This month, Richard Brody reviews classic action movies from the nineteen-eighties that hes never seen before.
Another slight cheat: I had seen The Terminator, from 1984, but I hadnt really watched it. My recent viewingwith undivided attention, in a single sittingproved revelatory, if in a sidelong way. The experience of watching a movie is a total experience that includes everything that the movie brings to mind, and The Terminator showed me why I havent, in the intervening years, rushed to fill in the blanks on the eighties action films that I missed the first time around: theres something accursed in the action-film genre itself. Unlike other genres, its determined not by its subject matter, not by its setting or historical period, nor by its mode of emotional expressionits determined by a certain kind of scene.
The Terminator is a science-fiction film, and Die Hard is a police movie, but both are known as action films because the filmmakers take a particular approach to their disparate subjects and film their subjects in a particular waywith many large-scale, fast-moving, camera-jarring, quick-cutting, gun-firing, stunt-centered scenes of violence. That kind of scene isnt intrinsically any worse than any other kind (though I think that scenes of gun violence have a special trouble of built-in incoherence that takes an especially imaginative and daring director to overcome), but, in action movies, such scenes are compulsory routines and the entire film must be retrofitted to make room for them. Action scenes, in action films, are the tails that wag the cinematic dogand watching The Terminator made clear the kind of synthetic beast that this obligatory approach brings to the screen.
But, first, a public-service announcement regarding one of the cinematic events of the year: David Lynchs Twin Peaks: The Return. The show is a mixed bag of only intermittent sublimity, but one of its most sublime inventions is the character and attributes of the reprocessed, hermetic, mimetic, and grace-spangled insurance executive Dougie Jones (played by Kyle MacLachlan)and I think that the seedling of Dougies mannerisms is found in Arnold Schwarzeneggers first dramatic scene in The Terminator. A garbage-truck driver is surprised by streaks of blue lightning; from a quick explosion, the Michelangelo-esque nude from the future turns up on the tarmac, unfolding the unnatural perfection of his form. Moments later, the Terminator, still birthday-naked, strides toward a trio of teen punks who mock himNice night for a walk, eh? The Terminator responds robotically: Nice night for a walk. They mock him again: Wash day tomorrow, nothing clean, right? He answers, without inflection, Nothing clean right. That affectless repetition of the last words in a long sentencethats what Dougie does, too. Lynch has taken this tiny nugget of behavioral peculiarity and turned it into a cosmic visiona vision that is embodied as fully in MacLachlans performance as in the majestically laconic manner with which Lynch films MacLachlan, and the series over all (or at least whats best in it).
Some of the most striking elements of The Terminator are purely dramaticnot least, the gradual or even retentive way that the basic elements of the story are dosed out, thanks to the script, written by the films producer, Gale Anne Hurd, and James Cameron, the director. It takes a half hour to find out whos planning to kill whomthat Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), the smaller and less buff naked visitor from the future, has arrived not to kill Sarah J. Connor (Linda Hamilton) but to save her. It takes even longer to find out that he has also arrived to impregnate her. Also, the Terminators mechanical powers arent revealed for half an hourhis data vision, the computer screen in his mind that registers and analyzes information from his camera-eyes, isnt seen until the story arcs are already well established.
Its unfortunate, because theres nothing of any greater interest to watch in all of The Terminator than the inner life of a cyborgand theres nothing more engaging to think about in the whole film than the consciousness of a human from the future who goes back to a past that he knows he has to inflect in several very specific ways. As science fiction with a time-travel and alternate-worlds premise, The Terminator is the start of something interesting that it never engages or developsand thats because the movie is conceived and realized not as a science-fiction film but as an action film. The Terminator blows itself up to distorted proportions, leaving its basic, central, crucial, and finest inspirations far behind.
Cameron and Hurd inscribe political frenzies of the time into the plot, which involves the aftermath, in the year 2029, of nuclear war. That war was caused not by human intention or even human error but by the government computers that have been deployed to insure national defense. In 1983, a year before the movie was filmed, President Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, soon derided as Star Wars, involving a vast and computer-centralized network of weaponry, some placed in outer space, that would defend against missile attacks. The Terminator, with its story of a resistance movement, led by members of the U.S. armed forces, against a postwar computer-run regime, is a post-Vietnam movie that pits the valorand, most importantly, the judgmentof American military personnel against the machinery that they increasingly were seen to serve and the officials who valued that machinery above their manpower.
