"Killing It," Episode 1.8: Does the Kingmaker like-like Brock? Are the Flo Boys brothers or boyfriends? And whose d*ck is that?

 

Killing It (2021-23) stars Craig Robinson as a Florida schlep who tries to get rich by hunting pythons in the Everglades.  Scott MacArthur plays his frenemy, a seasoned python hunter.  The two have a sort of love-hate gay-subtext relationship, but I'm going to review Episode 1.8, "The Kingmaker," which gives us Brock's back story.

Scene 1: 2016. Brock and his wife are celebrating their anniversary, discussing how much hot sex they're going to have tonight.  Whoops, they forgot that their son Corby (Wyatt Walter) is sitting at the table with them. Why bring your son to your anniversary dinner?  Have him order a pizza.  

Brock is a manager now, so they'll be able to buy a house.  Everything will be perfect from now on. Never say that on tv, or you're doomed.

 Uh-oh, phone call: It's the Boss, firing him for incompetence.  Brock switches from begging not to be fired to yelling "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"

Scene 2: 2018. Brock is lying in bed, talking to himself about how great he is: "I can kill a python with my bare hands!" But he's also sensitive; he cries when he thinks of his mother passing -- "women eat that stuff up."  He appeals to all four quadrants: kings, queens, teens, tweens, and men."  Aren't the kings men?  He just needs a partner to help monetize his fan base.

Son Corby asks why he's been sleeping in the guest room for the last month, and suggests marital counseling, but nope: "Your mother and I are fine."

Scene 3: At breakfast, Brock suggests a video where he's out catching pythons in free-balling jeans, so viewers can see his butt -- a tactic sure to draw followers.  His wife thinks that his goal of becoming an influencer is misguided, but he insists: one guy makes $190,000 a year letting spiders bite him.  

"Is he hot?"

"Um...yeah, incredibly hot, but...is that important?"  Brock is bi.

He's got a meeting with viral marketing pros today that will make his career. 

Scene 3: While driving Corby to school, Brock tries to bond by bragging about the big car they're going to get when he's internet-rich, but "I don't care what kind of car you drive."  This depresses Brock: "WHen I was a kid, I worshipped my Dad."

Scene 4: Brock giving his pitch at the Viral Marketing Agency.  "We want you to be sponsored by a major tobacco company."

"Fine, no moral qualms here. I'm not some fucking weird-ass pussy."  I forgot to mention that Brock is a terrible person.  They all are.

Actually, they want him to cast negative social attention on vaping, so kids will try cigarettes instead: use a vape pen all day, while secretly taking poison, so: "Your liver will give out, but you won't die, as long as you get to the hospital in time."  It pays $8,000.

"Don't you have any regular advertising, like gloves?"

You need a million followers for that, and he only has 150,000.

Scene 5: A depressed Brock looks at one of his python-hunting Youtube videos, and wonders why it has only 150 views. He accidentally clicks on the Flo Boys (Chris Mason, Luke Mullen), whose video got 1,000,000 views in an hour.  They're a Christian prankster team: after they pray, they dare Intern Kyle (Trey Best) to eat some mace-covered chicken wings. He runs away sobbing.

Left: The d*ck of someone named Chris Mason (there are a lot of them).  

Luke Mullen played the first identified gay character on a Disney Channel program, in Andi Mack.  He mentions a girlfriend in an interview, but his Instagram is full of pictures with male friends.

Back to Killing It:

Brock calls his son Corby and shows him the video.  "Look who's sitting with the Boys -- Kevin Brailing, the Kingmaker!"  He's got 120 million subscribers; he can make or break online influencers.  

Cut to the Kingmaker being interviewed. "I can get anyone 2 million followers," he announces.  The downside: he's making content constantly, with no time for shopping or having friends.

The Flo Boys are based in Miami, which means that the Kingmaker is in Miami right now!  

Scene 6: While on the way to the Flo Boys' house, Brock gets a call from the Viral Marketing people: some boys in Ohio got poisoned from vaping, so theyr'e going to use them instead. 

He yells: "Lose my number.  My life has value.  I have a family, I have talent, and I'm on my way to a meeting.

Crash, explosion!

