He Is Some Body
Schwarzenegger Sculpted an Image. Can It Power His Political Aims?
By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 17, 2003; Page N01
A story so good it can't possibly be true concerns an ancient movie mogul, a veteran of the golden age of Hollywood, on his deathbed in 1966, sliding in and out of alertness. But before he goes, he hears some kind of tumult and asks an aide what's going on.
"Ronald Reagan has just been elected governor of California," he is told.
A look of puzzlement comes into the shrewd old eyes, to be quickly replaced with irritation.
"No, no," he explodes, "Jimmy Stewart for governor. Ronald Reagan for governor's best friend!"
Let's update this story. It's 2003 -- Oct. 7, to be exact. The mogul this time is only 55, but he's dying just the same. Let's make it something hip: His black shirt leaked toxic dye into a stomach tuck and he was so tan, no one noticed the redness of infection until it was too late. Now, lying on his deathbed, flashing in and out of consciousness, he hears the same tumult and asks his aide the same question.
"Arnold Schwarzenegger has just been elected governor of California."
The same anger: "No, no," he explodes. "Tom Hanks for governor. Arnold Schwarzenegger for governor's cyborg."
That's the problem with an image. It makes you famous, but it's a specific kind of fame. And now, with the California gubernatorial recall effort in full swing, the key question is whether Schwarzenegger's specific image -- and it's a pretty strange one -- will translate into the kind of power at the polls necessary to take him to the next step.
Of course, off the top, he has extraordinary advantages, even beyond his fame. It sets up very nicely for him: He doesn't have to get beaten up in a bloody Republican primary. There are less than two months left until Election Day, so he won't have to submit himself to the brutal ordeal of a long, sustained effort, with all its chances to trip himself up. He only needs to win a plurality, not a majority. He has a nice long name, easy to pick out on a ballot laden with scores of other names, all shorter. And, finally, possibly his biggest advantage of all: It's California, for crying out loud!
But momentarily forgotten in all this is a fact yet to be processed by the public. That is: At some level, all this is about a body, not a man. For Schwarzenegger, probably more than any performer since Jayne Mansfield, is identified and defined by the package in which he carries his brain, with its soaring V architecture, its bloated but symmetrical arrangement of ripples, tumescences and tubes, its concavities where so few have concavities, its convexities where so few have convexities, the body reinvented almost as an exercise in advanced pneumatic expansion and hydraulic extension.
That is not to say he isn't talented, or he isn't smart, or he can't win. It is to say that we do not yet understand how his peculiar vibration, derived from our doubts about his self-body-worship and its weird themes of narcissism, will play out with the electorate.
Of course, image isn't universally connected to body. Think of Bogart, all city smarts, wariness, tough tenderness, and that way with a wisecrack. Watch him smoke if you want to know what cool is. Who knew what lurked under those suits? More, who cared? Only Lauren Bacall, and she probably didn't care that much. With John Wayne, it was size but not shape. You never saw the Duke with his shirt off, but you saw him move, plenty, and were intoxicated by the grace and the power concealed under those double-placket shirts. He stabilized himself with almost a contrapuntal syncopation of his arm swing and the strange, one-foot-ahead-of-the-other gait that made him look like a runway model with a .38-40 strapped aboard; the whole package spoke of power and authority, size and strength, but we took it as metaphor for internal strengths because we never saw the motor of musculature that drove it. Maybe we never saw the corsets that tightened it, either.
Yet all this is different with Ah-nuld. He is not image, he is flesh. Or rather, his image is sculpted in flesh; it's the flesh that drives everything.
We first saw it in a now long-forgotten feature called "Stay Hungry," in 1975, derived from a novel by Charles Gaines and directed by the great Bob ("Five Easy Pieces") Rafelson. Schwarzenegger played a weightlifter named Joe Santo -- Santo, saint, get it? -- in a movie notable for Sally Field's only nude scene. Rent it if you want, if that's the kind of thing you can't live without; however, this isn't the real Arnold. Joe is too meek and decent, reflecting the then-recent immigrant's unsureness with the language and his newly chosen career as well as Gaines's moral schemata. Joe is Pure Good, and we all know how boring that is.
Uber-Arnold didn't emerge until two years later, in a documentary titled "Pumping Iron," directed by George Butler. This was a "documentary" in the sense that it recounted one of Arnold's Mr. Universe campaigns, but it was so narrativized, and it boasted Gaines as "author," that it seems to have been more than pure cinema verite.
It was there that the Austrian strongman first evinced the personality that gave the body meaning. It was as if he were postulating, and the screen seemed to be confirming, his own theory of charisma, of something more than mere presence, unique to him alone. It wasn't that his body was the best -- maybe it was, maybe it wasn't; only a trained eye could tell and no straight man was going to look too carefully anyhow -- but that unlike his competitors, he popped when he posed. That is, in some way, he connected with the audience (albeit a small audience); you felt his will driving those perfect protein sacs straining to attain ossified density even while attached to his bones, you felt the power of his intensity and his ability to exude such perfect concentration that it somehow shattered the confidence and concentration of his competitors.
