Self-styled sculptors whose art is their bodies
A new film looks at the world of bodybuilding – but Alan Tyers sees more than just muscles on display
eneration Iron 2, a film about professional bodybuilders, premiered last Friday and is well worth a look when it comes to wider release.
These are remarkable, extreme and sometimes tragic figures. The film focuses on Kai Greene, a 41-year-old from Brooklyn who has endured the agony of three runners-up places at Mr Olympia, the bodybuilding contest that made a legend of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Greene, a thoughtful, softly-spoken man, says: “The world sees me as a 300 pound black guy with an eight-inch scar down his face, someone who would know nothing about feelings of vulnerability.”
Greene paints and draws, and says he no longer finds meaning in the pursuit of trophies. The exhaustion and the adulation alike seem to have made him numb. He and others in the film talk about their sport, if that’s what we are calling it, as a sort of performance art.
Shawn Ray, who won the Arnold Classic, says:
G“You are trying to change your appearance by lifting weights. I prefer the term ‘ body sculpting’. I consider myself an artist.”
The material is the human body, and the sculptor’s chisels are weights, a great deal of grilled chicken, and, as several athletes in the film readily admit, lashings and lashings of delicious steroids.
Wild-eyed man mountain Rich Piana, from California, says: “I have been taking steroids for 25 years and needless to say it does its damage. But I am aware of that and I am willing to take my chances.”
The bodies on display, and the lifestyle efforts needed to get them, have become so extreme that one could reasonably ask whether it even matters if they are on drugs or not. To many non-aficionados, these men are grotesques, and bodybuilding is no better than a Victorian-era freakshow. Some of the champions of a generation ago lament
Armchair psychiatrists will be in hog heaven as they ponder the self-image issues at play
that bodybuilding has become less about aesthetics and symmetry in favour of sheer muscle.
To the participants, it is about self-actualisation – and, increasingly in these days where they have armies of fans on social media, about acclaim and making a very good living.
The documentary (executive-produced by Jerome Gray, who produced the 1977 Schwarzenegger genre-defining Pumping Iron) does a great job in humanising these superhumans. Armchair psychiatrists will be in hog heaven as they ponder what selfimage issues are at play.
There’s also some fine unintentional comedy as some of these extremely buff men insist that their route into bodybuilding was gazing dreamily at magazines of oily, muscular men, but that they are definitely not gay. Nope, not me. Not at all.
The sport, or art form, is hypermasculine in some senses, with its goals and reps and gains. Some might argue that the preening, the worrying about the looks, is a more traditionally female preoccupation. Certainly, sexism in the sport is as overdeveloped as some of the muscles. Girlfriends are “kryptonite, dreamwreckers” for competitors.
Asked about female bodybuilders, Mamdouh Elssbiay, who at 316lbs is the heaviest-ever Mr Olympia competitor, simply laughs.
For Iris Kyle, legendary female bodybuilder, there’s nothing funny about it at all: she is a 10-time Ms Olympia winner, but public appetite for the sport has changed and the tremendously muscled female form is not drawing in the punters. According to the film, all the major competitions cancelled their women’s comps due to a lack of popularity.
Kyle says: “They say we don’t look attractive but it is not a beauty contest. It’s not a pageant. It is a bodybuilding show.”
Enormous bodies balanced on little stick legs: it feels like some of these people might topple at any moment.