NOT SLOWING DOWN
Early morning in late July, Arnold Schwarzenegger climbs onto a bicycle with fat tyres and chrome trim and sets out on a four kilometre ride from Santa Monica to Venice, California. The rest of his crew for the day – me; his chief of staff, Daniel Ketchell; his old friend Dieter Rauter; and a new friend, actor Gabriel Luna, who stars with Schwarzenegger in Terminator: Dark Fate – are supposed to ride alongside him, but within a few minutes that plan has evaporated, mostly because nobody else in the group rides as aggressively as Arnold does.
He blows through red lights and stop signs with an ambulance driver’s assertiveness. At one point he blazes right past a cop car, helmetless and unconcerned. Eventually he whips around a corner and we lose sight of him entirely – dusted by a man who will be 72 in five days. He doesn’t even appear to be pedaling that hard; he just will not slow down.
The first Terminator movie was released 35 years ago this October. A string of bodybuilding championships and a glowering, oiled-up turn in Conan the Barbarian had already made Schwarzenegger a sensation. But The Terminator, the second feature by a young director named James Cameron, made him an icon. It was cheap and eerie and relentless and its story – presciently paranoid sci-fi that looks past the nuclear threat to the dawn of malignant AI – pulled from Arnold the most unforgettably unemotive performance through which an actor has ever forged an emotional connection with the public. It’s the most important Schwarzenegger movie because it’s the beginning of both the legend and the joke of Arnold, of both Arnold and Ahhhhhnuld.
It’s the reason every man in the English-speaking world believes he can do an Arnold impression. It launched a million jokes and inspired an army of pop-culture figures, from Hans and Franz to Rainier Wolfcastle, who were themselves jokes about Ahhhhhnuld. One key to Schwarzenegger’s success is that he never seemed to mind being a punchline to people; he understood it as another way he could live in their heads. So let them make jokes.
Arnold’s onscreen introduction plays like a prophecy: the T-800 materialises out of nowhere, buck naked and surveys the lights of Hollywood from the top deck of Griffith Observatory, as if preparing to crush all resistance, possibly with his glutes. Within 20 years, Schwarzenegger was the governor of California, after unseating Democratic incumbent Gray Davis in a recall election whose also-rans included Gary Coleman, Arianna Huffington and Larry Flynt. He was nicknamed “the Governator”, but the important part was that he was the governor of California. It was the most improbable case in American history of a tide of voter resentment sweeping a celebrity without political experience into public office
