I had not seen Conan the Barbarian - the Schwarzenegger
breakthrough and his first major film role, released two years before The Terminator, and directed by John "Red Dawn" Milius – since I was 16,
where I believe I watched it on VHS, in the wrong aspect ratio, on an average, crappy 1980s television. I don't remember watching it more than once -- unlike, say, The Thing or The Evil Dead or any other VHS favourites of yore, which my buddies and I watched again and again. Would seeing it in the proper aspect ratio on a vastly improved TV elevate the experience? I was eager to find out, especially since Erika had never seen it.
Turns out that Conan the Barbarian is not a very good
film, but there are some things in it that gave me great pleasure, nonetheless, enjoying it sometimes in spite of and sometimes because of its flaws. For instance:
1. James Earl Jones turns into a snake. I am a mild aficionado of snake-to-human (or human-to-snake) transformation films, also including Sssssss, Hisss, The Reptile, and Dreamscape -- where David Patrick "Warriors Come Out to Play" Kelly turns into a cobra-monster:
Somehow I had forgotten about the James Earl Jones scene, but understand, when I first saw Conan, I was probably still CATCHING snakes recreationally, not musing about their representation in cinema. Realizing that, as Thulsa Doom, he leads a snake cult (and that he is a sorcerer), at the moment his facial features started to morph, I sat up and excitedly declaimed: "Is James Earl Jones turning into a snake?!"
He was!
It is not the only snake scene in the film. It is interesting how they combine really great photography of live action snakes, in a few places, with scenes involving mechanical snakes on a par with the mechanical tarantulas in The Beyond. You get excited when you see how well-photographed the big snake in the film is, the first time you see it, and think, this snake is going to be awesome! And then the film cuts to the “action” shots with the mechanical one, and "awesome" is no longer the word you have in mind. Put it this way, it is on par with Ken Russell's The Lair of the White Worm:
But this marks a significant point in the film's development: When the snake scene arrives, you realize that up til that point, you had actually been kinda-sorta suspending your disbelief, which you only realize you'd been doing when it becomes totally impossible to continue thus: Oh, shit, THIS is what I'm watching? ...but the movie actually becomes MORE FUN from this point on, where suspending disbelief is replaced with guffaws and raised eyebrows. The mechanical snake will be your guide, leading you to these richer, weirder waters...
And weirder yet, the snakes in this film become explicitly phallic when Jones stroke a snake and it stiffens! There is a very striking closeup of his hands around the shaft, pulling it straight, whereby it turns into an arrow, a weapon, which – help me unpack this in terms of phallic symbolism? -- he then shoots into Valeria, Arnold's love interest, killing her. (Has their been any queer criticism of this film? Are there any Freudian interpretations? Was Milius reading Freud? …this actually seems possible).
We'll return to queer content presently, but suffice to say, for now, that that's a lot of snakes for one movie. And I like snakes.
2. There is an element of unintentional camp. Even IF it is NOT an intentional, campy, tongue-in-cheek film like we will see soon thereafter as Schwarzenegger becomes a BRAND, post-Terminator… Even if Milius quite possibly took some of this seriously, or at least expected his audiences to, or thought they would in ways that seem, oh, I dunno, quaint? Naïve? Charming? Maybe a bit, uh, hubristic? Even despite all that, Conan develops an aspect of “unintentional camp” (contra the intentional camp injected into Total Recall or so forth). You feel a bit bad laughing at it, because you realize you weren’t actually intended to, but you can't help yourself!
In contrast, Conan actually makes me feel greater appreciation for Red Dawn, which is ten times the film, if also absurd; that film is probably a must-watch, if you haven't seen it lately, as way of putting dogwhistle histrionics about "communism" in their place. Someone should remake it and give Jordan Peterson a cameo.
Oh, wait, they already remade it? Nevermind.
3. There is a gay pickup scene. Speaking of queering Conan, there is, also stretching things in implausibly entertaining ways, a bit of brief homoerotic content which never would occur in later Brand Schwarzenegger product, and which gets described on Youtube as the weirdest scene in the film. It ends in casual violence against the gay man that speaks of how banally homophobic the times were, or at least John Milius, but FOR A BRIEF MOMENT, a priest of the snake cult hits on Arnold, and Arnold smiles at him and gives him a bit of a come on, smiling and saying something like, "why don't we talk over there where it is more private," which, I dunno about you, put ALL SORTS OF IMAGES in my head, like suddenly I had flashbacks to Derek Jarman's Sebastiane.
Once they are alone, Schwarzenegger seduces the priest further by saying he's "shy" and playing hard to get; as the priest does indeed -- with no references to oysters or snails to be had -- move in for a kiss, just as the more homophobic members of the audience are starting to clench their asses shut and sweat (and/or salivate a little, because these things are never simple), Arnold decks him, dashing hopes for a bit of man-on-man action, and steals the priest's robes. Not the payoff I wanted -- sexual tension climaxing in violence in lieu of sex -- but for a second there...
Question: Is there a Milius autobiography? Was he raised Catholic? Did he have any bad experiences with priests? Does this have any bearing on this scene?
