The Toss

Every game begins with a coin in the air.
It’s the neatest lie we tell ourselves, that chance decides what happens next, not the system already built around these bodies.

Heads or tails.
Choice or illusion.
Order or collision.
The stadium pretending that fate is democratic.

Cam Cade suffers the first brain injury long before anyone calls the play.
Long before cameras roll.
Long before the film lets us see what breaks him.

The coin spins.
The crowd quiets.
And the body begins its slow collapse.

This isn’t analysis.
This is record-keeping.
A concussion in five acts, clarity, loop, fracture, overload, silence.

What critics called incoherent was simply accurate.
We aren’t watching a story fall apart.
We’re watching a mind do it.

FIRST QUARTER: Clarity

The Body Still Believes in Order

Before the fracture, there is structure.
Cam Cade moves through the mirrored room with the kind of certainty young men mistake for purpose.
Isaiah shadows him, same scream, same stance, same breath fogging the glass.
A coach and a quarterback, but the film frames them like reflections trying to decide which one is real.

The light is fluorescent white-blue, humming like a heart monitor.
Above them: a perfect grid.
A cage disguised as geometry.
A map of the mind before the first crack.

Every ritual looks holy if you shoot it slow enough.

Cam throws.
He misses.
And a man takes a football square to the face, laughs through the sting, braces for the next one.
It’s a drill Isaiah calls accountability.
The film calls it training.
But the truth sits in the absurdity:
every mistake has a body attached to it.

This is the last part of the concussion where the world still holds shape.

Isaiah walks the line between mentor and prophet, murmuring:

Eyes up. Don’t slip.

A phrase meant to focus him, but spoken like scripture.
Like a warning you only understand in hindsight.

And for a moment, Cam believes him.
Believes in the grid overhead.
Believes the pain is instruction, not omen.
Believes the hit hasn’t happened yet.

But the sharpness of this quarter is lying.

The break already started.
He just can’t feel it yet.

SECOND QUARTER: Looping

The World Narrows. The Voice Repeats. The Lie Becomes Doctrine.

The narrowing begins with the helmet.

Not a quarterback’s crown, vision wide, grill open, made for reading the field.
No.
Isaiah hands him a linebacker’s cage instead.
Heavier.
Tighter.
Designed for ramming, not seeing.

Cam straps it on without thinking.
Trusts the man in front of him.
Trusts the ritual.
Doesn’t know he’s stepping into a role built for someone else’s violence.

The drills start.
Bodies rush.
His sight tunnels.
A voice cuts through the blur:

Eyes up.

But the phrase no longer means “focus.”
It becomes rhythm.
Then becomes scripture.
Then becomes a loop.

And every time Isaiah says it, something in Cam tightens as if the words are lacing him into the helmet from the inside.

He blinks—

Combine lights above him again.
Bulbs arranged like the same fluorescent grid in Isaiah’s gym.
His phone buzzing in his lap:

Your dad is watching from above. Good luck today.
Is Cameron Cade a risk?

A blessing pinned to a threat.
A memory pinned to a performance review.

He blinks—

The desert cult reappears.
People painted in thrift-store furs, waving signs like commandments:

ISAIAH IS THE CHOSEN ONE.

They stare at him through the car window like pilgrims waiting on a miracle.
The heat distorts their smiles.

He blinks—

The second hit.
The film shows the impact and the shape it leaves:
skin parted, sutures shining, the wound curved like a football.
Not metaphor.
Not accident.

The game wrote itself into him.

Loop—

Back to Isaiah pressing his face to the bars.
Too close.
Too calm.
Breath fogging the grill.

Eyes up. Don’t slip.

Loop—

Back to the youth-league photo.
His father’s hand heavy on his shoulder.
A handshake staged like a promise but operating like a loan.

Loop—

Back to his friends filming drills like hype trailers.
If he makes it, we all eat.

Matching jerseys.
Matching hunger.
Matching expectations he never agreed to carry.

The concussion is already speaking.
It rearranges time by pressure, not chronology.
Cam can feel the world repeating itself like a bad sermon,
the wrong helmet,
the Combine lights,
his father’s ghost-texts,
the cult at the roadside,
the wound shaped like the sport that made it,
and Isaiah’s voice slipping between all of it like a priest who forgot the difference between prayer and command.

Quarter II is where faith becomes instruction
and instruction becomes recursion
and recursion becomes destiny.

HALFTIME: The Congregation of Proximity

Where Rest Looks Like Ritual

Halftime is supposed to be recovery.
In HIM, it’s recruitment.

