Movie review for Bigger, Faster, Stronger in the NYT:
Steroid Myth, Scandals and Dreams
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: May 30, 2008
Just when Christopher Bell’s documentary, “Bigger, Stronger, Faster*,” seems content to be an entertaining exploration of his and his two brothers’ use of anabolic steroids, it turns a corner and plunges into deeper waters. It happens when Mr. Bell, who narrates the film in the jocular first-person style of Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock, reflects on steroid use as a metaphor for modern American life. Are steroids un-American, as Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. is heard to say? Or are they as American as apple pie?
How do you reconcile the imperative drilled into children by parents, teachers and the news media that winning is everything with the increasingly quaint moral injunctions to play fair, exercise good sportsmanship and do the right thing? If your childhood idols are preening supermen like Hulk Hogan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who preached clean living but revealed their own reliance on steroids, which path are you likely to follow?
To an impressionable boy, the spectacularly muscular superhero is an irresistible role model. What shy youngster confronted with Superman doesn’t fantasize about changing into a skintight blue suit and transforming into the Man of Steel? The movie shows the evolution of the G.I. Joe action figure from a fit soldier into a mountainous, V-shaped hulk, an increasingly achievable ideal, thanks to steroids.
The movie ponders the question of what constitutes cheating when you look objectively at the role of medicine in competitive sport. Is it cheating for a bicycle racer to pump more oxygen into his system by sleeping in a high-altitude chamber? Has Tiger Woods’s Lasik eye surgery given him an unfair competitive advantage? The lines between cheating and fair play, the movie suggests, are hazy to the point of being arbitrary. Pharmaceutical enhancement extends even to the sedate world of classical music, in which musicians susceptible to stage fright consume beta blockers to keep them calm.
In some areas, the film suggests, deception is more the rule than the exception. You have to take on faith the claims of the unregulated food supplement industry, in which a pinch of this and a pinch of that is often added to useless filler. We learn that in fitness industry advertising, before and after pictures are often shot on the same day, then doctored.
The bottom line in the debate is the sprinter Ben Johnson’s rationale for using steroids, which cost him his 1988 Olympic 100-meter title: Everybody does it.
“Bigger, Stronger, Faster*” methodically examines the history of performance enhancement in sports, concentrating on the years since the mid-1950s when a physician for the United States weight lifting team observed Soviet athletes being given injections. Almost immediately the American pharmaceutical industry began work on developing an oral anabolic steroid, Dianabol, for American athletes.
Now and again the movie circles back to the poignant stories of Mr. Bell and his siblings, who, growing up in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., took up weight lifting and strength training to help overcome feelings of inadequacy because of a family tendency toward obesity.
Mr. Bell, a power lifter who is the smallest of the three (and has written television segments for World Wrestling Entertainment), used to take anabolic steroids but, unlike his siblings, has sworn them off. His older brother, Mike Bell, nicknamed Mad Dog, who as an overweight boy was tauntingly labeled Pugsley, took up weight lifting and became captain of the high school football team. In college, when he discovered that he was no longer his team’s biggest and strongest player, he gave up football for wrestling.
Since then Mike Bell has obsessively pursued his dream of becoming a World Wrestling Entertainment star, and once became so frustrated that he attempted suicide. His declaration that he can’t bear the idea of not being a star is the film’s saddest moment.
The youngest brother, Mark Bell (nicknamed Smelly), grew up with a learning disability but developed self-esteem as a power lifter. He gave up pursuing a career as a pro wrestler after marrying and becoming a father. But he continues to take steroids (to his wife’s chagrin) and enter weight lifting exhibitions.
The movie questions stories about the horrors of steroid abuse. The explosive aggression known as ” ‘roid rage” is largely a myth, several experts insist. A hilarious excerpt from a 1994 television movie starring Ben Affleck as a steroid-using high school football player gone berserk is compared to the marijuana scare movie “Reefer Madness.”
The filmmaker interviews a man in Houston who blames steroids for his 17-year-old son’s suicide, and a San Francisco AIDS patient who was wasting away until he began taking steroids. The movie doubts the football star Lyle Alzado’s assertion that the brain tumor from which he died in 1992 at 43 was caused by steroids. Although the movie doesn’t defend steroid use, neither does it go on the attack.
“Bigger, Stronger, Faster*” left me convinced that the steroid scandals will abate as the drugs are reluctantly accepted as inevitable products of a continuing revolution in biotechnology. Replaceable body parts, plastic surgery, anti-depressants, Viagra and steroids are just a few of the technological advancements in a never-ending drive to make the species superhuman.
BIGGER, STRONGER, FASTER*
Opens on Friday in Manhattan and in Irvine, Los Angeles and Pasadena, Calif.
Directed by Christopher Bell; written by Mr. Bell, Alexander Buono and Tamsin Rawady; director of photography, Mr. Buono; edited by Brian Singbiel; music by Dave Porter; produced by Mr. Buono, Ms. Rawady and Jim Czarnecki; released by Magnolia Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. This film is not rated.