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In what time period is Magazine Dreams, a drama about a bodybuilder suffering from chemically induced rage, set? In the opening scenes of the film, written and directed by Elijah Bynum, everything from the fashion to the setting to the plot points to the late 1970s. In an empty garage stands bodybuilder Killian Maddox (Jonathan Majors). He is black but blue in the suburban darkness, his body toned by both nature and his own efforts. He wears short shorts and ring socks, his hair uncut. He is performing for us. Inside his rustic ranch-style home, his grandfather, Po-Po, sits at the kitchen table, mindlessly watching as an oxygen tank keeps him breathing. The house feels claustrophobic, with one body at the peak of physical fitness and another on the brink of decline. Killian has turned his home into a sanctuary for his workouts, covering his bedroom walls with bodybuilder posters. The outside world is a stranger to him. He works at a grocery store, where he tries to attract the attention of Jessie (Haley Bennett), a petite blonde cashier who Killian believes will help him escape the purgatory of social maladjustment.
And then this seemingly historical piece about violence and psychological projection takes a turn. Killian goes online and hides in the YouTube comments section among other bodybuilding fans. Later, he Googles “How to make people love you?” This is a man of the present, not of the past. Bynum borrows the style and emotional state of postwar American pop cinema to win us over, adding another layer to his otherwise simple parable of male rage. But he seems unable to make Magazine Dreams say anything original. The film is naked Scorsese propaganda—The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver—but that’s not the only reason it feels simplistic. The film struggles to present a comprehensive exploration of the paradox of the black bodybuilder, to become an analysis of black masculinity. Killian is an object that aspires to be a subject. He's not just masculine – he's animalistic, growling when he works out. But he's the one getting beat up for the first two-thirds of the film. Steroids prevent him from having sex; he's essentially a eunuch who wants to be seen as a male.
How should we respond to this black man who embodies our preconceived fears about black men? This figure who writes letters of admiration to a white bodybuilder—literally named Brad—and who has no real black family? (Paw Paw is suffering from mental decline, and Killian’s parents are dead.) The camera’s interest in Killian is a physiognomic interest. No one in this film is as black as Killian. Practicing his obligatory poses in front of the mirror, chest out, arms folded, the focus is always on his face, which contorts every expression except a smile. Majors explores his internal conflicts of aggression and loneliness and their destructive effect on his personality as he grinds his bloody teeth.
At one point, his mouth is full of blood because he was attacked by a group of white men. (Killian came into their shop with a bat, thinking they had cheated Paw Paw during a paint job.) After the beating, a long chase follows Killian, who manages to get into a car and drive to a bodybuilding competition. Bloody and limping, to the horror of the judges, he tries to demonstrate his poses until he collapses as his body gives out.
The Bainum created a physical fear; as the plot develops, we realize that Richard Wright’s Rasov’s alienation has the same strong influence as Skorseze In the diner with his family, Killian shouts incoherently: “Africa!
The film begins and ends with Majors’s physical presence, and that’s why it fails. Magazine Dreams is as obsessed with the spectacle of the flesh as its character; the film relies on a tragic backstory to explain why Killian can’t fit into the world. He’s a product of pure patriarchal violence: His father killed his mother, then himself. When recounting his life story to Jessie, who has agreed to go on a date with him, Killian delivers a mannered, halting speech, the words slurred rather than spoken. (Jessie disappears halfway through the date.) At one point,
Sourse: newyorker.com