Isaiah’s desert compound fills with faces lit by phone screens.
Followers.
Disciples.
Influencers orbiting him the way moths orbit a porchlight they’ve mistaken for the moon.

They chant his slogans.
Record his sets.
Move their phones in slow arcs like incense burners over an altar no one calls an altar.

Cam walks among them quieter than the cameras.
Already concussed, already drifting, already learning what it feels like to be surrounded and still alone.

His father visits once and talks like he’s reading a balance sheet.
His friends laugh with him until the phone is recording, then they laugh for the camera.

Everybody loves him, but nobody sees him.
They’re not bad people.
Just hungry.
Just tired.
Just orbiting his potential the way the compound orbits Isaiah’s power.

The faith economy doesn’t reward rest.
It rewards motion.
Performance.
Access.
Yield.

This is the only halftime the film gives him:
a crowd that calls itself family right up until he stops paying their rent in hope.

The concussion deepens.
The room buzzes.
The chant loops.

No one notices he’s not breathing evenly anymore.

THIRD QUARTER: Fracture

The Moment the World Splits and Still Demands Performance

The break doesn’t happen all at once.
It comes in flashes, drills, voices, faces, lights,
and none of them show up in the right order anymore.

He’s back in the chair from the Combine for a second.
Bulbs burning at his temples.
People talking behind him like he’s not in the room.
Someone asks, Is Cameron Cade a risk?
The question is a blade disguised as a notification.

Cut—

He’s in the compound.
Bodies swaying to the low thrum of music.
Women hired to play joy.
A ritual offering disguised as a party.
Someone shouts Isaiah’s name like a chant.
Cam smiles and doesn’t remember deciding to.

Cut—

Marco’s voice: Run.
Except it doesn’t come from the doorway.
It comes from under his ribs.
From the same place the second hit still vibrates.
From that stitched football-shaped wound the film showed instead of the impact.

Cut—

Tom lays the contract in front of him like scripture.
Says his name slowly, the way men do when they need someone to obey.
The pen looks heavier than the helmet.

Cut—

back to the desert pilgrimage, people in thrift-store furs and facepaint screaming ISAIAH IS THE CHOSEN ONE,
their voices hot and bright and meaningless,
their devotion echoing the Combine crowd that watched him warm up like they were screening livestock.

Cut—

back to the compound entrance, the split dune of earth and steel yawning open like a birth canal.
He remembers walking in.
He does not remember walking out.

Cut—
Elsie’s phone held high.
The red light blinking like a pulse.
She smiles with brand-trained precision.
Even the violence here has good lighting.
Even collapse must be streamed.

Cut—
the contract again.
Marco whispering run again.
But the word keeps looping,
falling out of sequence,
losing grammar,
becoming less command than reflex.

This is where the concussion stops pretending to be a bad day and becomes the whole movie.

Cam stands in that room with the men who expect to own him.
Tom.
The owners.
The brand handlers.
The machine wearing suits.

Someone says his name.
Someone says sign.
Someone says this is your moment.

And the fracture finally speaks back.

He doesn’t see the moment he decides.
He just feels something split
a line, a nerve, a season, a life
and then the room becomes a wound.

The camera doesn’t clarify what’s hallucination and what’s real,
and that’s the point.
Fracture doesn’t care about continuity.

There is blood.
There is shouting.
Elsie keeps streaming.

When it’s over, Cam is breathing hard through a helmet that used to protect him and now feels like a cage he tore open from the inside.

Quarter III is where memory can’t keep score.
Where story loses the ability to stay in one lane.
Where a man can kill the prophet,
kill the owners,
kill the narrator inside his own skull,
and still hear the Combine barber ask him:
Good luck today, son. Your dad is watching from above.

The concussion has taken the wheel.
The third quarter is almost over.
The crowd hasn’t noticed.

QUARTER IV: OVERLOAD

The Moment Violence Stops Being Figurative

The first break isn’t the drugs or the women or the red light.
It’s the interview.
Cam talking about drills instead of childhood, discipline instead of joy, the father who coached him into obedience.
A single tear.
Not grief.
Leakage.
A memory slipping through the crack left by the second concussion.

The room watches him perform pain like it’s part of the brand.
They hear trauma as testimony.
The gospel of grind.

That’s where the collapse starts.

Not in the body,
but in the story he’s no longer able to keep straight.

Then Re-Creation.

The RE droops from the sign, half-fallen, leaving CREATION glowing in red.
A warning disguised as welcome,
the promise that they’ll remake him in their image.

Inside, everything is ritual.
Bodies swaying.
Owners toasting.
Tom smiling like an usher at a funeral he’s hosting.

