Pumping Iron

 

Pumping Iron is the documentary that made Schwarzenegger famous and it’s possible to trace two emergent trajectories through Stay Hungry and Pumping Iron, one of which leads to the soft capital of the boomers, through Microsoft and Google and hipster entrepreneurs and the other, through Pumping Iron, which presents Schwarzenegger as a ruthless Nietzschean ubermensh who will stop at nothing to win and whose confidence borders on the pathological. He is not afraid of throwing up or passing out in the gym, he will psych out his rivals mercilessly and is so remorselessly focused that he has no time for any distractions. In the documentary on the making of Pumping Iron, the filmmakers try to get Schwarzenneger to appear warmer on camera, to talk about his doubts and fears, but they fail: he simply doesn’t have any. He is machine-like and ultra-focused, the only thing that matters is being number one. Schwarzenegger is a Randian ideal made flesh, a veritable Atlas, a true believer in American Individualism and Exceptionalism with no loyalty to anything except his own titanic self-surpassing, whose surpassing narcissism means that getting a bicep pump from barbell curls is, infamously, better than “coming with a woman”.

 

 

 

 

 

The obsessives’ fantasy that they are “self-made” is literalized in bodybuilding and feeds into the emerging new Corporate ideology channelled by motivational speakers, a new wave of “chaotic” management gurus and undoubtedly the dizzying effects of steroids, cocaine and boosted testosterone that culminates in the ludicrous and sinister figure of Enron CEO Jeff Skilling with his absurd posturing machismo and delusional self-belief. Self-belief is the exhortation of the Eighties, it is talismanic. If you just believe in yourself and you can achieve anything, you can, through relentlessly banishing doubt, self-surpass. The untermensch are locked in the “reality based community”, whereas the Randian Prometheus creates his own world, he is boundless and unbound.

 

 

There is a revealing series of outtakes from Pumping Iron featured in the Making of documentary. In order to generate more contrast and narrative tension, the filmmakers recruited the actor Bud Cort, who comes to the gym to work out alongside the body builders preparing for Mr Universe. Cort’s heyday was in the early seventies with Robert Altman’s MASH and Brewster McCloud and Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude. In a sense Cort is the archetypal early Seventies outsider geek, a smart but unworldly, over-idealistic man-child with sticks for arms and a pigeon chest, a prototype for the interminable parade of precocious Indy-geeks, too steeped in reflexive irony to even take their own alienation seriously. In the gym sequences in Pumping Iron Cort plays up his physical debility and bug-eyed amazement at the bodybuilders' strength and size. The message is clear: Cort, a remnant of the Sixties, is pathetic, whilst Schwarzenegger, the film's central concern, is a titan.

 

 

Schwarzenegger is one of the “mass monsters” who came to dominate body building in the Seventies, and this is where the fantasy that a superhuman power or capacity for transformation kicks in. The secret to Schwarzenegger’s size is of course steroid use, but this is still unacknowledged in the early Seventies and becomes a secret that must be hidden throughout all the world-record smashing and sporting achievements of the Eighties.