“He is the blockbuster given human form”: J. Hoberman on Arnold Schwarzenegger

“The more contact I have with humans, the more I can learn”, ponderously enunciates killer cyborg Arnold Schwarzenegger in a rare lull during his multimegabuck superspectacular Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The accent may defy transcription, but the humanising (or is it Americanising?) of our Arnold continues.

A film offering the most vivid thermonuclear firestorm in screen history, Terminator 2 is more a remake than a sequel, less a homage than an obliteration. Among other things, it sets out to efface the implacable robot menace of The Terminator that elevated Arnold to superstardom back in 1984. Opening unheralded on the eve of the US presidential election, The Terminator presented an alternative of sorts to the Reaganite ‘new morning’, unleashing der Arnold as the most compelling Frankenstein monster for half a century. Terminator 2, described by its director-writer-producer James Cameron as “the first action movie advocating world peace”, offers the monster’s redemption.

T2 (as production company Carolco is hoping we’ll call it) is more like E.T. 2, with a continual backbeat of Die Hard pyrotechnics – artfully pulverised walls and shattered glass, Evel Knievel cycle stunts, exploding skyscrapers and incinerated children. This time around, however, the bad old terminator (Arnold) protects the twelve-year-old future Messiah rather than trying to destroy his mother. Pitting the quaintly old-fashioned terminator against a new, liquid metal prototype, Terminator 2 makes the earlier model seem almost innocent. In a sense, it employs the same principle as US electoral politics: just when you think you’ve seen the worst…

The Terminator cost a mere $6 million; Terminator 2, whose budget is being estimated at fifteen times that, may be the most expensive movie ever made. And as we career into the 90s, it is the Arnold who seems the greatest of those extraterrestrial/immigrant/supernatural strangers in paradise who have wandered through the movies of the past decade, validating America’s suburbs and shopping malls. It is Arnold who is the current American ideal, number eight (highest ranked actor) in Entertainment Weekly’s ‘101 Power People’. A self-made millionaire married to the glamorous newsreader and JFK niece Maria Shriver, our Arnold received $12 million to play the eponymous hero of Kindergarten Cop (1990), while in an ancillary promotional move his patron George Bush anointed him chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. For Terminator 2, his estimated $15 million recompense included a Gulfstream G-III jet.

Yet, more than a public servant, Arnold is a strategic asset. During the 80s his films grossed $1 billion worldwide. He is the most bankable star in the US, Germany and Japan. (In the UK, he should soon surpass Mel Gibson, although the French continue to prefer Depardieu, Gibson and even Dustin Hoffman.) In a story knocked off Time’s cover late last December by a piece wondering whether Kuwait was worth the price of war, Richard Corliss called him “the most potent symbol of worldwide dominance of the US entertainment industry”.

While generations of would-be movie stars were compelled to Anglicise their names, this one sports the least pronounceable, most problematic moniker ever to emblazon an American movie marquee. Arnold is bad enough. As pronounced by an American, Schwarzenegger sounds practically obscene. Elevating those twenty letters is no small feat. But then, while other stars were born under the signs of Marx or Freud, this Austrian muscleman evokes that third prophet of modernity, Friedrich Nietzsche.

In Conan the Barbarian (1982), director John Milius introduced the five-time Mr Universe with a quote from Thus Spake Zarathustra: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger”. Arnold’s public statements reek of “will to power”, even as his image fulfils its manifestation, the Ubermensch. (In the two Conan films, Schwarzenegger lords over the lower species wrestling gorillas, punching out horses, cold-cocking camels – as if to illustrate Wilhelm Reich’s observation that “the theory of the German superman has its origin in man’s effort to disassociate himself from the animal”.)

Even der Arnold’s most famous line – the ”I’ll be back” delivered with the full flourish of dull robotic menace in the original Terminator and echoed in Kindergarten Cop – has intimations of the Eternal Return. Yes, Arnold has willed the return of the American Dream. His parents, he says, wanted him to be a skier or play soccer, but he chose bodybuilding because “it was a very American sport, and I thought, ‘If I do well, it could take me to America” ’.

