Never Stop Blowing Up asks what it means to be a man

In the balcony of a crowded nightclub, Wendell Morris and Liv Skyler feel the muscles of their new bodies. Magically transported into the world of Never Stop Blowing Up, they have transformed from awkward teenage video store clerks into paragons of masculine power—Wendell a street racer and Liv a drug kingpin—with physiques that command the fear and respect of those around them. Standing by the door is their bodyguard, Doug Meat, confused. When the two turn their attention to him, feeling his muscles, he begins to cry. “It’s just nice to be touched.”

Never Stop Blowing Up is, as I’ve written before, an homage and satire of the summer action blockbuster. A genre of film that solidified in 1980’s America, action movies depict an idealized sense of what it means not only to be a hero, but what it means to be a man—which of course, would be an oxymoron within the genre’s ideology. To be a (white) man in Reagan’s America was to be a hero, a hypermasculine, hyper individualistic rogue who plays by his own rules, punching and fucking his way to the top regardless of the damage he leaves in his wake. Those ideas around masculinity have come into question in the decades since, but recent years have seen a reactionary response, with conservative personalities ranging from manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan to political figures like JD Vance and Donald Trump (who himself is a caricature of Reagen-era masculinity) pushing for a return to this singular vision of rigid gender roles. 

The various archetypes players embody in NSBU examine and subvert mainstream ideas of gender. Ally Beardsley’s womanizer becomes supplanted in the body of a highly sexualized cat burglar. Alex Song-Xia’s preppy valedictorian occupies the massive body of a crime lord. Rekha Shankar’s elderly grandmother reels at the lanky hacker boy she’s become, and Izzy Roland’s midwestern divorcee finds (unethical) freedom through the unrestricted movement of being a loose-cannon New York detective. However, unlike the other players at the table, Ify Nwadiwe and Jacob Wysocki—the only two cisgender men on the player’s side of the GM screen—play young men who stay men in their filmsona paragons. Though they don’t cross the threshold of binary gender like the other characters, they explore the limitations of embodying a masculinity that does not conform with the lone wolf ideals of the genre. Under the violence of patriarchy, men who do not live up to these ideals are hardly men at all.