The rapid maturation of Arnie, and other thoughts on a Schwarzenegger double feature

I'd had my appetite whetted for another viewing of Total Recall when I'd heard it discussed lovingly on a recent episode of the Blank Check podcast, which I am listening to despite the fact that it frequently annoys me and the podcasters love their own show and its inside jokes too much. And I got Predator, which I'd never seen before, out from the library last weekend.

So when my wife had to opt out of our Friday night viewing to do some work, I opted in to an Arnold Schwarzenegger double feature.

It ended up being a fortuitous pairing for such a thing. Schwarzenegger has had a very long career, so if you decided to watch two of his movies, you could separate them by 40 years or longer if you wanted. Pumping Iron (1977) and Killing Gunther (2017) might make an interesting double feature, for all I know (I've only seen the former).

But by seeing movies that came out in 1987 and 1990, I focused on a very specific snapshot of his career -- and found two very different movies.

Now I must start out by saying that this would be my sixth or seventh viewing of Total Recall, first since 2012. I saw it in the theater in 1990 and have always considered it a personal favorite. It ranks #167 on my Flickchart, and it should probably be higher. So it's both a nostalgia pick and a genuinely good movie, making any apples-to-apples comparison with Predator -- a nostalgia pick and a genuinely good movie for other people, because they saw it in the theater in 1987 -- problematic.

But I couldn't help but notice how much three years matured Schwarzenegger as an actor. And I can't even credit the directors, as John McTiernan got great performances out of his whole cast in Die Hard just a year later, while Paul Verhoeven has gotten laughable performances out of a cast (Showgirls). No, this maturation was all on Arnie.

The characters are different too, I'll give you that. Predator's Dutch is a man of few words, a mercenary trained to kill. Recall's Doug Quaid also has training in lethal fighting techniques, but he thinks he's a construction worker, and even his alter ego is more a smarmy asshole than a mercenary. So more range is required of the actor in Recall than Predator.

But he gives the range, and I never thought he was capable of it until I saw this movie. I was actually a bit resistant to Schwarzenegger before Total Recall, which is why I never saw Predator when other friends were going on breathlessly about it. I'd seen Commando on cable at a friend's house, and I had a memory of it as a lot of grunting and bodies jumping on trampolines to simulate being blown up. Even when I was like 12, when I should have been at the height of my appreciation for this sort of thing, I recognized it wasn't a high watermark of sophisticated culture. I didn't see The Terminator until after T2, and I still to this day have not seen Conan the Barbarian or its sequel. In looking at his filmography, I guess both The Running Man and Twins predated Total Recall, and I certainly saw both of those. But that's the only time I've seen both of those movies, so I guess I was not sold. Coming into Total Recall, I considered him a dubious property.

The role of Doug Quaid/Hauser (I just now realized Hauser does not get a first name) changed all that, and kicked off a honeymoon period with Schwarzenegger that lasted the better part of a decade. Whereas I hadn't rewatched any of his films prior to this, Total Recall became an immediate repeat viewing for me, as did his other 1990 release, Kindergarten Cop. It was probably that film that really served as the other half of the 1-2 punch that let me know this guy was actually a capable actor, able to play more subtle emotions than were once required of him. As I watched Total Recall last night, I noticed how much relies on small shifts in his expression as he absorbs new information or gradually changes from one emotional state to another. You tell the Arnie of Predator to do that and you'd be out of luck.

My favorite Schwarzenegger film of all time, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, came out the following year. And though those three films are probably still my three favorite of his, I saw more of his than I missed from there on out. (I guess I'm still not an Arnie completist, though, because I still haven't seen 1994's Junior, and only saw 1996's Jingle All the Way for the first time this past Christmas.)

Maybe if I'd seen Predator at the time and last night was my sixth or seventh viewing of that, I'd recognize there were subtle things he was doing there. In fact, even now I can think of one. I love the scene where he first realizes that the mud is camouflaging him from the predator's vision, which relies on sensing his heat and motion. That scene is one big moment of held breath, and in that moment he displays something that the big iconic Arnold roles had lacked before then -- fear. It reminded me of one of the things I appreciate most about McTiernan's follow-up, Die Hard, in which John McClane flashes moments of the type of fear that was usually anathema to action heroes.

But I think there's little dispute that Total Recall is a role that required a real actor, and got one. Listening to that podcast reminded me that Richard Dreyfuss had been the original actor considered for Total Recall when they planned to make a different type of movie out of it. The podcasters kind of joked about Schwarzenegger's abilities when contrasted with those of Dreyfuss, and sure, Dreyfuss is a better actor. But I don't think the gap is as large as we would assume it would be. In those few years in the late 1980s, Schwarzenegger committed himself to becoming better at his craft, and it shows.

