Features

Men’s Health Magazine: Among the Zealots

I haven’t seen bodies like these since I quit porn. Maybe there were approximations in swimsuit editions or Fast & Furious movies, but it’s never been like it is here, where I can watch the sweat bead and the muscles quiver and the legs go for miles. They call this place a fitness festival. It looks like Gomorrah.

Over 35,000 human figures are on display at Wodapalooza 2017, the largest functional fitness competition outside of the CrossFit Games. The Games are rigid and corporate-minded, but Wodapalooza—named for CrossFit’s Workouts of the Day—packages a downtown Miami beach party to go with its pump.

RELEVANT: Inside the Newfound Profundity of Horror Movies

They say people died of heart attacks while watching The Exorcist. The consensus is the scares killed them, but perhaps it was the sacrilege. With boundary-pushing intensity (including a scene in which a young girl mutilates herself with a crucifix) and disturbing subliminal messaging (listen close at times and you can hear pigs squealing), The Exorcist is still considered one of the scariest and most controversial movies ever made. And yet, alongside the spider-walks and yellow eyes is a complex, nuanced portrait of faith, one that rivals anything on PureFlix. It’s a movie about fighting the devil as much as it is about the devil himself.

RELEVANT: ‘Red Dead Redemption 2’ and the Weight of Glory

The American West, in the shadow of our memories, is marked by failure. Its emblems—the outlaws, prospectors and pioneers—are extinct. Its achievements, like the telegraph and railroad, have been surpassed. Its possibilities, from the riches to the freedom to the land itself, are spent. The West was a dreamworld in both what it promised and implied, but we’ve interrupted that dream. It’s legend now, and barely that.

Red Dead Redemption 2, the latest video game from developer Rockstar (Grand Theft Auto, Max Payne), takes place in the American Southwest of 1899.