Bigger, Stronger, Faster
Bigger Stronger Faster
Matinee with Snacks
Christopher Bell grew up watching big muscle guy movies of the 1980’s, with Stallone and Schwartzenegger, pro wrestlers, and basically the USA kicking tail all over the place. In his film, he chronicles how these influences transformed himself and his brothers from low-end bully fodder into pumped-up competitive jocks. Before long, news of their heroes’ steroid use was too prevalent to ignore. Bell asks us to look at the effect of steroids on imagined heroes and their fans, on professional and societal expectations, and, most elusively, the mindset that drives so many to Be The Best in this way. The subtitle of Bigger Stronger Faster is The Side Effects Of Being American, and taken as such, it’s a darkly incisive and comprehensive look at the pump-you-up subculture that coils all throughout everyday American life.
Bell is a weightlifting enthusiast more than he is a filmmaker; but any loss of focus or arc is the movie is well compensated by his knowledge and enthusiasm for the subject. He even gets access to steroid-heads like Greg Valentino, whose biceps shocked the mainstream world when allegations of steroid use broke out. He looks into the science, the rationales, the effects, and the users. These people seem to have a love-hate relationship with the drugs that have so transformed them. Their competitiveness wins out over self-preservation more often than not. No matter what, it’s never enough; it’s an echo of the consumerist culture, but these users are consuming their bodies with delusions of lack of completeness.
Bell looks at how people chose to use, why people (like himself) think it’s wrong, how it affects the families, the realities in the aftermath, the cultural disapproval/demand but also yee-haw, the attitudes, the defensiveness, the aggression, the stereotypes, and the science. His work here is comprehensive to the point of over-saturation, but it’s all so alien and interesting that it doesn’t bog down.
It is very interesting to see a polemic about America so free of political content and yet so reminiscent of other cultural observations that are not as pure. This particular path to seek the American dream is to WIN to be the BEST, definitely all caps and definitely with a strong grunt behind it, to lift more, be bigger, stronger, faster, harder, better, more more more! It’s never enough, and it’s always hyper-competitive. They aren’t just competing against their last best or their peers, they are competing against an impossible ideal like teenage girls looking at an airbrushed Victoria’s Secret catalogue. War! Kill! Top! Win! Harder! Yeah! No other life goals can interfere, to the point of a middle-aged man living in a van in the gym parking lot, he has no other thing in his life. It’s high-testosterone almost to the point of retroactively growing an extra Y-chromosome and quite alien to my experience. Serious competitors get caught in this cycle, in this mind-set, and they pump their enormous, frankly freakish bodies full of scary hormones that perpetuate the impulse.
Those who do not inject cannot compete against those who do, the physical difference is so great. So they either put up or shut up; increasingly, the pressure is to put up (shoot up). In America, it’s kill or be killed, whatever it takes, the goal is all, cheaters always prosper, and it is never so blatant as in this professional bodybuilding world. Toys get more pumped up, cars get more pumped up, steaks and beer cans and everything is yeah big! It fosters a terrible sort of narcissistic insecurity in a person’s mind about themselves, never being enough, always needing more, wrecking marriages, careers, sports, and bodies.
Bell interjects his personal feelings about steroids and then openly wrestles with what he’s had to deal with surrounded by users, and having his heroes reveal themselves as cheaters after years of admiring them for their purity and hard work. It’s quite fascinating and deeply personally, but also alarming. These aren’t just guys who spend hours at the gym and eat lots of meat. These guys permanently alter their bodies (bone density, fertility, genitalia, hair, stretch marks, etc) to achieve an ideal that gets dysmorphized the closer they get to it. He notes the cultural acceptance of other performance enhancers (beta blockers, speed, that little blue pill that gets stuck in your spam filter) versus steroids and cultural embrace of the concept of “on steroids” as being generally positive, unless it’s referring to a “competing athlete.” We come away from this film, with its marvelous scope of research, knowing a lot more about him and his family and with a lot to think about our own cultural attitudes. Check it out.
MPAA Rating PG-13
Release date 5/30/08
Time in minutes 105
Director Chris Bell
Studio Magnolia Pictures