Some other thoughts ...

Predator passes the Blackdel Test

You've heard of the Bechdel Test, right? Of course you have. It's the test for gender representation in film and other works of fiction credited to cartoonist Alison Bechdel, which tests whether the story contains a minimum of two female characters who speak to each other about something other than a man. It's a purposefully minimal standard to demonstrate just how rarely films actually meet it.

Predator does not pass the Bechdel Test, as it has only one female character. But it does pass the Blackdel Test, a term I thought I invented, but when googling it, of course others have thought of it before me. It's basically the racial variant on the Bechdel Test, with black people as the underrepresented party rather than women, discussing something other than a white person rather than something other than a man.

I'd venture this is probably met more often by movies, as institutionalized sexism in films might actually be a worse problem, historically, than institutionalized racism. But that's a pretty big topic and I don't really want to dig into it or offer a definitive opinion.

I will say that you tend to notice when films of a certain era give two black people something to do that's separate from the white people, just as you would if two women were getting that spotlight. And I noticed it in Predator in this scene:

That's Bill Duke and Carl Weathers -- Mac and Dillon by name -- trying to get the drop on the predator, who does not notice them spying on him from a hidden area in the brush. They fail spectacularly, but that's not something, fortunately, that we can attribute (or that the film does attribute) to their race. The predator is just too damn smart and fast to be taken down by ordinary military stealth tactics, and camouflaging himself against the background certainly doesn't hurt.

What I think we are meant to take away from it is that both of these guys go in pursuit of the predator, rather than running from it as the other characters have done. In a short time, Duke's Mac has developed a near obsession with it, Captain Ahab style, but Weathers' Dillon is showing a different type of courage -- he's putting himself in harm's way as an attempt at redemption for his earlier deceptions, despite not naturally having the confidence that Mac has. Both of them are knowingly risking their own hides to save their dwindling number of comrades from an unimaginable threat. And, both lose their hides, Mac with a blasted head, Dillon with first a lost arm, then an impalement.

So the movie goes from two to zero black characters in the space of about a minute, but at least they were damn courageous, and for their scene together -- a couple scenes, actually, if you include the earlier interaction with the scorpion -- they talked together without talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jesse Ventura. (This movie is lousy with future governors.)

Total Recall gets you home in time for corn flakes

Especially compared to Predator, I noticed how much Total Recall really moves. I mean, it trucks. While Predator feels like about 38 minutes of actual plot and about an hour of filler -- which is not to say I didn't like it -- Total Recall is only ten minutes longer and has like a million more things that happen. Because that script is fast, and it just keeps moving you along.

In the climax of the film, Ronny Cox's Vilos Cohaagen (great name) tells Quaid he is going to kill him and still be home in time for corn flakes. That always struck me as a funny line -- who eats corn flakes at night? -- but it seems to describe perfectly what Total Recall does. It gives you a great, delirious burst of sights, sounds, action and existentialism, and still lets you off the rollercoaster to get you home in time for corn flakes.

Consider the scripts side by side for a minute. Predator is deliberate, you might say; slow, if you were not being generous. There's a lot of time devoted to the setup. They don't have their first interaction with the alien until the movie is 45 minutes old. Granted, there's that whole section involving taking out the insurgents, which has plenty of wham bam thank you ma'am. So it's not like you are deprived of action until 45 minutes in. But you're deprived of what the movie is really about, which I found a bit frustrating.

Then there's Total Recall. It opens with a dream sequence on Mars. By the 15-minute mark, Quaid is strapped into a chair at Rekall. All the setup they've needed to do has been fit into these first 15 minutes. Then the movie is off and running, and it never stops to catch its breath. Yet it still manages to continue to develop its characters and have them consider the nature of free will and selfhood.

Like I said, this thing trucks.

And because I love new observations about favorite films, I'll close out with a few more Total Recall tidbits:

- The line "Clever girl" was very familiar to me, and I thought it was because that line was used in (made famous by?) Jurassic Park. But I've only seen Jurassic Park once, possibly twice all the way through, and not since the 1990s. Last night I realized that Schwarzenegger says this to Sharon Stone's character when she tries to distract him from Richter's arrival by offering him sex, and it's three years earlier than JP.

