When he first appeared on the screen, you knew that he was big. Too big, in fact. His entire body was a large, tense bulge and his long unruly hair accentuated the wide and wolfish sneer of his face. His brief appearance was a non-speaking part, so he didn't have to worry about his flawed English or his improbable accent that sounded like a bad Prussian gag. All he had to do was remove his shirt and glare. He managed to do both on cue.
It was 1973 and a body builder was desperately trying to gain a foothold in Hollywood. The film was Robert Altman's
The Long Goodbye and, despite its more recent critical acclaim, it barely sold popcorn during its original release. The actor with ham hocks for muscles was listed as Arnold Strong. It was the second time he had gone nowhere under that name and he was about to drop the way too literal moniker. If he did succeed in his quest, they would have to build marquees large enough to spell the name Schwarzenegger. He was determined to be a superstar.
Things have changed since '73. He took a crash course in acting and spent intensive hours learning dictation, though his voice still wavers between a Teutonic bark and a lederhosen drawl. He searched for film projects in which his marginal thespian talents and imposing bulk would be an asset rather than a deficit. After a few disastrous run-ins with the press, he quickly learned how to evade and manipulate the media with a near seductive sense of charm. He began training for the role of film star with the grunting persistence of a long distance runner. Everything in his life was increasingly focused on the far off prize called stardom. “No pain, no fame” could have been his motto.
It's twenty years later and his visage hovers over Times Square in the form of a gigantic balloon, looking like a violent stray from the Thanksgiving parade. After the bomb blast at the World Trade Center, it was deemed wise to remove the gun from his helium filled mitt. Now he's holding a large, inflated badge. Arnie's new film,
Last Action Hero, is preparing to open and the studio's publicity mill is not about to let any terrorists rain debris on their display.
Floating like a blimp over the Babylon of the New World would seem like an unusual destiny for a man who grew up in one of Austria's most backwater regions. Schwarzenegger was the youngest son of a local police chief who was either a stern disciplinarian or a brute, depending upon one's interpretation of Schwarzenegger's various biographies. His father was also a Nazi, though his party membership is not believed to have amounted to much.
Schwarzenegger and his father were not close. He didn't even go to his father's funeral, fudging an evasive excuse that he later admitted was false. But then, he also didn't go to his brother's funeral. Neither death nor family bonds could stake a claim on Arnie. His attention was elsewhere. And there were many else wheres.
First there were the movies he escaped to as a young boy. In the early 1960s, Europe was inundated with
Hercules and countless other Italian-made strong man epics. Steve Reeves, Reg Park, and other lesser known muscle men flexed their way through cloak-and-sandal exploits in which the chest measurements were longer than the plots. As a young teenager, Schwarzenegger was irresistibly drawn to these films. He watched them repeatedly. He singled out Reg Park as the star who most appealed to him as a model. He decided to become a body builder.
The cloak-and-sandal flicks have a single, simple theme. All adversity can be overcome by great physical strength. The stronger the body, the greater the power.
This had to be a heady brew for an adolescent male whose knowledge of the world was most likely composed of a mixture of testosterone and small town provincialism. Though barely a teenager, Schwarzenegger began to devote himself with single minded fervor to the quizzical sport of body building. It didn't matter that he was pushing his body past various, painful thresholds. He was unconcerned about the possible side effects from the steroids he was taking. It wasn't even important that the gym was sometimes closed when he wanted to work out. He would simply break in.
Body building is a strange sport, based as much on aesthetics as on athletics. More posing than grunting takes place during competition and the simmering sweatiness of the contestants' bodies is largely an applied mix of mineral water and oils, a final cosmetic touch to highlight the muscular spectacle. There is a show business quality to a body building competition and the judging process can be notoriously subjective.
There is also plenty of lead way for a determined contestant to undermine his opponent through psychological game playing, false information, and borderline deceit. Arnie quickly became a master of backstage oneupmanship. He had a good intuition for locating the weak links in his opponent's mental armor and he would relentlessly hammer at them with crude efficiency. He came the master of psychological warfare while skirting round the loose rules of competition. When possible, he would have himself assigned to share a room with his chief rival so that he could spend the night tearing into his opponent's deficiencies. Repeatedly, he would trick, humiliate, and crush other competitors and then berate them for what he insisted was their own stupidity.
Long before
Conan the Barbarian, Arnie was an advocate of strength
uber alles. He was both exploitive and intolerant of any sign of weakness, especially the weakness of trusting him. He would convince people that he was on a
water diet, advise them to do the same, and then relish an easy victory over the water-logged hulks he had conned. Occasionally, he would advise both competitors and fans to follow a salt diet, despite the health risk posed by combining massive salt intake with strenuous exercise. Arnie's god-like stature in the body building world was enough to convince some people to try it, and years later he would still regale friends with tales of how sick he made the dieters. Austrian boys like to have fun.
Even during the early years of body building, Schwarzenegger was vocal about his ambition to become a movie star. He was hungry for money and fame and despite his enormous success as a body builder, the money was limited and he was only a celebrity within a narrow, even marginal, arena. He entered numerous business ventures, everything from mail order distribution to real estate, and he even began to seriously study the more engagingly cut throat world of finance. He wanted, however, something more. His talents were meager and his appetite was huge. He was a natural for the merging Hollywood of the 1980s.