But would the Arnold have achieved stardom during the breakdown years of the late 60s or early 70s? First had to come the decline of the Western and the universality of hyperreal cartoon imagery, the canonisation of an antithesis (Dustin Hoffman or Woody Allen), the culture of narcissism, and the deployment of the artist’s own person as sculptural material in Body Art. To become the Arnold, Schwarzenegger required the 80s fitness craze, the fifteen-year regime of ‘body horror’ movies, the proliferation of environmental cancers, the plague of Aids, the Reagan Jawohl. He had to transcend the suspect, sweaty fetishism of his chosen discipline and overcome suspicion about his sexual orientation. Stay Hungry (1976), the first movie in which Arnold had an important role, includes a scene in which a woman enquires whether his character is gay. Remarkably, this bit is reprised in Kindergarten Cop.

Still, for all the laboriously inscribed love interest in his recent movies, our Arnold is a man’s man – or rather, a man’s superman, or perhaps the simulation of a man’s superman. “Consider this a divorce”, he ripostes, shooting his treacherous pseudo-wife through the forehead in last year’s Total Recall. Der Arnold perfected male character armour long before he became a movie star: “I can hide my feelings under my muscles”, he told photographer George Butler, who with something of his subject’s prescience has been documenting Arnold’s thoughts and triceps since the mid-70s.

Not simply personifying the notion of the film star as an expensive expanse of well-lit torso, our Arnold returns the movies to their fairground origins. His seemingly indestructible body is, as Time observed, “its own stunning special effect”. The sloping planes of his smooth, simian features are as chiselled as a comic book superhero. He is the blockbuster given human – or at least, humanoid – form. Mapped, quantified, evaluated, the Schwarzenegger torso is less a sex object than an object lesson, recapitulating the post-Renaissance transformation of the human body into something to be manipulated and rationalised, surveyed and regulated, subjected to the institutional discipline of prisons, schools, hospitals.

With his exaggerated ‘perfect’ form, the Arnold exemplifies those sci-fi cyborgs whose bionic technobodies render the human obsolete. (“When I’m training for a competition, I can be what some people call inhuman, but really I think it’s more like being superhuman”, he told Butler.) ‘John Matrix’, the name by which he is called in the 1985 Commando, evokes both living cartilage and mass production. In The Terminator, the Arnold chose to play just such a matrix of metallic flesh and pseudo-human circuitry, as the movie invited us to share the joy of being a machine (“what some people call inhuman”) by providing numerous point-of-view shots from the perspective of the Arnold’s computerised videoterminal brain.

But even when Arnold does not play a machine, his behaviour is typically shown as an artificial construction. In Twins (1988), he has been genetically designed (by a German scientist, no less) to be a superman, then kept sequestered from the world. Arriving in America, an innocent in short pants, our Arnold must be taught by his dwarfish brother Danny DeVito to cope with the subterfuge of civilisation, even be tutored in his sexual instincts. In the far more radical Total Recall, the Arnold’s memory is repeatedly wiped out and reconstructed, demonstrating that his personality, his personal history and his perspective are no less objectified than his body.

Given this materialism, it is hardly surprising that Arnold’s movies are perceived as much as investments as they are entertainment. (T2 was reviewed in the business section of the New York Times a week before it opened.) As a movie star and media personality, our Arnold is highly self-conscious. Albeit self-invented, the Arnold has a sense of himself as a historical being: “With Rocky, I think Stallone did a big service to my career because he opened up a whole new type of movie, where the body is accepted and people go to see the body”. (Somewhat naively, our Arnold predicted that Conan would be his Rocky.)

Indeed, Arnold’s relationship with Stallone seems to have been a virtual subtext in both the 1984 Rocky IV (the Soviet fighter Drago resembling nothing so much as Arnold gone blond) and the 1986 Cobra (Sly appropriating Terminator shades while his nemesis suggests Schwarzenegger gone to seed). And this despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Arnold had helpfully supported Stallone consort Brigitte Nielsen in her ill-fated Red Sonja (1985).