- I had forgotten how disturbing the scene is where Arnie uses that guy on the escalator as a human shield. Of course, the guy had to be dead already before our hero would consider such a thing, but once he's just a slab of meat, Arnie uses him to take as many as a dozen more bullets that would have otherwise hit him. I think that might have been a seminal moment in the 16-year-old me maturing to an adult-style violence, one that felt brutally realistic in a way, despite the fact that you can describe some of Recall's violence as cartoonish. The commitment to the violence is at least somewhat like what David Cronenberg does in a movie like The History of Violence (and there's body horror here too, so Cronenberg could have easily made Total Recall).

- I love the little bow Arnie gives after he grabs the briefcase from the woman who just yelled "Fuck you, you asshole!" Unnecessary but totally charming.

- I had forgotten how many Pepsi product placements there were in this movie. In this movie, it doesn't bother me. It shows the persistence of our familiar brands in a distant future, sort of like what Blade Runner does.

- In the scene between Marshall Bell (the host of Kuato) and Arnold, it made me realize I have met both men. I talked to Marshall Bell in a supermarket once, and I shook hands with Arnie when he was governor and I saw him getting out of his car while I was sitting in an outdoor brunch spot. (He looked past me and said "Hi, how are you" in a totally emotionless voice, if you're interested.)

- I really like the shot of the Venusville residents running out of air that's taken from behind the stopped fan. I'd never specifically noticed it until last night.

- I love the sneers Michael Ironside gives when he goes from one level of angry to the next level.

- Cohaagen's soldiers, most often led by Richter, have uniforms that look a lot like those worn by the federation troopers in Starship Troopers, which is of course also directed by Verhoeven. An interesting bit of commentary between the two films, almost as though Troopers might exist in the same universe, and that Cohaagen's flunkies become mainstreamed upstanding citizens in the fascistic future represented in Troopers?

- Ronny Cox is not only Trumpian in his behavior in this movie, he even looks a little bit like Trump.

Okay, enough for today.

One expected Schwarzenegger movie, one unexpected Schwarzenegger movie

On Saturday I saw two films featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger, though I really only expected to see one.

The one I expected to see was, of course, Total Recall. You know this if you read my Friday post.

The one I did not expect to see was ...

... The Long Goodbye, the 1973 Robert Altman film featuring Elliot Gould as the (then) modern-day version of Phillip Marlowe.

You may rightly ask if I'm kidding. I'm not.

You may then rightly ask, "What the hell was Arnold Schwarzenegger doing in a 39-year-old Robert Altman movie?"

The answer is, not much. He wasn't even credited. But he was in the movie, which I thought was absolutely hilarious.

If this seems impossible to you, don't forget that Schwarzenegger made his film debut in 1969, in what I am sure is a great cult classic: Hercules in New York. I've really got to see that. He was billed as Arnold Strong in Hercules, and he didn't even get to use his own voice -- his lines were dubbed because his accent was too heavy. (Arnold Strong is an especially funny stage name, because that movie also features an actor named Arnold Stang.)

The Long Goodbye was his second appearance on film, and apparently, having starred in Hercules did not warrant him even getting credited as Goon #2. He plays a thug who appears in the office of Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell), the gangster who's trying to recover a bag of cash he thinks Marlowe knows something about. Language skills weren't a problem this time, as he never opens his mouth. He does, however, reveal that body builder's physique, as the scene requires Augustine and his goons to strip down to their skivvies. (If that doesn't sound like it makes any sense, see the movie -- it's just one of the wonderfully outside-the-box moments in this terrific film.)

I laughed when I saw him. It seemed like such a disconnect. At this stage in his career, I expected Schwarzenegger to appear in marginal movies, not in classic films by the great Robert Altman. In fact, an argument could be made by certain segments of movie lovers that The Long Goodbye is the best film in which Arnold ever appeared.

I probably prefer some of Schwarzenegger's more iconic roles, as they are the ones I have grown up on and loved for years. But after finally seeing The Long Goodbye, I am convinced of its absolute brilliance. It has immediately become one of my favorite Altman films, which is saying a lot. Gould is simply perfect as Marlowe, a private dick who seems in a perpetual state of semi-confusion about the world in which he finds himself, yet nonetheless can maneuver in this world using a copious amount of street smarts and a clever sense of how to manipulate people and anticipate their next moves. A friend over the weekend described Gould as wearing a second skin of Phillip Marlowe -- you can't tell where Marlowe leaves off and Gould begins. I could go on about the world created in The Long Goodbye -- Marlowe's apartment complex alone, featuring a neighboring apartment of free-love hippies in various states of undress, might warrant an entire post. But the fact is, I've got to get to work.

