Online Response #8: The Essayistic Mode

Christopher Bell’s Bigger, Stronger, Faster perfectly captures Fox’s description of the Essayistic mode as it “[integrates] personal experience, history, and social critique with taut, kinetic progression toward a synthesizing claim” (44).  It is in the claim (begin watching at 7:00) that Bell interweaves his own family’s experience with steroids with news and entertainment media that displays mixed messages of winning at all costs yet doing so without cheating.  Says Bell, as he watches his completely juiced brother win another weightlifting contest: “I was raised to believe that cheaters never prosper, but in America it seems like cheaters always prosper.”  Cut to a clip of George W. Bush discouraging the shortcut that is steroid use and instead promoting the virtues of hard work (despite an arguable awareness of rampant steroid use in his own locker room when he owned the Texas Rangers).  Bell continues: “There is a clash in America between doing the right thing and being the best.”  Cut to an excerpt from Patton, mixed with actuality footage of Carl Lewis, Lance Armstrong, Marion Jones, and Barry Bonds.  Back to Bell: “In a culture where second place is the first loser (quick shot of Al Gore), the real heroes are the ones who win at all costs (Sylvester Stallone as Rocky, Hulk Hogan, and, finally, Arnold Schwartzenegger in his inaugural address as governor of California).  Bell closes like so: “This is America.  We are the greatest country in the world.  You could call us a nation on steroids.  But what are those long-term side effects?  For me and my brothers, steroids are not the problem.  They’re just another side effect of being American.”   

The integration of personal experience, history, and social critique progressing towards a synthesizing claim is equally apparent in Ross McElwee’s Six O’Clock News.  The personal is revealed in the film’s opening shot: his first child has just been born, and he is concerned about keeping him safe in an increasingly dangerous world.  The historical and societal aspects of the film frame his question.  In his own words, McElwee imagined “he would go out and investigate how other people had dealt with personal tragedy.”  Those to be interviewed were the victims seen on the six o’clock news, or at least those whose story struck a nerve with him.  More so than Bell in Bigger, Stronger, Faster, McElwee tends to wander into “a tangentially related concept, personal anecdote, or new approach, providing a serpentine, unexpected, and present tense realness to the journey” (44), which is not a bad thing.  In fact, Steve Johnson of The Chicago Tribune characterizes the effectiveness of McElwee’s approach in a review: “Ross McElwee's new film is a deceptive little instrument. It seems slack, intimate and good natured, but its maker's puzzled narration and the film's haphazard journey obscure an editing that is military bed sheet taut in service to an elegant structure and ambitious theme.”