Thoughts on Arnold Schwarzenegger

Arnold Schwarzenegger's hand and foot prints at Grauman's Chinese Theater
(from Wikipedia)

We're far removed from Arnold Schwarzenegger now. He's changed addresses, moved from the lobby poster to the political ad, from the movie theater to television news. Sure, a part of the old Schwarzenegger--the 1980s Schwarzenegger--remains on DVDs and the occasional midnight revival, but he's married to his politics now, and we can't separate the two (let alone divorce them) in our memories.

The last twenty years have infected the image of Schwarzenegger in the same way they've infected the songs of Michael Jackson. Schwarzenegger and Jackson stood out on the cultural landscape of the 1980s, so effortlessly alien. No one moved or talked quite like them. There had never been pop stars or film stars so devoid of pathos or motivation. Schwarzenegger would turn as though there were hydraulics hidden beneath his muscles; when you saw a photograph of him or Jackson, it seemed as though their bodies had been custom-built for the frame.

Schwarzenegger was not dispassionate; he simply made passion irrelevant. He approached every line of dialogue--the sarcastic quips provided by the screenwriters--with an astounding indifference. He was never human, never a feeling--he was always a sound and an image, and we never wondered what secret feelings might motivate him, but instead imagined ourselves as machines. Why have love when we could have love scenes? Why have hate when we could have a punch, a pistol shot, a well-worded put down? He made dispassion into a force, transforming inertness into inertia. He replaced acting with actions. Van Damme had an ace's cockiness, Stallone had Jerry Lewis's earnestness, Bronson had weathered distance, but Schwarzenegger would emit vaudeville puns like radio signals, as though he had a transmitter in place of vocal chords. His mouth was a slit in his face. He showed you that there was nothing human about the human body. You take the context away from a hand, a pair of shoulders, a head and it's no different from a chair, a window, a wall.

Watching his films forces me to question myself. History has a funny way of turning our interests against us. The 2003 California gubernatorial recall is an ugly but inseparable footnote to Commando and Red Heat. "Am I playing into the hands of Schwarzenegger the politician?" I think. The "man of action," the "thing that needs to be done" that exists outside of context or emotions, is the fallacy that serves as the basis of reactionary politics. The dream of the action film lead to the reality of a conservative America.

Did the dream fail? Or was it always waiting to betray us? I have a doubt, like a cough in the back of my throat: is fascination a surrender? Is interest an approval?

John Ford's Imaginary Film

John Ford and members of the cast on the set of The Quiet Man

The Quiet Man is the sequel to an imaginary film noir: the movie that details John Wayne’s life as a boxer in America prior to his return to Ireland. It’s one of the great imaginary movies that exists only in the mind of the audience, up there with Odile and Franz’s silent adventures in South America.

Bits of this phantom film sneak through—in the way Wayne lights and smokes his cigarettes, or the way he grabs Maureen O’Hara by the hair and kisses her. These are desperate actions, at odds with Wayne’s screen persona. We even get a glimpse of this film—the flashback sequence, which breaks with Ford’s visual style for give us a few minutes of stunning color noir, all alienating close-ups, sweaty brows and vague signifiers (we see a doctor’s briefcase, but never a doctor). Wayne looks stunning uneasy in this scene; it’s as if he’s realized that he’s in the wrong film, and therefore escapes somewhere where he feels more at home: a John Ford picture.

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There’s a big difference between most noir--or in this case, color noir, a genre in an of itself--and Ford. Chiefly, there’s distance, the sense of space that places several characters into a frame when a noir film would linger on the face of one; this distance, by allowing us to examine the characters surroundings while they carry out their actions, or to see other characters’ reactions, allows us to analyze them. There is no urgency, no desperation here—instead, we can always see alternate solutions. The camera, after all, can make us aware of details we wouldn’t normally notice just as well as it can make us single-minded, unaware of the subject’s surroundings. In medium and wide shots, noir’s desperation would seem foolish—we would see a possibility, another course of action the characters, invariably trapped, don’t realize. The noir carryovers John Wayne brings in his baggage to The Quiet Man--his constantly abandoned cigarettes, the way he sulks in the shadows on his wedding night—are shot from a Fordian distance and seem awkward. Noir is a close-up without possibilities, while Ford is a medium shot, controlled but nonetheless giving us room to think; in noir, the story is a downward straight line, while in Ford it’s just one of many possible paths across an open field.