It is inconceivable that Schwarzenegger could have become a major film star at any other time in Hollywood history. His lack of acting skills were not, in itself, a particular disadvantage. There have been plenty of stars who had no real talents beyond that of good looks and a pleasing screen personality. Schwarzenegger was amply capable of charm. His looks were a problem. The imposing bulk that made him a champion body builder was a stumbling block to becoming a leading man. He looked like a mutant cartoon character brought to life by some renegade animator.
There were the occasional jobs, like the walk-on in
The Long Goodbye. There was the opportunity for major embarrassment in the grade-zilch flick
Hercules Goes Bananas. His dubbed voice was almost as ludicrous as the film's hasty plot line that managed to combine Ancient Greece with modern day New York in a time travel tale best noted for its delirious cheapness.
There would even be a significant stab at real acting in
Stay Hungry, a poorly received but audacious work in which Schwarzenegger did a surprisingly good turn at playing a character much like himself. Few people saw the film, but those who did were impressed by his unique form of casual brashness. Even more important would be the documentary
Pumping Iron which was fashioned as a feature-length advertisement for Arnie. It garnered good critical notices and a limited art-house release.
But Arnie wasn't looking for a retinue of espresso sipping art-house buffs. He wanted to be a movie star, and movies play to a pack, popcorn chomping house. But it was also the 1970s and the American cinema was undergoing a brief but vital burst of serious creative energy. The decade belonged to Altman, Scorsese, and Coppola. It was a period of drama and realism. Arnie was mismatched, like a large man in a cheap, tight suit. Then he lucked out. The American cinema went to hell in a handbag.
The '70s began with a restless youthful spirit and ended in a quagmire of arrested adolescence. The urban theater gave way to the suburban multiplex, directors gave way to producers, and everybody gave way to the special effects unit. Fantasy was king and everything had to be big, if not bigger than big. Lots of things had to blow up in huge, heaping explosions while the leading man mows down two thousand stunt men in Hollywood's courageous fight against the dreaded Vietnam War Syndrome.
The world was ready for Arnie. He was big enough, tough enough, and, most importantly, transparent enough. He could occupy the screen and not conflict with the special effects. He could kill countless men and still look boyish; he could hold an audience's attention for two hours and not elicit a single emotional response. He could act naturally and not really mean it. He became the ideal superstar of the '80s: a hi-tech automaton thriving on the culture's basest dreams.
Some of the the dreams were even brilliantly daffy. Schwarzenegger went to audition for the lead role of a low-budget production called
The Terminator. It had an unknown director whose last film had barely played the drive-in circuit and a screwy script that had been stitched together from several
Outer Limits teleplays by Harlan Ellison (an initially disputed point that ended quietly in a settlement and a credit reference). Arnie was under consideration to be the hero, but he took a liking to the villain instead. As the killer android, he got to blow away lots of people without having to mangle his way through too much dialog. His build would do the talking. Besides, he already had the hard, glacier-like profile of a robot. As an artificial man, he was a natural.
For once, Schwarzenegger's instincts were right. The high energy of
The Terminator more than compensated for the ponderous presence he had previously cut in
Conan the Barbarian. Likewise, the film's strange mix of right-wing politics and feminist posturing made it a perfect complement to the already rambling Age of Reagan. More importantly, it was a hit. A huge hit. Arnie's name was now firmly linked to a runaway box office sensation.
Not that there weren't still problems. His attempt to play a more conventional role in the thriller
Raw Deal was a minor misstep. There was simply no way to explain a muscle-bound undercover cop with a German accent.
Commando was a little too close to the sloppier side of the drive-in venue for some viewers taste. The same could be said about
The Running Man, though its futuristic attack on mass media had an endearing sense of audacity. Not many films can successfully pander to its audience while simultaneously chastising them for their low standards.
Despite the contradictions, Schwarzenegger became the cinematic phenomenon of the 1980s. Granted, he was often celebrated for doing things that mere mortals did every day. He walked and, increasingly, talked! He even began to smile in his films and in
Raw Deal he almost has sex. In fact, the contradictions fueled Arnie's career. Schwarzenegger has long been notorious for his reactionary politics and public musings about the need for the special few to lead the ignorant multitude. Many of his films, however, have been careful to surround him with enough politically correct references to defuse any possible suspicion that there might be an icy arrogance at his core. By his own admission, Arnie primarily believes in power. Not surprisingly, he wants to direct. His first feature-length effort as a director was the cable TV remake of
Christmas In Connecticut. Suddenly, he wants to do romantic comedy. Like the decade that bore him, none of it really makes any sense.
Though his career was the result of a series of well-made yet inexpensive action flicks, Arnie has become the king of the budget-busting epic. Both
Total Recall and
Terminator 2 shot past the $100 million mark during their productions. Studio accounting is as flexible as the theory of relativity, but its highly unlikely that either film has yet to recover their costs. For his new film,
Last Action Hero, Columbia Pictures wants to launch a rocket into space. It is appropriate. Arnie's too big for a mere planet like Earth. He needs the universe to conquer.
1. Butler, George: Arnold Schwarzenegger: A Portrait, New York,NY
Simon & Schuster, 1990.
2. Green, Tom: Arnold!, New York, NY; St. Martin's Press, 1987.
3. Leigh, Wendy: Arnold: An Unauthorized Biography, Chicago, IL., Congdon
& Weed, Inc., 1990.
