SCHWARZENEGGER SYNDROME: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt
by Gary Indiana
The New Press £13.99 pp140

Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor of California may be the chief executive of the world’s sixth largest economy, but in the estimation of Laurence Leamer he has never abandoned the “instinctive conservatism” and “convivial habits” of the Austrian villager he once was. Emotionally neglected by his father (a drunken police chief who had been a Nazi party member and a storm trooper during the second world war), bullied by his elder brother, though taught “empathy and tenderness” by his mother, Schwarzenegger “developed an ability to turn his head from what was negative and hurtful and always to look beyond”.

As a competitive bodybuilder in the 1960s and 1970s, he may not have had the perfect body, but he had the perfect mental attitude. And killer instinct: not content with winning, he felt impelled to “taunt and denigrate” his rivals. And, of course, we know that he merrily groped his way through those less politically correct times.

Leamer pays tribute to Schwarzenegger’s determination, unique among Hollywood stars, to promote his films internationally. He also paints a plausible portrait of Schwarzenegger’s marriage to Maria Shriver (one of the Kennedy clan) that downplays suspicions of cynical calculation and emphasises instead both Schwarzenegger’s respect for Maria’s intelligence and independence of mind and their shared celebration of sexuality. In his even-handed assessment of the warrior king, Leamer captures his subject’s wily political character in a single sentence, describing him as “a man who is overlarge when he chooses to be and almost invisible when he chooses otherwise”.

Even-handedness is certainly not the intention of Gary Indiana, a camp satirist, who used to write for New York’s Village Voice and also writes novels. In this short polemic about Schwarzenegger and celebrity politics he tries hard to be Joan Didion, to whom he tips his hat a couple of times. Unfortunately, he lacks Didion’s crisp syntactical brilliance and sublime dryness of tone. Too often his meaning gets lost in the convolutions of his sentence structure and one yearns to escape the hothouse and return to the deadpan reportorial prose of Leamer.

Indiana believes that Schwarzenegger, far from eschewing special interests, is the creature of the deregulated electricity industry. Electricity companies may have pilfered as much as $71 billion from state coffers after Governor Pete Wilson deregulated California’s state power authority in the early 1990s. Schwarzenegger, advised by Wilson’s people, ended up “offering, as a solution (to the energy crisis), the free market model that caused the crisis in the first place”. (Even so, as Leamer reminds us, Schwarzenegger is a moderate Republican and has even pledged $3 billion of California state funding towards stem-cell research.) Schwarzenegger “would almost certainly have failed to get nominated by his own political party in a regularly scheduled election”, let alone win, but the rules of California’s recall process are arcane and peculiar. Indiana sees something sinister in the alignment of forces that led to Schwarzenegger’s victory. He digs up one unpalatable episode that Leamer has overlooked, namely the charge by the African- American bodybuilder Robby Robinson that Schwarzenegger casually referred to him as a “nigger” several times during the late 1970s. But this was at a time when Schwarzenegger was prepared to use any psychological weapon to undermine his opponents in bodybuilding competitions.

Indiana is better at parsing Schwarzenegger’s screen persona than he is at elucidating California politics. The best and funniest passage in his book is an analysis of the absurd film End of Days, which allows him to conclude that “the fictional Schwarzenegger hero incarnates the bodybuilder-turned-actor-turned-governor’s reductive view of politics, morality and social relations, enacts his messianic fantasies, dramatises his fierce and almost robotic preoccupation with winning and getting his way”.

Indiana quotes an interview that George Butler, the photo-grapher and director of Schwarzenegger’s first film, Pumping Iron, gave to the New York Times in August 2003: “The past meant nothing to Arnold because it was over. He never looked over his shoulder. This is a man of bottomless ambition. It’s always been there. He sees himself as almost mystically sent to America.” However, Schwarzenegger appreciates the importance of controlling his past. Thus, according to Leamer, he took care to pay Butler $1.25m for the film rights to Pumping Iron and the outtakes, as well as 43 photographs and negatives that were potentially embarrassing, including one of him in the nude with a teddy bear.

Leamer believes that if Schwarzenegger can impose his reform initiatives on a recalcitrant legislature by the end of this year, either through tough negotiation or plebiscitary mechanisms, he will have achieved his goal of becoming a transformative governor and will be ripe for re-election in 2006. In a memorable phrase, he called his opponents in the legislature “girlie-men”. As Leamer explains, “Arnold has an impish quality that no amount of power, no seriousness of position or theme, can change.”

AIMING HIGH

Schwarzenegger has always been extraordinarily ambitious and determined. In the 1970s, at the height of his body-building career, he capitalised on his growing fame by publishing a book, Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder. But when his publishers suggested a five-city tour for the first-time author, Schwarzenegger refused. “I want to go to at least 30 cities,” he insisted. By the end of the tour, the book had become a bestseller.

Available at the Books First price of £15.19 and £11.19 (Indiana) plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585

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websites:
www.schwarzenegger.com
Arnie’s official site

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