More after the break

The Answer to the Naked Man's Question

 

Today summer lasts for 12 weeks; I can see its beginning and end.  But when I was nine years old, lasted for months or years, or never ended: somewhere it's still that childhood summer, an endless succession of days, all bright green and dazzling.  

A week in Indiana, visiting my parents' family.

A week camping in Minnesota and Canada.  

Nazarene summer camp.  

Swimming lessons at Longview Park Pool.

The bookmobile every Tuesday. 

The Denkmann School Carnival.

  

Malts at Country Style. 

Vacation Bible School

Gold Key comic books at Schneider's Drug Store.

Dark Shadows.  H.R. Pufnstuf.  Tarzan Theater.

Posters of teen idols.

And the Naked Man's Question:

 All on a golden afternoon, probably a Saturday in July, in my Grandma's farmhouse in northern Indiana.  It's a big house, white frame.  The living room is pink, with flowered wall paper and thick drapes.

My brother and I are alone.  I don't remember why.  Maybe Mom and Dad have gone off somewhere, on an expedition of their own, leaving Grandma Davis to babysit, and she has stepped out.

We have just come in from something or other -- puttering around in the apple orchard, playing fetch with the dogs next door, exploring the old barn where Grandpa used to milk cows.  We kick off our shoes at the door.  

Maybe we're going to head up to our room which happens to be Dad's old room, with his pictures and schoolbooks and baseball glove), or up to the attic to sort through the bundles of old magazines in search of comic books.

I stop in front of the tv set, a big piece of furniture, wood-brown, with curved pillars on the sides.  There's an empty candy dish and a photo of my Cousin Phil on top. 

At our house the tv is almost always on, whether anyone is watchng or not, a stable, comforting background noise.  But Grandma keeps it off unless someone wants to watch a specific program.  It seems unnatural, wrong somehow.

I reach down and turn it on.

Kenny asks "What do you want to watch?"

I shrug. "I don't know.  Maybe Tarzan Theater."  On Saturday afternoons in Rock Island, when there isn't a game on, you can see old Tarzan and Bomba the Jungle Boy movies.

The black and white screen flickers, and then pops on.  A game.

I turn it to the next channel.  Some people talking.

"Find some cartoons," Kenny suggests.

There are only three channels, so only three choices.  I turn to the third.

A naked man.

In my memory he's naked, although he was probably wearing a leotard.  Shirtless, though, with taut hard pecs and very thick hard biceps.

You never saw naked or even shirtless men on tv in those days, except in Tarzan movies, so I stand dumbstruck, frozen in place, realizing that I will remember this moment forever.

"What's this?" Kenny asks.

The naked man twirls and high-steps, bulging his bare calves, across a bare stage to a young blond woman.  Then, dancing a sort of tap dance, he asks "Who....are...youuuuuu?"

She starts a tap dance of her own, dances in front of him, and says "I....don't...know. Who...are...youuuuu?"

He stops dancing and glowers at her, his eyes dark, and replies.  "I am the Magic Mushroom."

At that moment, Grandma appears at the window leading to the kitchen.  "There's nothing for kids on now," she says. "Turn the tv off."

"Wait...I..."  I begin.   But Kenny obligingly turns it off.  

"Now who wants to help me bake a pie for dinner tonight?"

All in a golden afternoon.

More after the break

"Sinners": Twin brothers fight vampires and klansmen in the Mississippi Delta. With Jordan junk and O'Connell cock

For movie night this weekend, we actually went to a movie in a theater, for a change: Sinners (2025), about twin brothers fighting vampires in the Mississippi Delta in 1932.

The first hour is quite naturalistic: Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan in a dual role) return to the Deep Delta from their gangster career in Chicago with a lot of money and Irish booze, buy the old abandoned mill from a klansman who says he's not a klansman, and organize a juke party. We get the sense of the vast emptiness of the cotton fields, and the terror of everyday life for African-Americans in the Jim Crow South.  

You had to be very careful; glance at or speak to a white woman, accidentally bump into a white man, and you would be attacked.  Gay people live with a similar fear -- hold hands with your boyfriend or display a Pride flag, and you could get attacked or killed.  But at least heteronormativity ensures that most gay people are assumed straight, and can keep hidden in the riskiest situations.  Most African-Americans could not.

