Eprints.lincoln.ac.uk



Gábor GergelyLincoln School of Film and MediaUniversity of LincolnBrayford Pool, Lincoln, LN6 7TSggergely@lincoln.ac.uk+447794 356885Title: The accented cinema of Arnold SchwarzeneggerAbstractArnold Schwarzenegger’s personal trajectory - his career as a film star bookending a successful, but curiously also failed political career – mirrors his characters’ constant struggle to overcome opposition in a quest to become fully American. The often-parodied accent marks Schwarzenegger as always and irrevocably foreign, and, crucially, reminds us (and him) of his one failure as a body builder: to remodel his speech organs, which continue to mark him as immutably foreign.This paper builds on my earlier work on exile and émigré film actors in Classical Hollywood to bring a fresh look at Schwarzenegger’s work. It shows how a discourse of foreignness – via the constant reiteration of the superhuman quality of his physique and his unchanging German accent – dislocates the star body from the national, and thus builds the nation through his exclusion from the realm of the normative. The paper argues that Schwarzenegger’s roles can be read alongside Naficy’s Accented Cinema to unpack a transnational dynamic: the narrative of exile, dislocation and the drive to graft oneself into the host nation. A theory of exile and diasporic cinema, as applied to Hollywood, is used to show that despite all claims of victory in films and politics, Schwarzenegger’s body remains foreign and beyond the normative on screen and off.Naficy’s concept of the accent is combined with body theory, in particular Butler’s work on the immateriality of the feminine body in heteronormative discourse to interrogate the typical reading – in star studies devoted to him – of the Schwarzenegger body as hypermasculine. The concept of the posthuman is used to show how Schwarzenegger’s body is placed beyond the human realm through machinic embodiment, and doubling.IntroductionMany critics and commentators have remarked on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s accent. Few have given it serious consideration, or moved beyond a cursory acknowledgement of its centrality to the Schwarzenegger star persona. I try to make up for this failure adequately to theorize the Schwarzenegger accent by putting it at the heart of my inquiry. PREZI 1. (Sarah Connor) I conceive of the accent, with Hamid Naficy, as a sometimes visible, sometimes audible, ever-present but hard to apprehend marker of a perceived deviation from a putative norm. I argue that the Schwarzenegger star body is accented in diverse ways, and that the accent marks him as always and already foreign, and beyond the community of the normative, which I call the imagined community of us and which I have called elsewhere, after Jack Halberstam and Ira Livingstone, ‘the human loop’ (1995, 15).The questions of this paper came into focus when Schwarzenegger reappeared in his film star guise in the years that followed his two terms in office as Governor of California (2003-2011). My interest had been originally aroused while working on émigré actors in classical Hollywood, but was piqued in earnest by the 2015 low budget zombie drama Maggie (Henry Hobson, 2015). I was intrigued by this film’s potentially special place in the Schwarzenegger canon as the only feature alongside The Last Action Hero (John McTiernan, 1993) and The 6th Day (Roger Spottiswoode, 2000) which he also produced. I speculated that the film, with its focus on the slow spread of the zombie virus in the daughter of Schwarzenegger’s Wade Vogel, might articulate notions of the pathological issue of the foreign other, a teratology of foreign conception, if you like. What follows, then, is an attempt to trace a coherent motif through the Schwarzenegger body of work as a whole.Although most of his films offer a narrative of dislocation or migration, the typical reading of the Schwarzenegger star body is as a before the fact extension of the Schwarzenegger political persona. He is read as a hypermasculine embodiment of whiteness, a reactionary body that wages war on the other, and eradicates difference. PREZI 2. (Crush.) The elder George Bush’s description of the man as ‘Conan the Republican’ (see Nichols 1992, 41-2.) sums up this reading perfectly. In this reading Schwarzenegger’s roles are understood as articulations by the star, who is seen as having agency in the shaping of his star body. This is proposed in the face of the evidence of his political work, which is not so easily matched to the radical conservatism attributed to the Schwarzenegger canon.The Conan the Republican reading can be apprehended in Falkof’s ‘Arnold at the gates’ (2013, 123-43), an otherwise astute essay that spots the subversive edge in Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 1982) without linking it to foreignness and the quest to become integrated into the host nation. Dave Saunders’s 2009 book sees Schwarzenegger as embodying the American Dream of individual success through individual endeavour, ignoring the fact that most of the Schwarzenegger canon’s victories are Pyrrhic, coming at the cost of his life, as in Terminator 2: Judgement Day (James Cameron 1992), or End of Days (Peter Hyams, 1999), or at the cost of wholesale destruction as in Predator (John McTiernan, 1987) or Terminator Genisys (Alan Taylor, 2015). Approaching from the political sciences, but with a similar misreading of the 1980s Schwarzenegger canon as articulations by the future governor, Jeffrey Broxmeyer’s ‘From the silver screen to the recall ballot’ (2010) imagines Schwarzenegger’s personal political credo