The Terminator in Winter

There’s a wave of interest in the Hollywood career of Arnold Schwarzenegger. His political career was more important

JUDGE. Prosecutor, present your case against one Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

PROSECUTOR. He’s a Hollywood vulgarian. He started the bodybuilding craze, which is dangerous, unhealthy and causes boys to feel inadequate in the same way Barbie causes girls to feel inadequate. He’s spent his entire adulthood quite literally admiring himself in the mirror. He cheated on Maria and since is estranged from the best person who ever entered his life. He ruined his marriage and his children don’t get along, yet he makes movies extolling fatherhood. He claims to support the military and the police, yet his flicks rejoice in slow-motion closeups of soldiers and LAPD being gunned down. And his new series FUBAR is drivel.

JUDGE. Well, $100 million doesn’t buy what it used to. Defense counsel, present your case.

DEFENSE LAWYER. His movies are preposterous but entertaining – much of what Hollywood produces is preposterous but not entertaining. He didn’t invent bodybuilding, just made it popular, and the public is to blame for what becomes popular. He did a good job as governor of California. He shows that a conservative can wake up about gay rights and environmental protection. When the Ukraine War began he sent a broadminded message to his many fans in Russia, where he is admired for playing a Soviet hero in his 1988 Red Heat.

JUDGE. We will begin calling witnesses.

DEFENSE LAWYER. One more thing, Your Honor. Donald Trump hates him.

JUDGE. (Bangs gavel.) Case closed. The people find for Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Schwarzenegger is on a roll with a Netflix action series, a Netflix in-depth documentary, even being taken seriously by The Atlantic. Attention has focused on Schwarzenegger’s muscles, movies and behavior regarding women.

Around the time he was elected governor, Schwarzenegger was nicknamed by Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez the “Gropenfuhrer,” an invented term similar to a German word that simply means “leader of a group” – but the connotation was obvious. Garry Trudeau began using this joke in Doonesbury. At a time newspaper cartoons were roughly what TikTok videos are now, the governor of the nation’s largest state was being called a Nazi in the funny pages.

In the Netflix documentary, Schwarzenegger admits to, and apologizes for, groping women. Carla Hall of the Los Angeles Times recounts how she first reported the story – and how it took Arnold 20 years to own up.

His is among the most-photographed miens of history, and the progression from youth to current age 75 is fascinating visually. (I lack the copyright license to show the best ones, but google “Schwarzenegger face” and you’ll see plenty.) In a moment All Predictions Wrong will name his most ridiculous film, and with Schwarzenegger that’s a high bar.

Overlooked is his much-noticed life is his tenure in Sacramento. His achievements were both considerable and nonpartisan, no small feats for any governor but especially in the crazed politics of a state in perpetual upheaval whose economy is larger than all but a few nations.

When he ran for governor in 2003, Schwarzenegger was widely derided as engaged in a vanity campaign, and indeed things might have begun this way. (He could not stand for president because he was born in Austria.) Winning an off-cycle recall election against the pitiable Gray Davis, Schwarzenegger became serious about the job and rolled up his sleeves.

What he did right: created a bipartisan independent commission to prevent gerrymandering, achieved some reductions in California state spending, avoided a much-predicted deficit meltdown, avoided a repetition of the 2000-2001 rolling blackouts that plagued the state, opposed a border wall with Mexico, enacted a demonstration project in greenhouse gas control by carbon trading, and despite his macho image, in 2006 called for withdrawal of the American military from Iraq.

Drawing congressional district lines is a source of bitterness and gridlock throughout the House of Representatives and in most state legislatures. Your writer thinks the only sure solution is a Constitutional amendment to make House seats at-large like Senate seats.

Yes this would shift power from the countryside toward cities; cities are now the engines of American society. In any event, Schwarzenegger did what he could about the problem.

That the largest state enacted an answer to gerrymandering hasn’t landed in the national consciousness like it might because, California voters being about 80 percent Democratic, no matter how the districts are drawn most will go to the donkey side. (Forty of California’s 52 House seats are held by Democrats.) But Schwarzenegger had shown it is not, as some claim, impossible to fight gerrymandering. Let’s hope the fight goes on.

His efforts against the state deficit involved a months-long standoff with the state legislature that built up to Schwarzenegger calling Sacramento opponents “girlie men,” which meant something different then. Gavin Newsom just called Ron DeSantis a “small pathetic man,” so perhaps insult humor is required of California governors.

Schwarzenegger’s opposition to a closed border put him well to the left of the national political establishment of the time, though, in good company with Ronald Reagan, who also opposed border walls. And through the whole sad saga of American involvement in Iraq, it’s interesting to note Arnold Schwarzenegger called for withdrawal before Barack Obama did.

What he did wrong as governor: vetoed a bill legalizing same-sex marriage, though, like Obama, later changed his position and endorsed the concept. Called a special election in attempt to get voters to approve ideas he could not move through the legislature (California has the country’s most liberal popular-referendum rules). All the proposals were rejected and the special-election money wasted. Endorsed a universal health care initiative that was poorly thought through, similar to Hillary Clinton’s poorly thought through health care initiative of 1993. Called a second special election in which once again his proposals failed with voters.

Along the way Schwarzenegger has developed good political instincts. Lately he has been saying the term “climate change” should be dropped, it’s vague and sounds too much like complaining about the weather. Schwarzenegger proposes instead that the problem be called air pollution, since everyone understands that pollution is bad.

