An Appropriately Oversized and Muscular Post on Arnold Schwarzenegger

Arnold Schwarzenegger (b. 1947) turns 76 today; we observed the occasion earlier this week by watching the new Netflix “documentary” series Arnold (2023). The quotes are because the series is one of this new species of pseudo-docs that pursue an agenda with few dissenting voices to test its hagiographic thesis. The show is quite well done, illuminating, and even convincing, but you’ll hear precious little from Schwarzenegger’s critics in its three episodes. A documentary that doesn’t offer clashing interpretations of the facts is just a propaganda film. I’ve been seeing more and more of these lately. In a culture that is as factually-challenged and reason-averse as ours, I find it worrying. Ironically, I don’t worry about Arnold himself so much, but what he represents (onscreen) is troubling, and it deserves unpacking.

Arnold is structured in the same tripartite way as Schwarzenegger’s 2012 autobiography Total Recall (named for the only Schwarzenegger movie I actually kind of like). Fortunately his life story lends itself to this clean segmentation exceptionally well: 1) body building; 2) movie acting; 3) politics. All of it perfect fodder for this blog, even the first part.

For, one very acceptable way to describe Arnold Schwarzenegger is as THE MOST SUCCESSFUL STRONG MAN OF ALL TIME. There is actually an entire section of Travalanche devoted to circus strong men (and women), containing two dozen posts. We can now add this one! Arnold wasn’t a creature of literal sideshows, but of the latter day equivalent. By the late 20th century, the entire world was the sideshow. Long before he was a star of action movies Schwarzenegger was a hero to kids. I certainly knew of him as a child in the ’70s, much as one followed parallel phenomena like professional wrestling, daredevil Evel Knievel, and The Six Million Dollar Man. Having won numerous European bodybuilding contests throughout the 1960s, he came to the U.S. in the early ’70s, eventually taking the Mr. Olympia title (and retaining it for years), over competitors such as Lou Ferrigno (later famous for playing The Incredible Hulk). This leg of his career climaxed with the 1977 documentary Pumping Iron, which brought him terrific international attention.

But Schwarzenegger’s ambition for something more predated his retirement from professional bodybuilding in the mid ’70s by many years. Billed as “Arnold Strong”, he made his screen debut in the highly cheesy 1970 film Hercules in New York, a twist on the popular Italian Hercules movies starring his friend Reg Park. I’ll never stop loving that in this film Arnold Strong’s co-star was Arnold Stang! Schwarzenegger’s voice was overdubbed in the movie, but it was a starring role at least. In 1973 he played one of Mark Rydell’s henchmen in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, an amusingly distracting detail nowadays. Other early movies include Happy Anniversary and Goodbye (1974) with Lucille Ball and Art Carney (!), Bob Rafelson’s Stay Hungry (1976), Hal Needham’s The Villain (1979), the all-star comedy Scavenger Hunt (1979), and most wonderful of all he played the part of Mickey Hargitay in The Jayne Mansfield Story (1980). He also guest starred in episodes of The Streets of San Francisco and The San Pedro Beach Bums.

I always thought that Schwarzenegger was the ideal person — the only person, really — to play Marvel’s Viking comic book character The Mighty Thor. But he’d aged out of it by the time the MCU versions came out (I find the guy who plays him now a total snooze and just had to look his name up: Chris Hemsworth. As my wife likes to say “I couldn’t pick him out of a line-up”). Anyway, Arnold got to do the next best thing though, which was to play the title character in the screen adaptation of Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian (1982) and this is what established him as one of Hollywood’s top action stars for the next 20 years. His pictures included Conan the Destroyer (1984), The Terminator (1984), Red Sonja (1985), Commando (1985), Predator (1987), The Running Man (1987), Red Heat (1988), Total Recall (1990), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Last Action Hero (1993), True Lies (1994), End of Days (1999), and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), along with some rather feeble and weak (ha!) excuses for comedy such as Twins (1988), Kindergarten Cop (1990), and Jingle All the Way (1996). I’ll concede though that he was used cleverly in Batman and Robin (1997) as Mr. Freeze, formerly a role that belonged to Otto Preminger .

I stand by my disdain for Schwarzenegger’s screen vehicles. YES, including the Terminator trilogy. I fuckin’ hate The Terminator. In what way is “I’ll be back” a quotable line? It barely contains words. In fact, a deaf mute can MIME the sentiment and be understood. It’s a mere gnat’s piss away from “Ow, My Balls!” You’ll find some of my reasons why in my earlier post about Hollywood cinema in the Reagan ’80s. To be my age is to have stood by and watched as my country’s culture fell into the hands of, well, barbarians, a cult that worshipped strength and drank violent spectacle like so much blood out a Viking’s goblet. There are no words for how much I scorn and despise these kind of things. But who needs words? We’ve already established that “I’ll be back”, a virtual BURP, is a quotation suitable for repeating endlessly on the basis of its penetrating wit. “I’ll be back” is what guys say when they step away from the bar to take a piss. I guess that’s why some dudes love it so much. “I’ll be back? I couldn’t have put it better myself!”

