Bigger, Stronger, Faster: The Size of Manliness

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"I think pro athletes should be forced to use steroids. I think we as fans deserve the greatest athletes science can create! ... I have high definition TV; I want my athletes like my video games. Let's go! I could care less if you die at 40. You hate life after sports anyway, I'm doing you a favor." -Daniel Tosh

Daniel Tosh is a stand-up comedian, but there's a harsh truth to that quote. Bigger, Stronger, Faster is just over 100 minutes, but it covers a lot of ground in the subject of steroids. Too much, I would argue. There's a lot here, and Chris Bell, the director, does a little bit of a lot of things. Including:

• His brothers' and his own history of using steroids
• The perception of steroids (and their effects) in the media vs. the results of research
• The competitive cultural pressures that would lead an athlete to use them
• Societal pressure that would lead one to use steroids for aesthetic purposes
• His family's reaction to finding out he and his brothers use them
• The supplement industry
• The government's investigation into performance enhancing drugs in baseball
  

And a few more things I'm probably just not remembering right now. It is a packed documentary, and any one of these topics alone could have been given the 90-minute treatment. Yet, I can't really imagine any documentary about this topic without covering nearly all of these bases, especially after the attention that baseball has gotten. It's all informative and interesting, though little of it is particularly shocking (e.g. they use Photoshop on the before/after shots for weight loss ads? o rly?). Because the movie doesn't have much going for it from a film perspective, I can't say I'd want it to be any longer, but it's a bit much for such a short running time. Despite that, it's a helpful movie to have out there, especially since it manages to be somewhat impartial, with the goal of sparking discussion.

I think the most notable thing about this movie is that it implies that Bell is less concerned with the medical side effects of performance enhancing drugs and more concerned with the things that cause a person to use them and the effect heightened performance has on society. He's a bit disingenuous about this; he cites numbers that say drinking and smoking cause more deaths than steroids, for example. Of course they do - but few people are going to need to enhance their physical performance with drugs compared to the people who drink and smoke. It's probably the most obvious example of misrepresentation here, but it makes steroids seem more harmless than they probably are. His focus on the medical effects are more or less focused on steroids straight-up killing a person, while he glosses over the possibility of sterility. It still seems nearly fair compared to the "facts" constantly repeated in news reports whenever the topic comes up.

Essentially, this means that much of the movie focuses on the various ways society reacts to and sometimes encourages it. Bell recounts his youth, idolizing action stars of the 80s and watching pro wrestling. It's these images of larger than life men that can define society's image of manliness, and it's not surprising that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the inspiration to every model and body builder he talks to (his name is even in my spell check!). The example set by these kinds of entertainment is less ubiquitous than the influence of models and women's magazines, etc. etc. on women, but it still got through to a small subset of guys. And these guys wanna be bigger than would be natural. It also seems to stick out that everyone Bell interviews is around the same age group, and they all cite 80s action movies and pro wrestlers as inspirations for their lives. That makes it seem like there's a chance that this is somewhat of an aberration in cultural history: before and since Arnold's heyday we've seen action stars trim down to more reasonable levels of muscularity.

The near-impossible quest for washboard abs remain, but it's probably easier to a Jason Statham level of fitness. This slow changeover isn't covered in the movie, but then, it isn't covered in the heads of the guys Bell interviews. His brother, most notably, seems driven to obsessive levels of becoming a big star, either in wrestling or in acting, and he's not alone. The sight of grown men who believe that with size everything will go their way is thoroughly depressing. His brother and at least one gym employee says "you never know" and hold out hope for an acting career based on looks. It's like a weird alternate universe, now that our action stars include Nic Cage and John Cusack. Reliable ol' wrestling will still promote the shit outta John Cena, though, and Hulk Hogan's still limping around. I guess not everything has changed.

The parts about athletics are informative, too, and the movie itself is persuasive enough to reconsider whether 'roids are "cheating" in light of regular-ass modern medical advances. Not persuasive enough to convince me totally, with its aforementioned occasional leaps in logic and such. The kinds of surgeries and other medical/health knowledge that makes today's athletes so much better than anyone even in generations past is fascinating; it'd make a good PBS special on its own. Hell, it probably has been done, and most know better than to directly compare an athlete from the 1930s to one today. I was also impressed by the research going into better enhance people's physical abilities; those segments create a vision of the future that is either amazing or frightening.

The most convincing segment of the movie, though, is Bell's interview with Rep. Henry Waxman, one of the congressmen who spearheaded Congress' then-current (current?) investigation into steroids in baseball (and, to a lesser extent, pro wrestling). His inability to answer anything - even the legal drinking age for alcohol - without help from an aide was saddening at best, distressing at worst. A cynic might say that it's no surprise that politicians will put their face on a cause they don't really care about (and Bell does juxtapose the segment with an interviewee saying just that). It's just captivating to see it illustrated so directly.

In the end, though, the movie stops short of being very great for its information, mainly because there's so damned much of it presented. There are good and insightful bits here and there, but Bigger, Stronger, Faster feels like it's trying to cover as many bases as possible. It thankfully isn't pro- or anti- anything directly, but it also lacks focus. In its explicit primary goal, it works to start considering a more balanced discussion on the role of performance-enhancing drugs in sports that likely will never happen. Otherwise, though, it works better as a reflection of a conflicted culture, which is one of its secondary goals.