When in a 1988 Playboy interview, Schwarzenegger’s interlocutor referred to Stallone as his “friend”, our Arnold strenuously begged to differ: “He is not my friend… I make every effort that is humanly possible to be friendly to the guy, but he just gives off the wrong vibrations. Whatever he does, it always comes out wrong”. Unlike the tormented Stallone, the nonchalant Schwarzenegger is not haunted by the failure of Vietnam. Rather than dramatise old grievances or wallow in self-pity, Predator (1987) coolly reduces the war to the level of a videogame monster from outer space. Moreover, born and raised in neutral Austria, der Arnold is similarly unencumbered by the rigid categories of Cold War thinking. In Commando, he plays an East German immigrant; in Red Heat, his Russian cop is the ideal right wing law enforcer – militaristic, hostile (when not oblivious) to civil liberties, economical in his instinctual application of justice.

The truth is, Sly has no savoir faire, while the Ivan Reitman comedies Twins and Kindergarten Cop allowed Arnold to become, as People had it, “Cary Grant with pecs”. As early as Commando, our Arnold began to temper his aggression with corny puns and callous wisecracks in the manner of James Bond. His comedies deform the notion of amiability no less. We treasure the Arnold’s tender concern for his stunted twin – whether it be Danny DeVito, George Bush or ourselves – because it is backed up by the threat of maximum force. We applaud Arnold’s diligent public service in Kindergarten Cop, however threatening. “Stop whining. You kids are soft – you lack discipline”, he tells his five-year-old charges, teaching them to respond to police whistles, rationalising their chaotic play into regimented, meaningless activity.

Most American heroes are bugged by authority, but Schwarzenegger, the son of a cop, is not a cop-hater – despite T2’s clever opposition of Arnold’s biker-clad terminator against the newer, police-disguised model. On the contrary: “My relationship to power and authority is that I’m all for it. People need somebody to watch over them and tell them what to do. Ninety-five per cent of the people in the world need to be told what to do and how to behave”.

In The Running Man (1987), which unconvincingly attacked the cartoon world of the high 80s – the very robe-entertainment that provided the backdrop to Schwarzenegger’s climb to fame – our Arnold mocks futile dreamers of social reform and demands immediate action. Order and discipline are the stuff of his fantasy life: “I was always dreaming about very powerful people”, he confided to Butler. “Dictators and things like that”.

Which “things like that”, you might well ask? Alternatively perceived as comic or sinister, the sound of a German accent serves self-consciously to unite Americans as Americans against an alien order. Camp fascist that he is, Milius attempted to shock the liberal media by opining that his Conan would have been popular in 30s Germany. The transplanted Dutch director, Paul Verhoeven, couldn’t resist a similar gag, ending Total Recall with a mystical Alpine apotheosis worthy of Leni Riefenstahl. But our Arnold is not Conrad Veidt, a Nazi victim compelled to play Nazi villains. Unlike any previous star, he embraces and embodies the covertly admired Teutonic virtues.

The Arnold’s autobiographical accounts are unselfconsciously filled with references to “the Master Plan”, “iron discipline”, and his own compulsive “neatness”. An American citizen since 1983, he has scarcely shed his Austrian identity. Neither has his Heimat forgotten him. Kurt Waldheim’s wedding present, delivered to the Kennedy family compound at Hyannisport, was a larger-than-life sculpture of a grinning, Lederhosen-clad Arnold hoisting up his new bride, herself dressed in the laced-up blouse and Dirndl of a Bavarian peasant.