Cam’s white blazer turns the color of slaughter under the red lamps.
Purity refracted into product.

He’s still upright, but the room is tilting.

And then the moment his brain tries to refuse:

Marco’s head on the table.
Day VI: SACRIFICE.
Displayed like proof of faith.

They killed the only man whose concern wasn’t conditional.
Not a hallucination.
Not metaphor.
A message.

But Cam’s mind won’t let him absorb it.
The concussion mistranslates the horror,
blood becomes gold,
a body becomes a chain,
and the crowd erupts in laughter that doesn’t match anything happening.

That mismatch is the injury speaking for him.
The brain converts violence into currency because that’s the only language the system has taught him.

This is the overload phase,
when reality can’t enter the mind without being laundered into imagery that the culture finds acceptable.

Marco dies.
Cam can’t hold the fact.
The system survives.
That’s the concussion.
That’s America.

And the fourth quarter ends not in chaos,
but in the moment Cam learns he is worth more broken than whole.

OVERTIME: THE BODY KEEPS PLAYING AFTER THE MIND IS GONE

There’s no whistle for what comes next.
No scoreboard.
No crowd.
Just the brain running on the last fumes of belief,
trying to finish a game no one asked it to win.

Overtime begins where language ends.

It starts with the helmet.

Not worn, held.
Lifted like a torch, like a relic, like the last thing in his hands that still resembles purpose.
Cam walks back down the hallway where Isaiah once screamed scripture into him,
where drills replaced childhood,
where obedience was taught as the first virtue and pain as the second.

Every corridor echoes.
It feels like memory, but memory has already left the building.

What’s left is reflex.

He finds Isaiah in the ritual chamber,
the false prophet, the father the injury built for him,
the man who shaped his collapse and named it calling.

Isaiah leans in again, face to face, the same way he did through the helmet grill,
that counterfeit intimacy, that weaponized mentorship.
This time Cam doesn’t flinch.

The helmet crashes down.
Once.
Twice.
More than needed.
Not out of rage,
out of programming.
The same muscle memory that made him perfect the throw now perfects the killing blow.

This is not patricide.
This is the final drill.

Men who toasted his body as yield.
Men who watched Marco die and called it sacrifice.
Men whose hands stayed clean by letting the system do the bloodwork for them.

In overtime, the system loses.
Every hit lands like a hit he once took.
Every fracture he caused mirrors the fractures inside his skull.

By the end, the chamber is silent.
No sermons.
No cheers.
No witnesses.

A rare moment in the entire film where no one is profiting.

And then he walks into the desert.

Alone.
Blood drying on his skin, sand catching the sweat, shoes sinking into a landscape big enough to take everything from him except the last shred of instinct.

He doesn’t look back because looking back requires coherence,
and coherence ended somewhere between the interview tear and Marco’s head on the table.

The desert offers nothing.
No judgment.
No redemption.

For the first time in the film, he is not being watched. Except by us. And if that feels uncomfortable, it should.

This isn’t escape.
This is afterlife.

This is a man whose brain broke open under the weight of a nation’s favorite ritual,
walking off the field long after the game has killed him.

He isn’t free.
He isn’t saved.
He isn’t healed.

He’s simply done.

And the wind is the only thing left that isn’t lying to him.

This is America.

I wrote this one from a place I didn’t expect to go.
If any part of it stayed with you, I’d love to hear where it hit.
I’m around. I’ll respond.

WORKS CITED

Primary Film
HIM (2025), dir. Julio Quintana.

Supplemental Sources Consulted
National Institutes of Health – “How Football Raises the Risk for CTE.”
Medical Literature on Concussion Symptom Progression (NIH, CDC).
Public interviews and production notes with cast and crew.
Sports medicine reporting on sub-concussive impact and helmet-to-helmet collision force equivalencies.
Gambling behavior research related to U.S. sports betting expansion.

Further Reading:
• Concussion Legacy Foundation: CTE Research Registry
• NFLPA CTE resources
• Medical studies on repetitive head trauma

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Thank you to everyone who shared early conversations about this film with me, especially those who live close to the sport and the injuries it leaves behind. Your clarity shaped parts of this essay I wouldn’t have reached alone.

And thank you to the readers who sit with the difficult pieces.
It matters more than you think.

DISCLAIMER

This essay is a critical interpretation, not medical diagnosis.
Descriptions of traumatic brain injury, concussion, and CTE reflect publicly available medical research, not personal expertise.
Any discussion of health effects is meant to illuminate narrative structure and cultural context, not to substitute for scientific or clinical authority.

The moral responsibility for the interpretations here is mine alone.