Burden of Dreams and Avatar: For the Love of Jungle

Burden of Dreams, Les Blank's documentary about the filming of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, is shocking in its hardships and its compassion for Herzog's vision. It's a testament to either Herzog's brilliance or his stubbornness in this project. The film's narrative - of a man determined to beat great forces far out of his reach to accomplish a seemingly benign goal - parallels the story of Fitzcarraldo itself. But with hindsight, it also sharply contrasts with James Cameron's Avatar, its drippy nature-worship still fresh in my memory from less than a week ago.

Going in, I knew the Fitzcarraldo shoot was difficult. Jason Robards and Mick Jagger, original stars in the picture, had to leave with the film 40% completed. Robards was replaced by probable lunatic Klaus Kinski. Herzog insisted that the film's centerpiece, a boat being dragged over a mountain, be a real boat. Couple those factors with filming in the dense Amazonian jungle, and you have the recipe for a turbulent ride.

It's a surprise, then, that the film barely focuses on most of these things. Instead, most of Burden of Dreams is mostly concerned with the Native extras and their relationship to the film. The personnel issues with this film boggle my mind. There's political issues, propaganda and forces the crew to relocate. A few extras get shot with arrows, and everyone involved risks their lives bringing the boat over the mountain.

Bringing the steamship over the mountain is the issue that makes the film blur the line between fiction and reality. Herzog's insistence - several years into this project already - that the boat must overcome a 45 degree slope is absurd (his engineer prefers they flatten it to 30 degrees; Herzog insists this would ruin the power of his film's "central metaphor."). This is even after the film crew clears some forestation and discovers that the ground is feet-deep with watery mud. Their bulldozer, a luxury the film's protagonist doesn't have, is a second-hand purchase that breaks down frequently. It requires that fuel must be flown into the forest and shipped down river, and it burns more gas because it cannot get traction on the mud.

Before seeing Burden of Dreams, I was already lukewarm on Avatar (and I still am; new perspective doesn't affect the good things about it). Its central message is that nature is to be revered, like a god or goddess. It's slammed into our heads in the following ways:

• in order for blue people to enter adulthood and fly dragons,they must create a bond
• an impassioned speech about how killing a creature in self defense is "a sad thing"
• a montage of its protagonist learning to become one with nature
  
• another impassioned speech: Sigourney Weaver about why shooting missiles at a big tree is bad
  
• another montage: people crying at a big tree that has been shot with missiles
  

So James Cameron wants you to know: nature is a beautiful thing to be revered and loved. Also, it might be a good idea to build your civilization around it.

Except Cameron's "nature," is mostly computer generated, shot in LA and New Zealand. The message rings false on the surface to anyone who's so much as had a dog growl at them, but then begins to slide into heinous idiocy when you have real-life examples of films that actually have to film in nature (the storied production of Apocalypse Now being another example). All coverage of the creation of Avatar focuses on its computer generated effects (check Wikipedia), and its resulting film is a ham-fisted screed about the wonders and beauty of plant life.

In some ways, it is an absolute wonder that technology to do this exists at all. Burden of Dreams features a scene showing the crew filming, over and again, a large group of Native Americans canoeing toward the protagonist's ship. Sometimes, one of the extras would be in a wrong position; often they had only two hours a day (golden hour!) to film this sequence. It took days. The resulting footage in the final film is astonishing, but brief compared to the time it took to get it right. Avatar's computer-generated nature is just plain easier. But "easier" doesn't require the same kinds of sacrifice as the old approach to film making.

At one point, Herzog shares his impression of the jungle (edited):

Kinski always says it's full of erotic elements. I don't see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It's just - Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and... growing and... just rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they - they sing. They just screech in pain. [...] But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.

Notably in the film, this monologue is intercut with shots of the creatures around him. The death of a bird feeding the bugs, a frog breathing rhythmically on a tree, etc. It shows the true natural world, and in its way, is beautiful in its continual cycles. When he says that "[he loves] nature... but against [his] better judgement," it shows a level of self reflection impossible for a director whose greatest successes are in the realm of big-money special effects demos (which is not meant as an insult to James Cameron; his films require an entire skillset Herzog doesn't have).

The main takeaway I got from Burden of Dreams was probably unforeseeable by its subjects and creators. There was an entire era of film making that has been lost with the advent of CGI effects that look so realistic you can almost imagine they're real. I don't demand that every film's production is the equivalent of pulling a plastic spork through the palm of your hand, but there is something great to be said about the arts and entertainments that are completed despite setbacks that are seemiingly impossible. And that's also not to imply that CGI special effects work is not fraught with its own challenges (though I doubt anyone at ILM has ever been shot with a freaking arrow), and I definitely don't mean to imply that challenging on-location filming is dead (The Hurt Locker, for one). But there's a point now where a film's very production and its methods for coming into existence can clash fully with its deliberate. Or when the a focus on special effects can lead to a director completely missing the point of a film's source material (as Ebert points out in his review of The Lovely Bones). It's all a matter of hard-earned self-awareness, something Burden of Dreams illustrates fantastically.