And I'm pleased to say that one of those iconic Schwarzenegger roles -- Quaid/Hauser in Total Recall -- still holds up. Sure, some of the effects are dated. But with a script this tight and a performance by Schwarzenegger that has genuine sympathy and nuance -- he had come along way in those 17 years since The Long Goodbye -- I didn't care one bit about the only thing the 2012 version of this film can probably do better.

No "short wait" to revisit the original

I'll be seeing Total Recall this weekend.

The 1990 version, not the 2012 version.

Call it the remnants of an Arnold Schwarzenegger binge from earlier this year, when we watched both the second and third Terminator movies. Or call it the remnants of a Paul Verhoeven binge, which has included viewings of Starship Troopers and Robocop since the beginning of 2011.

But my wife had never seen Schwarzenegger and Verhoeven's only collaboration, so I decided to correct that. And around the beginning of August seemed like a good time to do it.

In a way, I was a bit surprised it was so readily available from Netflix. I tend to think there are certain real-world events that put a strain on Netflix' finite supply of any given title. Like, the curiosity about the original movie created by its remake.

Not the case here. Total Recall never slipped into "short wait" status even briefly, that I saw.

And that's actually what I want to talk about today -- not the predictable antipathy I feel toward Len Wiseman's version of Total Recall, opening today, but the demand on that supply for the original Total Recall.

Shouldn't there be others out there, like me, who rebel against our perpetual cycle of remakes by wholeheartedly embracing the original? And want to share the pleasures of the original with those who have not previously had, er, the pleasure?

I've wondered about this before. Like most businesses, Netflix surely structures its inventory based on expected demand. If a title is really popular -- say, Star Wars -- then Netflix probably keeps a dozen copies at any given distribution center. (I'm just throwing out numbers here -- I only have a vague idea of how large each distribution center is, and how many distribution centers there are.)  But if the movie is not very popular -- say, The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain -- then one or two copies per center would suffice.

But what happens if a real-world event comes along to throw the predictable supply-demand ratio out of whack?

This idea occurred to me first in relation to Filmspotting, my favorite film podcast, which I seem to be referencing more and more regularly on this blog. As often as they can manage to squeeze it into their overstuffed viewing schedules, the hosts of Filmspotting like to host marathons based on certain themes: a particular director (Robert Bresson was a recent subject) or a particular subsection of the cinematic world (see: Contemporary Iranian Cinema).

The idea behind these marathons is to expose their listeners to films they haven't seen, and might not be likely to see if not for this artificial creation of a viewing appointment. And Filmspotting has many, many listeners. This is again something that's hard to measure, but each week they read a list of new donors, listeners who have seen it fit to help subsidize the costs of putting on this podcast. (To my great shame, I have yet to donate.) So if you add all the new donors to all the previous donors, as well as assume that there is a much greater number of freeloaders like me, you could reasonably guess that the podcast has as many as five thousand listeners. But really, that could be on the conservative end. There could be 10,000, even 15,000. It's hard to say.

Okay, let's assume that there are 10,000. If even 1/10th of those listeners choose to participate in one of these marathons, and at least half of them are getting their movies from Netflix, that's 500 more copies of Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar than would be needed under ordinary circumstances. Okay, Filmspotting has a pretty sizable foreign audience. So let's say that only 300 more copies are needed.

Shouldn't the demand for 300 extra copies of Au Hasard Balthazar make it an extremely rare commodity?

I didn't participate in the Bresson marathon, but I did watch two of the films in the Contemporary Iranian Cinema marathon, one of which, Jahid Jahidi's Close Up, I had to acquire as a physical disc through the mail. Yet there was no lack of availability of this movie on Netflix. I got it delivered to my home in a timely manner.

How many copies of this movie might Netflix bother to house nationwide? Fifty? In an ordinary year, they might not even rent Close Up 50 times all year, to all of their customers.

There's a lot of speculation here, and only a little to do with Total Recall.

Well, I've got my copy, and either tonight or tomorrow night, my wife and I will be traveling to a version of Mars full of three-titted prostitutes. Jealous?

I hear that a new version of Miss Three Tits appears in Wiseman's remake, so you have an easy mechanism for getting your own mutant boobs this weekend. They just won't be as good as the mutant boobs I'm seeing.

Why we're so upset about remakes

Remakes are nothing new in Hollywood.