America’s reigning male star is a priori a political figure, as well as a didactic one. “The most important American of our time is John Wayne”, wrote theatre critic Eric Bentley in 1971. “Granted that all good things come from California, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan are only camp followers of Wayne, supporting players in the biggest Western of them all”. From the Bicentennial through the Iran-Contra hearings, Stallone provided Americans with a decade’s worth of political metaphor, while Clint Eastwood’s old movies continued to supply tough-guy rhetoric through the 1988 presidential election – when, ever mindful of the wimp factor, George Bush campaigned alongside der Arnold and Chuck Norris. Thus, Arnold’s innocent statements (“The joy in public office is a tremendous idea. I think it could be the greatest challenge yet”, he told Entertainment Weekly) are a factor of the seriousness with which he takes his exalted position.

It is time, as George Bush proposed (and Premiere seconded), for a “kinder, gentler” Arnold. As Kindergarten Cop signalled, our Arnold is now a father. He has done penance for the sins of his fatherland, pledging $250,000 to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which reciprocated with a dinner at the Century Plaza in LA honouring Arnold’s work on behalf of physical fitness and handicapped children. This astonishing event featured a full-dress Marine colour guard, a US flag secretly stitched together by the inmates of the Mauthausen concentration camp carried into the ballroom by a group of Holocaust survivors, and a speech by George Bush. Not long afterwards, Variety reported Schwarzenegger’s plans to run for senator from California, possibly as early as 1992.

Like Stallone, Schwarzenegger might be said to enact the masculine. The power of Stallone’s alter egos, Rocky and Rambo, is, however, predicated on their ability to absorb physical punishment. (Rocky, in particular, embodies the pathos of the proletariat – the man who’s only capital is his body.) But even as Rocky devolved and the Gulf War relegated Rambo to a joke – a figure mocked by Saddam Hussein and debunked by US commanders – the Arnold, who once cheerfully asserted that “for me, pain is pleasure”, had already rendered Stallone’s suffering obsolete.

While Stallone’s movies were turgid exercises in regaining national self-respect, the vehicles that made Schwarzenegger a star are distinguished by their can-do attitude and insouciantly surplus carnage. On a per capita basis, the Arnold has surely racked up the highest body count in movie history. In Commando, he single-handedly kills dozens, if not hundreds, to save a single life. In Raw Deal, he decimates the Chicago mob, accomplishing “a hundred years of police work in a single afternoon”. Unlike his macho predecessors, der Arnold has been an equal opportunity terminator, killing women on screen not only in The Terminator (where it is the subject of the movie), but, most famously, in Total Recall.

In the new improved Terminator 2, Arnold kneecaps his opponents rather than blowing them away. The bloodlust in the world’s greatest demolition derby is transferred to his former victim, Sarah (Linda Hamilton, her movie career seemingly on hold since she first played Arnold’s snuff object). An even more crazed Rambette than Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, Hamilton is the mother not only of its Messiah but of all eco-terrorists – single-handedly pulverising a suburban ranch house and terrorising a family into submission. Although her character gets to trump Arnold’s curtailed antisocial behaviour (reduced now to punching out pay phones to get a quarter), her nurturing side is not completely absent. Around the time that the terminator begins to wonder why it is that people cry, Sarah realises that this half-domesticated killer cyborg is the perfect dad.

Potent symbol of worldwide domination, our Arnold reconciles father and destroyer, America and Germany (and Russia), man and machine, freedom and authority, terminator and redeemer, Rambo and Cary Grant, gym class and kindergarten, teacher and cop, the barbaric past and the awful future, the triumph of the will and the death of the subject, American hegemony and American vulnerability. Proudly wasteful and bizarrely self-serving, Terminator 2 suggests the merging of Schwarzenegger and Schwarzkopf. This is truly the Desert Storm of action flicks – mindboggling display of state of the art F/X angled at the international, as well as US, market.

Not only does T2 advocate ‘world peace’, it illustrates the concept of ‘collateral damage’. Too kind and gentle to massacre his opponents, too thorough and butch to let them live, too ambitious and socialised to divorce any more wives, our Arnold packs the cinema with invisible corpses. For an encore, he has enlisted Verhoeven to direct him in a twelfth-century version of Operation Desert Storm. They shall call it The Crusades.