The Incredible Bulk

[June 18th, 2008]

Of all the assumptions audiences are asked to swallow when watching first-person muckraking documentaries, the strangest is the conceit that the personalities holding the microphones have been living in a hole until the very moment they started making movies. The trend began, of course, with Michael Moore, who recognized in 1989 that Roger & Me would be that much more effective if he plopped on a Detroit Tigers cap to identify himself as an Average Joe. Two decades later, ordinariness is an epidemic. This year alone, I’ve watched four nonfiction films with an onscreen investigator—The Union: The Business Behind Getting High, Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?, Mr. Big and Lord, Save Us from Your Followers—and in every single one, the filmmakers have bravely overcome the crippling naiveté with which they began their inquiries. Our modern world frightens and confuses them, but there’s one thing they do know: The marijuana industry, Middle Eastern policy, police entrapment and evangelical rhetoric are scandalous!

Which brings us to Christopher Bell, the director and star of the steroid scrutiny Bigger, Stronger, Faster*: The Side Effects of Being American. Bell wears a lot of ball caps in his movie (judging from his hats, he is simultaneously a fan of the NFL’s Giants, Saints, Steelers, Colts and Chargers) and, at first glance, he’s a model Average Joe. A gym rat from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Bell has the dumpy build and open face of Kevin James in TV’s The King of Queens. He grew up watching WWF matches and Rocky movies, and so naturally when it dawns on him that neither the Iron Sheik nor the Italian Stallion came by their muscular builds honestly, he decides to take a closer look at anabolic steroids, human growth hormone and whatever other drugs might be blamed for Barry Bonds’ giant head.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster* is funny, smart and troubling as it gleefully skewers an American culture that turns a blind eye to cheating until the moment it decides to pettifog hysterically about it. (In a priceless moment, Fox sportscaster Joe Buck is shown extolling Mark McGuire during his chase of Roger Maris’ record: “If you were to construct a home-run hitter in a lab, this is what he’d look like.”) But the movie is most instructive as an example of the logical limits of the Average Joe documentary.

Because Christopher Bell isn’t just a regular, curious guy: He’s one of three brothers who have all tried steroids, and he’s the only one who isn’t still taking them. His muscle-bound siblings, who still answer to their childhood nicknames of Mad Dog and Stinky, compete in professional wrestling and weightlifting, feeding their dreams of glory with regular injections. Neither of them is prepared to quit: “If you’re apprehensive about taking steroids,” says Stinky’s trainer, “then maybe you’re not cut out to be a champion.”

With Mad Dog and Stinky in the background, Christopher Bell is a lot harder to accept as a disinterested judge of the steroids era. He is, in fact, impossible to take seriously in his analysis of the health risks of bodybuilding drugs, which he concludes are probably safe because they haven’t killed many people. (Even if it’s true, this argument—whatever makes you stronger doesn’t kill you—is fairly irrelevant to the ethics of ’roiding.) He’s far more persuasive when he examines how his personal insecurities are writ large in the national obsession with perfect physiques. He tracks the Adonis Complex from airbrushed abs in protein-drink ads to adult-film stars who inject Viagra directly into their penises. “We’re in the porn business,” a bathrobe-clad stud explains. “There’s not a lot of morals to begin with.”

But then there isn’t an overabundance of ethical scruples in professional wrestling either, or in major league baseball, or in the Bell family. And for all his feigned astonishment, Christopher Bell knows that. The most poignant and credible moments of Bigger, Stronger, Faster* come when Bell explores the increasingly pathetic ambitions of his brothers, and his own sadness at how his family has compromised its ideals for fleeting tastes of success. The tragedy of the Bell brothers is that they didn’t want to be average. When Christopher Bell’s movie acknowledges that fact, it’s exceptional.