as being set down in The Terminator.Linda Ruth Williams’s (2012) essay ‘Corporeal Charisma’ similarly attributes control and intent to Schwarzenegger. While her focus is the star image constructed on and off the screen, and she is critical of the poor Austrian lad made good narrative, she, too, falls prey to the notion of Schwarzenegger’s ambition as a marker of difference. In so doing she unwittingly participates in the discursive othering of Schwarzenegger as different: as if ambition imparted his stardom with a quality that is distinct and different from the stardom of others.I argue that the Conan the Republican reading is the outcome of a deeply problematic conflation of the person and the persona, borne out by a retroactive analysis of the Schwarzenegger canon in which the Governor’s policies are analysed in view of the ideologies espoused by the films in which the actor had appeared, which are understood as articulations by Schwarzenegger himself. This clumsy auteurism typifies most writing about Schwarzenegger.Linda Mizejewski (1999) in Annette Kuhn’s Alien Zone II sees the built body as special effect. Mizejewski explores its many contradictions, and sees in Schwarzenegger a star body that is subject to doubling, queering and other forms of othering. This is a reading that informs my own, but I would like to trace a different path in this paper. Similarly, Dyer’s ‘The white man’s muscles’ (1997) sees the otherness in Schwarzenegger, although the argument Dyer posits is that the body-builder as star body serves to construct a white hegemony. I agree that a hegemony that happens to be white is constructed through stars such as Schwarzenegger and Steve Reeves, but my point here is that the Schwarzenegger star body is not an agent of this hegemony construction, but its product.My argument is that we must be very careful not to mistake Schwarzenegger the actor for the producers, scriptwriters, directors and audiences who create narratives around him. I suggest that it is entirely unhelpful to read the Schwarzenegger star body as having been uniquely shaped by the actor himself, or to see Schwarzenegger’s characters as active agents of normativity. He may have emerged from the realm of body-building, but Schwarzenegger had far less control over the cultural and ideological uses to which his body was put than scholarship currently acknowledges. Schwarzenegger does not produce his own films (except the three already mentioned). He has not directed or written the screenplay for a single feature, as opposed to Sylvester Stallone, for instance. To be sure stars have the right to refuse screenplays. However, the diversity of the Schwarzenegger canon seems to go against the thesis of a consciously constructed star persona through careful selection of scripts united by the Conan the Republican ethos.I would like to use what is left of this paper to sketch a reading of the Schwarzenegger persona that can explain its usefulness to a centre of cultural production that constructs a nation that sees itself as universal and gains shape through articulations of its own naturalness, and the irresolvable difference of its others. I suggest that Schwarzenegger is put to work by Hollywood as the nation’s other to construct an unproblematic American identity.An impossible presence – Conan the Barbarian and The TerminatorThe cinematic Schwarzenegger star body has two origin texts. These are Conan the Barbarian and The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984). I go back to the origin texts at this point to show the foreignness of the Schwarzenegger body in the moment of it being constituted as foreign. I then signal – for I shall have time for little else - how the reading I am about to propose can be applied to the rest of the canon. I will happily take questions at the end of my paper on how each role can be seen to engage with and put a spin on this central theme.Conan the Barbarian and The Terminator both centre around the making of myths. They tell stories on an epic scale about mythical bodies and each, in its own way, builds the myth of Schwarzenegger. Both films imagine Schwarzenegger’s body as an impossible presence.We see the making of Conan. He is orphaned. (PREZI 3. You took my father’s sword.) He is cast into slavery, and marched from his native frozen North to the scorching South, where he is shackled to a giant wheel which he drives day and night. A montage (PREZI 4. pics) that focuses on his limbs and the shoulder length hair that hangs over his eyes constitutes Conan as fragmented, as an organic assembly of body parts that puts under question his wholeness. Bound to the giant wheel we see him accrue muscle tissue. Compelled to expend energy he converts power output into accumulated strength. We do not see him eat anything. In other words net energy expenditure – hard labour alongside insufficient nourishment – results in accretion of muscle tissue. This is alien physics. Or rather this is normative discourse positing the foreign other as operating under its own rules of space and time, as existing outside the realm of known physics, the here and the now. His bodily development is achieved in spite of the conditions under which he exists. Indeed, all his fellow slaves perish one by one. Conan moves forward in time, but stays in place, all the while acquiring power, like a self-winding spring. He is on an impossible perpetual journey – an unending dislocation none the less bound in space – whose destination is his adult body-built self.Similarly, he acquires a solid identity under conditions that are not normally conducive to the emergence of a secure