Left: Michael B. Jordan

The brothers pick up Preacher Boy (Miles Caton), who is torn between the church and the guitar (which his Preacher father calls Satanic).  After he agrees to perform tonight, they split up.  

Stack and Preacher Boy go to town, where they recurit another performer, the elderly, alcoholic Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo).

They hire shopkeeper Bo Chow (Yao) to make up signs and fry the catfish.

Left: Malaysian actor Yao received a MFA from Yale University in 2023.  He played a gay character in #LookatMe (2022).

They pull Cornbread (Omar Miller) from the cotton fields to act as bouncer.

The brothers are so intimate that I was sure that one or both would be gay, but heteronormativity is running rampant.  Both of them, and Preacher Boy, get girlfriends, whom they have s*x with, one after the other.

1. Stack with his ex-girlfriend Mary, who is an octaroon (one-eighth black), so Jim Crow laws still apply to her.

2. Smoke with his estranged wife Annie (Wummi Musaku).  She's rather old , so I thought she was his mother until they started doing things.  

She's also quite butch, so I figured that the actress must be a lesbian. LezWatch says that she is cisgender, unspecified sexual identity, but she has played at least three queer characters.

3. Preacher Boy with Pearline, a married singer.  Fortunately, her husband isn't around. 

It keeps going like that.  Bo Chow has a wife (we learn their favorite s*xual activity).  Cornbread has a pregnant wife.  Delroy Slim isn't married, but discusses the hetero exploits of his youth.

Left: Michael A. Newcomer, who plays a bartender in a white joint, is gay in real life.  

Vampires after the break

Gemstones Episode 2.6 Deep Reading: a frame-by-frame analysis of the sex scene

 

In case you're new here, The Righteous Gemstones is a HBO Max sitcom about the famous, ultra-rich televangelist Eli Gemstone and his three children, who live in separate mansions on his compound and get into constant squabbles and scrapes.  But of course they love each other deep-down.  Kelvin (Adam Devine) is the youngest son, 29-34 years old during the four seasons, a muscle enthusiast who usually works in the low-prestige teen ministry, and has to constantly prove himself.  Keefe (Tony Cavalero), a former Satanist whom he saved, is his boyfriend.  

Kelvin has a standard fiction coming-out process, one that we've seen a hundred times in movies and tv-shows.

Season 1: Falling in love with his best friend, sexual experiences, feeling guilty, denial, then recognizing that he is gay.

Season 2: Becoming obsessed with the erotic, refusisng to admit that he and Keefe are romantic partners, eventually coming around and coming out to the family.

Season 3: Trying hard to stay in the closet, refusing to call Keefe his boyfriend, leading to their breakup and reconciliation, and a kiss.  

The problem is, up to the Season 3 kiss and even after, many viewers insisted that the two were straight buddies.  The queer codes were all misdirections or misreadings.

Which brings us to Season 2, Episode 6: Kelvin is standing naked in front of the mirror; distraught:  he has lost the respect of the God Squad, his cadre of muscle men; his father hates him; he is worthless, nothing, no better than a beast.  Keefe suggests that he will feel better if he gets dressed for the day.  His hands are broken, so Keefe will have to dress him.

What happens next is about as explicit as a sex scene can get on television, yet some viewers insisted, that Keefe is just helping Kelvin on with his underwear.  Even after Season 4, when they two are out as boyfriends and eventually get married, viewers insist that they were not sexually active until the after the wedding.  

Maybe a frame-by-frame analysis will convince them.

1: Kelvin turns around.  Keefe kneels in front of him, and says "Now step into your Tommy Johns."  Instead, Kelvin reaches out with both hands and pulls Keefe's head forward.  

2: Kelvin guides Keefe's head down, and grimaces and groans as he begins oral sex.  Sometimes it's very sensitive, at first.

 3: A sharp breath, and then Kelvin cries out in pleasure.  Adam is obviously simulating having an orgasm.  Notice that Keefe's head is no longer visible, as he's going way down, but Kelvin is still guiding his actions.  You would steady yourself for putting on underwear by grabbing your friend's shoulders, not his head.

4: Fatigued and disheveled after all his effort, Keefe swallows (you heard me, he swallows) and whispers "Nice."  This is not the point at which you would usually do that, but remember, this is all simulated.

More oral after the break