That sort of manpower (and, in later iterations of the genre, womanpower as well) is the heart of action films such as The Terminator. The genre, rooted in its bombastic and numbing set pieces of grand-scale violence, is a sort of Stakhanovite cinema of conspicuous exertion in which any conventions of socialist realism are voided in favor of capitalist unrealisman element of fantasy that frames the superheroic efforts and triumphs of Homo americanus as both supercolossal and unexceptional. The brilliance of The Terminator is to make the monster alluring, fascinating, piquantby contrast with Kyle, a regular guy with good training and, above all, good principles, but no charisma. The murderous cyborg with the weird accent is funnier than Kyle, but Kyle has a sense of purpose, and that sense is doubled by Sarah, whose sense of self-preservation and patriotic intention is amplified decisively by love.
For all its earnestly determined virtue, the charm of The Terminator is the charm of Schwarzenegger, whose aura as the taciturn cyborg flowers altogether more volubly and spontaneously in George Butler and Robert Fiores 1977 documentary Pumping Iron, which screens tonight at Film Society of Lincoln Center. (Butler will be on hand to introduce the film.) Its about bodybuilders who are training for a pair of competitions, Mr. Universe (for amateurs) and Mr. Olympia (for professionals), held on successive days in 1975 in Pretoria, South Africa. Schwarzenegger, who was twenty-eight at the time, had won the five Mr. Olympia contests from 1970 through 1974, and the movie shows him preparing to compete for his sixth victory (following which, he retires, on-camera, from the sport).
Pumping Iron is, of course, a documentary, but Schwarzenegger isnt merely its subjecthes its star, and his beaming, witty, charismatic presence in the film is among the most ingratiating performances of the time, one thats resoundingly predictive of the acting career that he had long aspired to and that he would, of course, soon achieve. (His first big role was in Bob Rafelsons Stay Hungry, from 1976, alongside Jeff Bridges and Sally Field.) Hes a figure of paradox; he clearly delights in his sport, his training, and his very life. He breezes through the gym with a regal good humor. He talks about the thrill of his muscle-pumping as orgasmic , saying, Its as satisfying to me as coming is, you know? As having sex with a woman and coming. . . . So Im coming day and night; its terrific, right? So, you know, Im in heaven. He delights in the eye of the camera upon him, and that delight is mutual: he beams at it as it radiates his energy.
The movie focusses on other contestants as well, including his closest competitors, Lou Ferrigno and Franco Columbu, and shows Schwarzenegger bad-mouthing both of them, explaining the methods by which he psychs them out prior to competitions. (With Ferrigno, Schwarzenegger says that he will talk him into losing. He calls Columbu a child and explains that Columbu comes to him for advices and that he gives Columbu wrong advices.) Schwarzenegger speaks plainly of the pain period of workouts, explaining that the difference between himself and lesser bodybuilders is his guts, his willingness to endure the pain that bodybuilding requires. Yet, when he talks about his training, he has the self-awareness of an artist, and discusses the sense of proportion and balance with which he builds his musclesa process that he likens to the creation of a sculpture. He says, I trained myself to be cold, and explains that he admits of no distractions, lets no emotional life interfere with his trainingand that, after his father died, he didnt attend the funeral because the timing was bad with respect to his training. Schwarzenegger also talks freely of his lifelong ambitions to move to the United States, to be the greatest, and being different from everybody else. He says, I was always dreaming about very powerful peopledictators and things like that. I was just always impressed by people who could be remembered for hundreds of years, or even, like Jesus, for thousands of years being remembered.
Pumping Iron presents a fascinating, complex, willful, wild, strange person who was turning himself into exactly that sort of a character, a public figure. Its exactly that element of subjectivity, of inner strangeness, that Camerons creations in The Terminator, human and synthetic alike, filter out. Cameron is into the exertion; hes into the single-mindedness of purpose; hes into the breezy charisma. What hes not into is complexity, paradox, unresolved inner differences. This sense of pure and focussed exertion, magnified to a marmoreal simplicity, may be the exemplary trait of Camerons entire career, the secret to his success, and the catnip of the genre that he helped to found and that has come to dominate the industry, even the market, but hardly the art of movies.
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Arnold Schwarzenegger's Best Cyborg Performance Wasn't In The Terminator - The New Yorker