4. Arnold Schwarzenegger punches a camel. Again, this is not necessarily meant to be a "good" thing about the film, but it is somewhat, um, exceptional, and I confess, in a singular, WTF way, when this happens -- especially if you have not been prepared for it -- it is pretty entertaining: Conan and his friend are wandering around town stoned on some sort of Cimmerian hallucinogen ("the Black Lotus"), so camel-punching seems like a good idea at the time. Who among us has not been there? And if you watch carefully, it's a pretty obvious stage punch, with sound effects added afterwards, including a laugh that Schwarzenegger can be seen not giving. Though the camel does fall down afterwards, that COULD still be a well-trained animal -- it is not a clear case of animal cruelty. But do a quick Google of "animal cruelty Conan" and it takes much of the fun from the film: I am sorry to report, the film was made in Spain, land of the bullfight, where there were no animal cruelty laws to be had, so horses are tripped, a dog gets kicked, and more. And rather than drawing heat for the filmmakers, the camel punch apparently was regarded as an entertaining moment, because there is a follow-up to this scene in Conan The Destroyer where Conan sees the same camel again, says, "I'm sorry for what happened last time," and gets spit on, whereupon he gets angry and hits the camel anew.
This may in fact be the first instance of "Brand Schwarzenegger's" development, where someone was watching with a pencil in the back row during a screening, taking note of what audiences liked, with the intent to repeat the formula next time. If you are curious, both scenes are compiled here, and also a "bonus" of a horse getting punched; Tracy "Plate of Shrimp" Walter is Conan's companion in the second film, and remembers the camel punch to Conan, even though he wasn't in the first movie.
5. Valeria wrestles cartoon demons. Later in the film, demons attack Arnold when he is being resurrected and have to be fought off by his companion, Valeria, who is played by Sandahl Bergman -- y'know, from Hell Comes to Frogtown? She is the one on the chain:
That ridiculous little film would make a fine follow up to Conan, as would the Den cartoon from Heavy Metal... but in 1982, Bergman did not realize she would soon be relegated to quasi-ironic b-movie roles, and does a fine job in the action scenes of Conan, which she, like Arnie, plays straight; though it's interesting to note, in terms of looks, she's nowhere near as conventionally beautiful as a female actor would have to be to net such a role nowadays -- she's no ScarJo; but then, Arnold's not exactly a standard leading man, either. It's an interesting thing, suggesting that 1982 may not have been as backward as one thinks...
Still, as game as she is, the resurrection scene has her fighting CARTOONS. The demons are animated; the figure in the centre is one such example (it doesn't look that much better on blu-ray!):
This is absurd enough that Erika and I actually hit rewind and did the scene a second time (you can see the whole scene here). Or maybe Erika was falling asleep at this point, and I was, like, "Wake up, you gotta see this!"
There were a few moments like that ("wake up, he's stroking his snake and it's stiffening!").
6. The sets look just like sets! Speaking of bad effects, consistently in this film, the set designs look like nothing so much as set designs. Cecil B. DeMille would have pshawed The film tries for sweeping Hollywood spectacle and instead ends up looking more like Circle of Iron (y'know, where David Carradine, in one of a few roles, plays a kung-fu fighting monkey?). Not a good thing, per se, but again, this is somewhat entertaining to observe!
7. Max! Finally: not only had I forgotten that James Earl Jones turns into a snake, I had forgotten ENTIRELY that Max von Sydow was in this film, in maybe the film's most delightful role: the thieves are brought before Max, as King Osric, expecting to be punished for having stolen some jewels, only to discover that the person they stole from was Max's enemy and he is delighted (and wants to hire them to do another job!).
I had just played Erika a go-to Bergman of mine the other week, with von Sydow in it – Shame – and was delighted that in fact, that film worked for her; I did not know how she would take Bergman, but she enjoyed the film immensely. (It’s a weirdly feminist film -- Shame, that is, not Conan. Did people see the Ukrainian anti-war film Klondike? It is in many respects a descendent of Shame).
As extreme a contrast as it is to go within a short span from Max in Bergman to Max in Conan, he's delightful, playing the role as if he were a benevolent Viking patriarch, laughing and jocular. Perhaps because it's the opposite of what you're expecting, his scene is hilarious. While it is quite possible James Earl Jones may have felt contempt for the material – you cannot tell from his workmanlike performance how he truly feels about it, though he is very entertaining to watch -- it is vibrantly clear, especially if you know a bit about von Sydow, that he is HAVING THE TIME OF HIS LIFE playing Osric, possibly having even more fun than he did as Ming the Merciless. He has complained in interviews about being asked to play the same sort of role again and again; Osric is about is as far from the "von Sydow stereotype" as you can possibly get. You feel happy for him, and find his enjoyment infectious.
There are other fun things you notice when watching Conan, mind you, from horrific hairstyles, especially on Jones, to some decent swordfight choreography, but the "unintentional camp" factor ratchets up if you turn on the subtitles and try to imagine Milius actually WRITING some of the lines in the film as dialogue: there are some real doozies, a level of pretension that one does not normally encounter in a film like this. You may notice other odd quirks of language that way, too, like when James Earl Jones calls Conan and his band of thieves "infidel defilers": doesn't that imply that they go around defiling infidels? I don't think that's what he meant!
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