But still, who got it? The movie was a cult hit, it earned him publicity and recognition slightly beyond bodybuilding circles, mainly on the strength of his freakiness, and the freakin' freakiness of the whole big-bod universe. It made him semi-famous, but it had no power of transcendence. He gave interviews then in which he offered up his ambition to become a movie star. Ho, ho, ho! What a laugh! A guy who looked like he was made of bacon-fat doughnuts stuck to each other by chewing gum over a frame of slats -- a movie star?
That breakthrough occurred in "Conan the Barbarian," in which the body, instead of being seen as some kind of pathological fixation, was suddenly appropriate to the performance; it was a weapon. This film, widely hooted at in 1982, pretty much established the Arnold essence. It removed him, for the first time, from the gym. His overdeveloped body was therefore not an aberrant impulse fueled by world-class amounts of vanity but a survival tool in the unpleasant climes of the Iron Age. It represented something conceptually, as well: that Schwarzenegger was smart enough to realize he had to redefine himself as a warrior, not a weightlifter.
His foreignness, much laughed at, may have actually have helped him here. He would not have been credible, either as a movie star or as a potential politician, had he come out of American bodybuilding culture, which then as now (even in an era when most sentient beings except this one spend an hour in the gym a day) seems somehow, er, creepy. We suspect, somehow, that people who spend so much time obsessing over how they look, and who can, frankly and baldly, devour the contents of the mirror, are kind of different. How can anyone be that profoundly infantile? "My lats need work." "How can I thicken my damned ankles?" "I don't think my oil is showing off in the light well enough." Ew.
Arnold left all that behind with "Conan," where his thick accent and beefy intensity sold the picture, with help from writer-director John Milius's sentimentalization of strength as virtue. For the first time, he looked valid on-screen and his body expressed an idea outside of its own idealization. That idea was expressed in words some aging adolescents still live by, a distillation of Nietzsche out of Conan's creator, Robert E. Howard, by way of Milius, which is his definition of the best things in life: "To crush your enemy, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentation of their women." As translated from "To clush yuw enemies, to see dem driven before you, and to hear da lamentations of der vimen."
And, fortunately, Groucho Marx wasn't around to ruin his career with a single line, as he had done to another beefcake boy, Victor Mature, at the time of "Demetrius and the Gladiators," with Susan Hayward. Asked if he'd go to the film, Groucho responded, in the best film review ever written, "I never see a movie where the man's [breasts] are bigger than the woman's."
"Conan," far more than anything that followed, had a remarkable impact: It so memorialized the body, it made the body unnecessary. It somehow planted the body in the imagination, like a primal fear. Thus, in few of his movies afterwards did Schwarzenegger bare flesh; he didn't have to. "The Terminator," the hit that guaranteed his career, almost turns this principle into a paradigm: It invokes the great body in the first few seconds, then never again shows it, as if the point is so powerful it only need be made once.
In his late career, he has worked a somewhat different wrinkle into the game, and here he may have some trouble with the electorate. That wrinkle is irony. It's Arnold's best thing on-screen, the sense that somehow he himself knows how ridiculous he is. That's a constant theme in "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines," as it is (although unstated) in some of his comedies. He seems to wink at the audience; he's in on the joke and he, like they, can enjoy the preposterousness of the fact that such an outlandish figure not only made it but made it big, married a Kennedy, got to hang out in a Republican White House and in Hyannis Port (unifying two competing strains of American royalty). He, Arnold. With the muscles and the lantern jaw and the accent thick as strudel gel. Ach! Mein Gott! Amazing!
Yet if there's one location in America where irony doesn't play, it's on the hustings. We don't want nominees whose best move is self-deprecation. We want true believers, egoists, people who can fake sincerity with the best of them. Can Arnold play it for real, without the amusing irony to defuse the memories of all those head choppings. (Remember what he did to James Earl Jones in "Conan"? Remember the sound, a kind of squalid scrunch, as the blade cleaved the neck and the blood spurted up wetly like a pomegranate detonating?)
Even today, as he hustles about, glad-handing and back-slapping, ducking interviews (Washington Post headline: "Few Details From Schwarzenegger"), the body is there, almost a silent declaration: The body stands for indomitable will, dedication, perseverance through pain and also luck (only certain muscle fibers, genetically predetermined, thicken up like that), but it also stands for triviality of mind and obsession with appearances, and it stands for its owner's willingness to make jokes at his own expense. All of these may be useful, even necessary, for politicians, but most don't emphasize them as flagrantly as Arnold will.
No one will know, of course, until everyone knows, but it'll certainly be interesting to see if Californians elect a governor with bigger [breasts] than anyone else in the race.
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