Werner Herzog
2001
135 minutes
This is a Herzog film about a Jewish strongman during the run-up to WWII. Tim Roth plays a sketchy hypnotist, who hires the main character as a sort of circus performer to wear a blond wig and pretend to be a great Aryan superman, but drama ensues when he insists on playing actual legendary Jewish strongman Samson instead. His size and strength makes him a source of amusement for the Nazis and also provides him some protection. There's a romantic subplot, he has a little brother who acts as his moral conscience, et cetera. It's actually a weirdly enjoyable movie that disappeared down the memory hole for a lot of people.
You were never especially strong or athletic in grade school. You were an only child raised by a single mother, so you never were good at sports. You were pretty bookish and liked to read and write. Go figure. This worked just fine for you until you hit middle school, which was a bit like being thrown into General Population in a prison. Suddenly you found yourself in a different world. You went to the Wrong School for teachers to believe you were smart, so you weren't tracked into gifted classes despite having straight A's and high test scores. So you got to be a nerdy pussy around a bunch of much bigger and older and rougher kids who bullied the shit out of you. And suddenly you found yourself in survival mode.
Gym class of course was particularly horrifying. The older, bigger kids--who behaved particularly badly in groups--really liked bullying the smaller younger kids, especially when they would take their clothes off and try to clean up after class. You learned pretty quickly that actually trying to take a shower in the curtainless communal showers they had was a no-go if you were not actually an athlete of some sort.
Merely changing from your street clothes to your gym clothes and back was pretty harrowing. The bullies would often choose someone to pick on during this vulnerable time. At best the kid would be stripped fully naked, his underclothes thrown in the shower to get wet, and he'd get slapped around and spanked. At worst they'd also twist his nipples or grab his dick and balls or give him a spanking (or worse) until he cried like a baby, to everyone's great amusement. The harder he helplessly fought this, the funnier it would be. The gym teachers, of course, turned a blind eye to all these shenanigans. Good clean hazing fun, boys will be boys.
You had your turn in the barrel a few times, mostly just getting stripped and slapped around and getting your clothes wet, until you discovered some coping mechanisms. You ended up deliberately making friends with a much larger, dumber kid who was not someone you'd normally talk to but was at least not one of the bullies. He'd failed classes and was held back and he wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, but at least he had a sense of humor. You'd try to stick close to him since he was big enough for them not to fuck with, and he'd usually try to stop them from fucking with you too.
You also started carrying a weapon of sorts to school. You were usually wary of bringing an actual knife for fear of being expelled or worse, although you fell back on this a few times when things looked dicey. You finally settled on bringing in a metal comb, a Hartz flea comb with a hard plastic handle, designed for combing vermin off of dogs. You wrapped the handle with black electrical tape to make the logo less noticeable, and the teachers thought nothing of it. Whenever it was time to change from your pants to your gym shorts, you would find that a convenient time to put your back against the lockers and "comb your hair" so it was in your hand while you were at your most vulnerable.
This precaution cut down dramatically on the number of times you got physically fucked with in the locker room at least. It also gave you a bit of protection on the bus home, which you had to share with actual high school kids, some of whom would regularly carry switchblades which they would sit and flick open and closed out of boredom.
During this time you suddenly became depressed and moody, much to the puzzlement of your parents, who had trouble believing that school had gotten that much worse since their own school days and not reflecting that their social circumstances (e.g. having older siblings or going to a smaller school at the time) might be different from your own.
After some further bullying incidents outside of school during the summer, something in you snapped a bit and you resolved to make things change. You started working out pretty aggressively around the time you were hitting puberty, doing push-ups and lifting weights with dumbbells every day three times a day. You lifted weights on machines whenever you could get into the gym as well. By the end of eighth grade you ended up putting on a good deal of muscle mass along with your growth spurt. Aside from being quite strong, you still weren't very athletic, and some of your classmates who previously had bullied you were disappointed you didn't want to be on the football team with them.
By the time you graduated, you ended up being quite a bit larger than most of the kids who had bullied you in middle school. One guy in particular who had been one of the milder bullies barely recognized you when you ran into him at a gas station, remarking that "You look like you kick people's asses for a living." You took this as a compliment coming from him.
Years later you're not in quite as good form as you were when you graduated. But you're glad you've at least retained some of the muscle, and you try to work out when you can to keep it. You don't talk much about being bullied in school. You've found that for some reason people still find the thought of a bigger person being pushed around as a kid extremely amusing, especially if they learn there was some horrifying sexual aspect to it. So it's best not to bring up these days.
Time to choose something different: