothing to it. Neither is there much examination of the ridiculous amount of racism he faces as a muscular, tall, dark-skinned Black man. Or, say, the perpetuating cycles of violence in Black communities. Or the mega-macho, strong and silent swallowing of emotion that’s pushed as an unquestioned definition of masculinity. Or the suppressed queerness of the objectifying bodybuilding world. Or…anything, really, besides the maximized torment facing Maddox. It’s all namechecked, then passed along, like groceries down the conveyor belt at Maddox’s cashier job.
Maddox can’t just be late for an important competition. That would be too easy. He has to be late for an important competition after being brutally gang-beaten by racists, his collapsing body filmed and posted, while dying of liver tumors and high blood pressure. He can’t just be disappointed by his hulked-out heroes, but victimized by them.
Like its star’s muscles, settling for what’s naturally achievable doesn’t cut it. Narrative PEDs juice the hardship. If the film had a different tone—one couched more inside Maddox’s unreliable perspective rather than one clearly observing from a safe distance—this kicked-while-down cruelty could be ascribed to Maddox’s lonely life and the toxic internet and hobbyist outlets offering him solace. Reassuring him that the world is out to get him. It’d be a perfect fit: Bodybuilding forums are real-life hotbeds of alt-right vitriol, shaped over years to cater to ostracized, obsessed men. But Magazine Dreams rebuffs this avenue, instead using the internet as yet another place that rejects Maddox. Comments on his YouTube videos tell him to kill himself. Call him an incel. Rather than truly radicalize him, or stoke something in his inner world, Maddox absorbs these comments like more blows from a blunt object. The internet truly only exists to exemplify his little-kid mindset; he’s a guy who turns to Google for big, obvious, bummer questions, like “How do you make people like you?”