Forgive me, but I am going to dwell on this at length. This one has been brewing in me for FORTY years. Not because I hate action movies (a misnomer, actually. Mack Sennett and Buster Keaton, after all, made movies that were entirely about action, and I love them. A better term for the genre that emerged in the 1980s is violence movies. In fact, I’m going to start doing that now. If someone talks approvingly of “action movies”, I’m going to make myself difficult and say, “You mean VIOLENCE movies?” THAT ought to get me invited back to lots of parties!)

But honestly, I want to probe this because the phenomenon is objectively fascinating, and so clear. Very few stars in the entire history of cinema have possessed an image so WELL DEFINED as Arnold Schwarzenegger, and I’m only partly talking about his muscles. Consider what previously passed for a buff action star, say, Charlton Heston. That guy was macho and cut, and all the rest. He played Moses as though he was Jack LaLanne. But next to Schwarzenegger, Heston’s a 90 pound weakling. And though there were previous athletes with good movie careers (Johnny Weissmuller is a relevant example) no one apart from children pretended they were real movie actors. (Weissmuller’s screen presence was about on par with Cheeta’s). Schwarzenegger was basically a sideshow freak. And, I should point out, he’s sometimes an okay actor. But in movies he was like the living embodiment of Neitzsche’s Superman.

I find the American embrace of this Teutonic strongman image deeply unsettling. What does it say about where the country’s head is at exactly? In Joe Louis vs. Max Schmelling, we’re supposed to be the ones rooting for Joe Louis! In the previous decade it had widely been considered a cultural triumph that shnooky little Jewish men like Dustin Hoffman and Woody Allen were the movie stars. What’s up with a pendulum swing in the OTHER direction? Arnold loves tanks, but I’m pretty sure he’s never made a movie where he drives one in Patton’s army and makes the hard choice to kill his Nazi cousins in the Battle of the Bulge. Instead, the films are all statements of GLORIFICATION of strength-worshipping Supermen. He’s a hero, technically, but rather a homicidal one, normally. It’s rarely about justice, always about MIGHT. With Sylvester Stallone or Bruce Willis you’re usually talking about an underdog, a guy who takes a few beatings himself before finally coming out on top. In Rocky, Stallone doesn’t even come out on top, a stroke of storytelling genius, in my book, to make the outcome feel like a triumph anyway. Schwarzenegger is much more like the 1992 U.S. Olympic basketball team. “I destroy you, I destroy you all! U.S.A! U.S.A!” I’m an 11th generation American. I love this country. I assure you that’s not what it’s supposed to be about.

As you can see, almost involuntarily we have elided into the third part, the political side of things. It’s inevitable, and ironically, it may be the redemptive factor. Schwarzenegger’s ambitions in that direction are probably as old as the ones that made him a world-class athlete and top box office draw. What a dream-like life he has enjoyed. It hardly seems real. Did I mention that I was in love with MariaShriver? Well I was, haha (from afar of course) ever since I first saw her anchoring the CBS Morning News in the mid ’80s and decided she was the most beautiful woman in the world, even without knowing she was a member of the Kennedy family at first. I was about 20 years old at the time. Damn, what a stunner! Took my breath away. Never heard a word of the news she was reading. And of course then Arnold Schwarzenegger got HER too. They’d been dating for nearly a decade at the time of their marriage, and so ultimately he was a member of America’s greatest political dynasty for about 30 years (though their divorce wasn’t final until a couple of years ago). And then, he blew everyone’s minds by serving as the Governor of California (a state larger than many countries and wealthier than most) from 2003 to 2011. His learning curve was steep, but by the end, he was no longer a neophyte and had accomplished many good things, the most notable of which involved taking a leading role in fighting climate change (more than a little timely at the moment, yeah?)

It’s ironic because philosophically he started out in quite a different place. Obviously he was a political acolyte of Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman. I haven’t yet got a bead on how influenced he may have been by the Austrian School of Economics and thinkers like Hayek and Von Mises (ironically enough). And even so, libertarians are no different from socialists, communists, or Christian theologians in having a million factions, and schisms, and differing doctrinal edifices. (I’m a former one, you see). It all makes perfect sense but it does create a kind of confusing conceptual dichotomy, for it means that Schwarzenegger (the Man) is timed to a completely different metronome than the Teutonic machine you see on screen. The movie character is German. Schwarzenegger is very American.