We act as though Hollywood is completely out of ideas, but the truth is, Hollywood was always out of ideas. At least, you have to reach that conclusion about Hollywood's past if you want to reach that same conclusion about Hollywood's present.

Did bloggers scream and yell when The Jazz Singer (1927) was remade 27 years later in 1954? (And then, again, 26 years later in 1980?) Were there conniptions when Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was made in 1931 and again in 1941? The length of time between an original and a remake has even been much shorter -- the classic Marx brothers comedy Duck Soup (1927) was remade only three years later as a movie called Another Fine Mess (1930). Numerous films had multiple remakes before anyone reading this post was even born. (In fact, for a handy and close-to-complete list of film remakes, check out this page on the ever useful wikipedia.)

I think there are two reasons we consider the current spate of remakes to particularly offend our sensibilities:

1) The people with the loudest opinions on the topic -- people of my generation -- are finally getting to the point where the originals of these movies were made in our lifetime. You notice we don't get nearly so upset about remakes of movies we've never heard of.

2) The movies being remade don't really seem like classics, the way we've come to define "classic."

The remake of Point Break -- which has a screenwriter attached (Kurt Wimmer), and which everyone has been fretting about lately -- seems like a perfect example of both.

For those who can't believe they're remaking Point Break, it seems like all too recently to us that the original came out. Twenty years goes by in a flash, I guess.

But more than anything, it doesn't seem like a "classic" -- it seems like a guilty pleasure, a B movie people embrace as more of a cult film than anything else.

But who says you can't remake cult films? There are numerous examples of that phenomenon, too.

There are two schools of thought on when a film should be remade:

1) When the original was so great that it simply begs to be introduced to a new generation;

2) When the original was a good idea that was slightly botched, and someone wants to get it right.

Of course, this tends to open up the potential field of remakes to almost anything.

However, the difference these days may be that there's a third reason to remake a film: to reintroduce it to the same generation. With films like the new versions of Point Break and Total Recall in particular, the smart money is on the fans of the original films flocking to the remakes in droves. That's consistent with the general Hollywood mentality to reboot, repackage and rebrand.

I think Total Recall has caught some of us by surprise in part because, like Point Break, we don't really consider it a classic. Even though Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall is a film I love, I'd be hard-pressed to define it as a "classic." It may be one of the smartest films Arnold Schwarzenegger has ever appeared in, but it's certainly a lesser film in his canon in terms of sheer name recognition. Or maybe it's just that straight remakes of Arnold Schwarzenegger films -- rather than reboots, of which there have been many (The Terminator, Predator) -- make us feel old. First Conan the Barbarian, now this.

I think the reason these films make us despair about the state of Hollywood is that they make us ask this question: "What won't they remake?" There's an implication that if you remake Point Break and Total Recall, it's because you've gotten to the bottom of the barrel and already remade the more obvious, credible choices.

But thankfully, that's not the case. Back to the Future has not been remade, and has in fact not even had a new installment since 1989. (Let's not ponder the role of Michael J. Fox's health in that particular decision.) Ditto Ghostbusters, whose last (and, modestly, only its second) entry was also in 1989. (I'm well aware that Ghostbuster 3 is moving forward, but at least it's not a remake.) And we can even go back to older movies. Citizen Kane turns 70 this year, and has yet to be remade.

And some of the movies being remade actually do seem like obvious choices. The remake of Footloose, which comes out next month, is one such movie. I guess that means it qualifies as a "classic" in the way Point Break and Total Recall do not. While the appeal of those movies was somewhat selective, simply everyone saw Footloose. And especially with Glee doing as well as it has, Footloose meets the classic definition of needing to be introduced to a generation that hungers for it. Likewise, it does not surprise me that a Dirty Dancing remake has been greenlit.

And if it's really an issue of considering it blasphemy to remake the movies in question, consider it a compliment. Nothing commits a movie to the annals of film history more than to be revisited down through the years with new versions. With any luck, it'll actually introduce fans of the new films to the films that inspired them.

So as you are bemoaning the decision to remake films from your childhood, consider where you'd be without the remakes you grew up on: Little Shop of Horrors, The Fly, Scarface, Three Men and a Baby and The Thing.

Oh yeah, stay tuned for the second Thing remake, also coming out this fall. Actually, it's a prequel, and actually, John Carpenter's 1982 The Thing may not have been an actual remake of The Thing From Another World (1951), since both films were different interpretations of John W. Campbell's novella Who Goes There?

It gets messy. So let's just take the movies on a case-by-case basis, and see how they go.

Lord knows, we'll have plenty of opportunities to do so.