self. He is in a position of total exploitation: first as forced labourer, then as gladiator. He is denied the fundamentals of a secure identity, yet he acquires precisely that. Displaced from his place of birth, cut off from family, language and history, denied comfort and nurture, shackled and exploited, put on display as the foreign other that constitutes the norm by embodying its opposite, he becomes that which he is said not to be: a viable body. He is an impossible body constituted under conditions wholly antagonistic to such constitution. This impossible embodiment is rearticulated later in the film when Conan is crucified in the desert. He is saved by his travelling companion, the nomadic thief Subotai (Gerry Lopez). Conan comes down from the cross as a profane Christ, perhaps antichrist or dare I say it, a ‘foreign devil’, the ultimate other in the Christian imaginary, itself central to white hegemonic power.In The Terminator we see the eponymous character ready-made (PREZI 5. Terminator Pics.), as if born of a divine spark from a God’s temple. This is no less an origin story than Conan the Barbarian. The Schwarzenegger star body bursts into the present, and into presence. The film blurs the difference between time and space, setting up a then and here dichotomy. This vision of the Schwarzenegger star body, unnamed bar for a serial number, T800, is a grown man manifesting out of nothing, born in an electrical storm, a mini-big-bang, into present-day LA. Just as Conan, so too the T800 tries to make sense of his environment through an ontology constituted elsewhere. He is a machinic assemblage operating with a knowledge of the world and himself acquired in a different time, which in the film’s representational scheme is an elsewhere, a different place, a destroyed Los Angeles that exists alongside the present LA in Kyle Reese’s (Michael Biehn) flashbacks.Here Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ will be useful. I do not try to claim Haraway’s text for a masculinist project. Quite the contrary. I would like to show how radical feminism can show heteronormative exclusion at work through, and therefore on, a body typically read as performing and implementing that exclusion. Haraway’s idea of the cyborg will help me claim that the masculine foreign body, its gender notwithstanding, is constituted in normative discourse along similar lines as the feminine body: both are denied power, albeit a very specific sort of power – sex appeal for one; brute force for the other – is attributed to them.Haraway, imagining the liberating potential of the embracement of a cyborg embodiment as a way of rejecting paternity, and with it patriarchy, writes: ‘the cyborg […] has no truck with organic wholeness […], the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense. [It is] an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense’ (2000, 292). And a little later: ‘the main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins’ (2000, 293). Haraway’s work brilliantly refutes – avant la lettre – the ‘Conan the Republican’ reading by showing how the cyborg body is a product of a masculinist discourse and as such is closely aligned with MacKinnon’s reading of the female body in representation as being constituted as ‘another’s desire’ (Haraway 2000, 298). It is in this sense that the hypermasculine star body of Arnold Schwarzenegger produces a hegemony that is masculinist and racist. The foreign body is produced here as ‘another’s monster’, the one that the imagined community of us sees as one of them.Indeed, Schwarzenegger’s accent is crucial here. Several times the Terminator lures Sarah Connor into open ground, and danger, by speaking in the voice of someone known to her. He impersonates her mother, and he calls to her in Kyle Reese’s voice in the film’s climactic finale. Able to modulate his voice to imitate anyone – it is important to note that he does not play back utterances, but speaks in the voice of those it has heard speak – the cyborg speaks in Schwarzenegger’s German accent. His accent, which he has from the moment he first opens his mouth, (PREZI 5. Your clothes, give them to me.) marks him as originating not here, but there, and not now, but then. He originates outside ‘our present day’ and therefore, in the film’s blurred spatial-temporal regime, outside our space. Schwarzenegger’s accent marks his body as foreign as surely as his endless hours pumping iron have marked it with an othering excess of muscle.Braidotti makes the link between Haraway’s essay and The Terminator explicit. She argues (1986, 22-3) that organ transplants and reproductive technologies have turned the body into a body without organs. Bio-sciences, in Braidotti’s reading, offer the dangerous and ‘perverse’ notion of the universal sameness and interchangeability of human organs. With the fragmentation of the body into an assemblage of organs the self is dislocated from culture, race and the realm of the organic. Parthogenesis or self-creation has become possible through reproduction that is dislocated, in both spatial and temporal terms, from the maternal (and paternal) body.For Braidotti ‘the social and cultural repercussions of this bio-scientific imaginary [seem] just as perverse: the fantasy of being the origin of oneself, that is of not having to recognize one’s beginning as originating in others – one’s parents – is manifested very strongly in popular culture, especially in cinema.’ For Braidotti, then, The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) is about John Connor, the male self, contriving to ensure that he is, indeed, born. He sends a guardian – an angel - to announce to his mother and thereby make real his own conception. In this reading, the threat to this self-constituting patriarchy, a patriarchy that has more than a little in common with the Catholic vision of the Holy Trinity and therefore with Western white masculine hegemony, the monster that imperils the advent of the secure self of the future leader of humanity itself is the T800. And the T800 is the foreign body, the body without organs, the machinic assemblage that spreads destruction. It is the monstrous embodiment that threatens the very existence of humankind. Like Conan, it is the other of the self-constituting white masculine hegemony. The T800 is the foreign other that threatens the maternal body and thereby imperils the nation. It is the body that is needed for the creation of this hegemonic us as surely as the feminine body is needed in the masculinist order as a vessel of reproduction. This, incidentally, explains why the T800 can become a force for good in the sequel. Offered a chance of acceptance into the host nation, the robber turned cop protects the boy next door, for this godlike secure self is in truth the white male of the American national imaginary. A privileged white male that masquerades as ordinary. And indeed the T800’s reward is the best a foreign body can hope for: an integration into the nation as one of the heroic dead. He is metaphorically and literally admitted into the melting pot.What makes this discussion of the early films of Arnold Schwarzenegger relevant is that it offers a reading of his star body that helps to step beyond the limiting auteurist view that sees his films as an extension of his political persona, and can resolve the inconsistencies of the reading that sees his star body as active agent of exclusion, while accounting for Schwarzenegger’s continued relevance as a film star. We can see how Twins (Ivan Reitman, 1988), a film that focuses quite explicitly on foreign birth and immigration, is informed by the same concerns around the possibility of the foreign other to be one of us that motivate the narratives of Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990) and The 6th Day’s frantic quest for one’s true self. The fish-out-of-water narratives of Kindergarten Cop (Ivan Reitman, 1990) and End of Days are driven by the same questions around the stability of selfhood in an alien environment as Eraser (Chuck Russell, 1996) and Predator (John McTiernan, 1987). I would like to return now to Maggie to link the foregoing to such a seemingly unusual Schwarzenegger film.Maggie is Wade Vogel’s only child from a first marriage. Her gradual decay turns her into a living corpse: an impossible presence. The pathology of the foreign other is inscribed into its issue. She becomes a threat to her father’s second family. Easily dismissed as an unsuccessful low-budget horror with an ill-cast veteran of action films trying to show ‘range’, Maggie is none the less consistent with earlier films of the Schwarzenegger canon in showing the Schwarzenegger persona working through a corporeally inscribed crisis of identity. It is resolved through Maggie’s suicide at the film’s end as she rejects the decayed body that is not her self. In so doing, Maggie – the issue of the foreign other inscribed with her unhappy parentage – destroys that which carries the visible marks of the pathology of the foreign other amongst us as constructed through normative discourse. Just as the T800’s machinic assemblage, its alien constitution was slowly revealed as it was gradually flayed, and just as Conan’s body was constituted in spite of its hostile environment and ultimately was born again on the cross as a profane Christ, so too Wade Vogel’s essential difference from the normative body included in the us of the host nation is made manifest in the gradual decomposition of his zombie daughter.ReferencesRosi Braidotti 1986. ‘Body-images and the pornography of representation’ in Knowing the Difference: Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology, Kathleen Lennon and Margaret Whitford eds. London: Routledge, pp. 17-30.Jeffrey Broxmeyer 2010. ‘From the Silver Screen to the Recall Ballot: Schwarzenegger as Terminator and Politician’ in New Political Science, 32. (1.), 1-21.Kevin Bruyneel 2006. ‘The Colonizer Demands its “Fair Share,” and More: Contemporary American Anti-Tribalism from Arnold Schwarzenegger to the Extreme Right’ New Political Science, 28. (3.) 297-321.Richard Dyer 1997. The White Man’s Muscles in White, London: Routledge, 145-183.Nicky Falkof 2013. ‘Arnold at the Gates: Subverting star persona in Conan the Barbarian’ in Conan Meets the Academy, Jonas Pride ed., London: Macfarland, 123-143.Judith Jack Halberstam and Ira Livingston 1995. Posthuman Bodies, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University PressDonna Haraway 2000. ‘A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century’ in The Cybercultures Reader, David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy eds., London: Routledge, 291-324.Linda Mizejewski 1999. Actions Bodies in Futurist Spaces: Bodybuilder Stardom as Special Effect in Alien Zone II, Annette Kuhn ed., London: Verso.David Nichols 1992. ‘Conan the Republican’ Australian Left Review, 1. (136.), 41-42.Dave Saunders 2009. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Movies, London: I. B. TaurisLinda Ruth Williams 2012. ‘Arnold Schwarzenegger: Corporeal Charisma’ in Pretty People: Movie Stars of the 1990s, Anna Everett ed., New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 19-42. ................
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