Bigger, Stronger, Faster*
March 1, 2008 at 4:23 p.m.
I view Chris Bell’s Bigger, Stronger, Faster* much the way I view Super Size Me: an unusually entertaining bit of muckraking on a subject that really shouldn’t require it. It’s informative and there’s not a dull moment to be found, but everything it says makes so much sense it makes one wonder why a movie was even necessary.
There’s some unnecessarily precious narration in the early-goings — apparently, being enrolled in a class with special kids didn’t make one of Chris’ brother’s “feel special” at all — but the film comes together produces both a broad and personal look at steroid use. At the film’s forefront are Bell’s two brothers, Mark and Mike, both of whom used and continue to use steroids to pack on the muscle.
Bell deals with the subject from all sides. Addressing the medical, he provides the amusing tidbit that anabolic steroids directly follow multivitamins on the list of substances that cause emergency room visits and reveals that the preconception of steroids having long-term effects on health come from anecdotal rather than experimental evidence. Addressing allegations that steroid use is cheating, Bell shows how the Olympics have fudged records of U.S. athletes who engaged in illicit substance use under the guise of “inadvertent use” while cracking down on others.
This history of double standards certainly stands in contrast to Congress’ recent crackdown on baseball: Eight days of a 151-day Congress session were spent on the subject of steroids in the major leagues — more time than was spent discussing health care, troop funding or Hurricane Katrina, Bell says.
“Why spend so much time on such an apparently insignificant topic?” pales only to “What causes the competitive environment that makes steroid use so rampant?” as the question at hand. Bell deals with body issues — using lighting techniques and Photoshop, Bell hilarious transforms himself into a hunk for his new brand of diet pills — but mostly attributes our culture’s implicit encouragement to abuse steroids to a “side effect of being American.”
“In my mind, there’s no excuse for not being as strong you can possibly be,” Mark says. If only Bell had searched more thoroughly there, Bigger, Faster, Stronger* could have been a great piece of cultural criticism rather than just an entertaining piece of muckraking.
- Kyle Puetz
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