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For many young men, masculinity is sold as an obsession with protein, and a personality that answers the question “What if WWE was real, and all the time?” Which brings us to Netflix’s explosive new documentary. Untold: The Liver King (out Tuesday 13 May), real name Brian Johnson, is a fitness influencer who promotes “ancestral living” as the solution to enervating modernity. This includes a great deal of hollering and extreme workouts, saying the word “alpha” a lot, plus eating a carnivorous diet of raw animal organs, including an unfeasible amount of genitals.
Liver King angry that people addicted to phones. Works with marketing agency to pump out stunt videos specifically designed for them. Opening shot shows Liver King pulling truck on chain. Famous caveman activity. Meanwhile, other men push truck from behind. Liver King knows not everyone can go full primal, so sells range of nutritional supplements that help bring in an annual income north of $100m. You’d think he would exclusively trade in shiny rocks, and in a sense he does.
Having piously attributed his inhumanly buff, conker-y body to the benefits of eating dicks and going on podcasts, it is proved that Johnson has, in fact, been injecting steroids to the tune of more than $11,000 a month. He does so on screen. He subsequently confesses to a lifetime of grifter behaviour, each extraordinary chapter of which could warrant its own deep dive.
The trajectory is inevitable – but Untold: The Liver King has an ace up its sleeve. It’s so funny. “Why eat vegetables when you can eat testicles?” is his mantra. He describes his first orgasm, a spontaneous ejaculation while bench pressing. We feel the film-makers’ delight in their subject, who has more quotable moments than the book of Psalms. “Where does oxygen come from?” Johnson asks his sons, who are invariably checked out or laughing at him. “Wind.”
The Hulk Hogan cartoon fun of it all is complicated by the implications of its reality. Johnson is demonstrably a moron, inveterate liar, a parody of an influencer and paragon of toxic masculinity. The latter, literally. In one disturbing scene, he instructs his teenage sons to dissect a dying bull in a field and eat its pumping organs. You can almost taste the salmonella and E coli. It’s jaw-dropping, but I’d advise you to close your mouth.
His relationship with his “weak” children, Rad “Ical” Johnson and Stryker “the Barbarian” Johnson is the central heartache. Johnson exhorts Stryker to pronounce the word “steak” with more guttural emphasis. Stryker doesn’t tell his parents when he has broken his leg, knowing they scorn pain medication. The boys eat 15 raw eggs a day, and it is revealed a woman from child protection services pays regular visits. “She’s like: ‘Why am I here? These kids are awesome,’” boasts the deluded patriarch. The Liver King’s originating grief is that his father died when he was a year old; he remains blind to the fact he has robbed his own children of a stable father figure. They could have called this Flesh Man Is in Trouble.
Similar streamer offerings, such as Devil in the Family, split their arc across three episodes or more. The Liver King is a tight 70 minutes, all protein, and leaves one wishing it were longer. The sly wit of director Joe Pearlman shines through, fusing elements of Tiger King, Spinal Tap and classical tragedy. As the sun sets, the show teasingly invites us to question crucial elements of what has gone before – well-structured documentaries and online videos sharing, as they do, a few narrative tricks.
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Stories of influencers melting down cannot help but be modern parables; they are the hollow totems of what we value. Scandal only damages those who have shame. The documentary leaves an upbeat Johnson who has metabolised his experience, and believes his reign is just beginning. He has turned his ranch into a produce store and meeting place for any “primals” who still believe in his message. “People say why don’t you have a retreat, something like that?” says Johnson. “We’re gonna have 302 of ’em.” Long live the king.