You may be skeptical, so I am going to give you a bit of historical timeline for context. It’s never a good idea to form your historical ideas entirely from Hollywood musicals, but if your ideas about Austria come primarily from The Sound of Music, be advised, it ain’t all a bouquet of eidelweiss. In one of their summits during World War Two, FDR, Churchill, and Stalin decided that in the mop-up following an Allied victory, Austria would be treated more like Poland, Czechoslovakia and France than like the Axis Powers. In other words, they were to be regarded as victims of Nazi aggression, rather than Nazis themselves. But Austria WAS a Fascist country, even prior to the Anschluss with Germany in 1937. Around the same time, Austrian expat Adolph Hitler came to power in Germany, Engelbert Dolfuss, head of something called the Fatherland Front, became Chancellor of Austria. Austrofascism was closer to Italy’s and Spain’s autocracies than Germany’s, but it was still characterized by one party rule, the execution and imprisonment of dissidents, and such like. And then of course after 1937, the nation was literally part of Nazi Germany. Schwarzenegger’s father was a local police chief in this culture, and part of the military police during the war. Gee, I wonder what his philosophy was, what his duties entailed? Thus alongside such mixed blessings as Volkswagens, rocketry, and the atomic bomb, Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of the legacies of Nazi Germany hiding in plain sight in contemporary America.

But Arnold was born two years after the war was over. The first years of his life were spent in a defeated nation, surrounded by a lot of depressed, angry, bitter grown-ups, whose dreams had all been punctured. And for the first eight years of his life his country was occupied by the Allies! This is his first impression of America: winners, victors, with an obviously successful philosophy. They were fun-loving, sexy, exciting, rich. The Austrians were a bunch of shifty-eyed beaten dogs who all had horrible secrets they never talked about, and beat their wives. So Arnold decided to become an American. It’s kind of shocking that more young people from the former Axis countries didn’t make that choice. But of course, Schwarzenegger did it by working out several hours a day and transforming his own body into a machine. Not everyone can do that or is willing to. Schwarzenegger literally did the American thing of making something of yourself, using the same gospel of physical culture that had been embraced by the likes of Eugene Sandow, Harry Houdini, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charles Atlas. Then he devoted himself to making money. When he wasn’t competing in bodybuilding contests, he had a second business as a bricklayer. With the money from that, he bought real estate. Little known fact: it was the real estate that made him a millionaire PRIOR to becoming a movie star. This allowed him to hold out for starring parts in movies in the early ’80s, without having to fart around trying to work his way up from supporting parts, which in any case may have never happened.

But I hope you can perceive the very real difference (some liberals can’t seem to) between being self-made and being someone who considers himself part of the Master Race. Schwarzenegger was poor. He worked. He won. He has a philosophy of wanting that experience for everybody. Through his mother-in-law Eunice Kennedy Shriver, he became deeply involved in the Special Olympics, which she founded. His parents’ generation had EUTHENIZED the disabled. The Kennedys were a good influence on him overall. Surely it was RFK Jr who put environmentalism front and center on his agenda as Governor. (Bobby’s son is a piece of work in a lot of ways, but in that category you have to give him credit.) Like both Jack and Bobby, Schwarzenegger proved a pragmatist who evolved from a hawk and a cold warrior into a guy who listened to good advice from liberal voices and incorporated it into policy. Listening to the best advice regardless of party is the essence of good leadership.

As we all know, the Kennedys weren’t and aren’t the saints we once thought and neither is Schwarzenegger. The patriarch Joe was an out-and-out Anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer and, perhaps worst of all, killed vaudeville! (that’s a joke, son) and like the Kennedy boys Schwarzenegger was a dawg who played around on his old lady, hence the divorce, in light of which I find this photo most amusing:

That’s a real shame, that is, and I have to say, I really admire her for sticking to her guns, and holding the line over that. That’s a woman who knows her worth, right there. And yeah pretty Catholic. But so is Arnold and I have to say I give him much credit for completely copping to that enormous mistake, and publicly taking responsibility, right down to openly embracing the out-of-wedlock child as part of his family.

I actually do really love a couple of Schwarzenegger movies, as it happens. They’re the video statements he has put out in recent years in the wake of things like the Jan 6 Insurrection, and the Covid-19 crisis, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They’re genuine acts of leadership. I know he longs to be President, though that would require a Constitutional Amendment (he being foreign-born), and in certain circumstances I would welcome it. There are numerous Democrats I would prefer (though RFK Jr is certainly not among them), but Schwarzenegger is the Republican I could live with the most. As a matter of fact, his centrist approach to leadership could conceivably be in the tradition of America’s first German-American President, the one who liberated Europe from the Nazis, and was in office when Austria emerged as an independent nation again in 1955. There are worse things that could happen. I think you know what they are.

Arnold may be watched here.

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