All told his record is superior to that of many two-term governors who entered office as professional politicians. If nothing else he made plain to voters that the professional political system can benefit from outsiders. Of course that helped set the stage for Donald Trump a few years after Schwarzenegger left office in 2011.

After leaving office Schwarzenegger returned to moviemaking, which leads us to….

Which Arnold Flick Is Most Ridiculous?

His latest effort, FUBAR, a Netflix 8-epdisode series that is a movie padded with filler, has a preposterous premise. In it a father and daughter are both top CIA undercover case officers investigating the same drug lord but neither of them knows the other works for the CIA. Off the deep end even by the notoriously low standards of Hollywood, it’s a zany wacky sitcom premise plus constant bloodshed.

There are multiple scenes in which the 75-year-old Schwarzenegger needs mere seconds to kill half a dozen huge heavily armed thugs. In the climactic battle his daughter, played by Monica Barbaro, kills a dozen heavily armed thugs with perfect shots that cause instantaneous death while hundreds of rounds fired at her at close range all miss. So, fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Schwarzenegger did movies that involve space travel, time travel, federal agents armed with ray guns, and a confrontation with Satan. (End of Days.)

The six-flick Terminator franchise requires suspension of disbelief to accept time travel, which seems all but impossible on a physical-law basis. But then some romcoms are all but impossible on a physical-law basis, so…

What’s absurd about the Terminator flicks goes beyond time-travel and shape-shifting liquid-metal cyborgs. Consider the premise of the final one, Dark Fate -- please tell us it’s really the final Terminator movie!

In Dark Fate the evil future AI that wanted to destroy humanity, Skynet, has been prevented from coming into existence by the noble Sarah Connor. Which means Skynet never happened, and so the first five movies never happened.

But another evil future AI has risen up and sends backward in time the same killbots built by Skynet, which the new AI somehow knows about though from its perspective Skynet never existed, and gives them the same name Skynet did.

Listen as comedian Ryan George of the hysterical Pitch Meeting tries to explain the Dark Fate premise:

Anyway that’s not what is most preposterous about the Terminator franchise. This is: If you assume time travel, the evil future AI would already know its attempts to manipulate the present day failed, since, to the AI, the present day is the past. The future would already know what happens in the present.

But then the only rational response to time travel movies is, “Bartender, another round.”

So now the most ridiculous Arnold Schwarzenegger movie: Last Stand, 2013.

In this flick there are no starcruisers, no supernatural specters, no secret underground government laboratories. Schwarzenegger plays the aging sheriff of a small Arizona town along the Mexican border near Yuma. 

Hollywood’s Golden Age produced many movies about square-jawed Arizona sheriffs, because the Grand Canyon State was the last gasp of the Wild West – final contiguous state admitted to the union, 1912.

In Last Stand, a drug cartel boss escapes from FBI custody in an extremely improbable sequence of events that involves multiple law-enforcement officers gunned down and a small army of super-competent ruthless bad guys knowing things in advance they couldn’t possibly have known, like exactly where the Arizona State Police would place a roadblock.

The super-competent bad guys supply the cartel boss with a modified Corvette Z06 that has a 1,000 horsepower engine. He wants to drive from Las Vegas into Mexico, where corrupt federales will protect him. The only road he can use to enter Mexico – the sole road on the entire 372-mile Arizona-Mexico border -- passes down the main street of Arnold’s sleepy little town.

This town appears to exist in 1912 except for cell phones. Against overwhelming firepower Schwarzenegger is assisted only by a female rookie deputy, a Mexican (played by Luis Guzmán, who was born in Puerto Rico) and the town drunk – an assembly reminiscent of the Golden Age classic Rio Bravo.   

A dozen mercenaries show up to help the drug lord blast his way through the town. No FBI or Arizona police come – Arnold’s location is depicted as many, many hours from the nearest city, while apparently helicopters do not work in Arizona.

Schwarzenegger, of course, systematically kills the mercenaries. The best part is that after Arnold kills the mercenaries the drug lord slips by and dashes toward the border. Seriously this is the only place on the 372-mile Arizona-Mexico border the cartel boss can go through? Arnold jumps into another specially souped-up car that just happens to be parked right there in the one-stoplight town and gives chase.

The two vehicles end up in a cornfield. Arnold and the bad guy are driving around in tall corn as if the Mexican border were in Iowa. The southwest corner of Arizona is known for winter lettuce, but not for corn.

Every other scene in the movie occurs on desolate, haunting desertscapes that suggest a Gary Cooper movie. Suddenly the cars roar into a vast field of maize where the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye.

The two souped-up cars collide and the bad guy gets away on foot. He begins to walk across the bridge over an arroyo that his super-competent henchmen built for him (we saw it being built) for this exact moment which they somehow knew would happen.

Who is on the opposite side of the bridge blocking his path? Arnold.

HOW DID HE GET THERE?

Last Stand is on Netflix as part of the wave of interest in Schwarzenegger. Invent a draining game and watch it.

Bonus: My Catty Comment. Studios always called Schwarzenegger 6-2. It’s important to Hollywood mythos for leading men to be tall. How Tom Cruise fudged this is the greatest special-effects job in Tinseltown annals.

In 2009 Schwarzenegger was in the Washington area for Obama’s first inauguration. I ran into him at the Starbucks in Potomac, Maryland, a horsey-set place that residents humble-brag by calling “The Village.” I am an even six foot. Standing next to him, I was two inches taller than Schwarzenegger.

Bonus Bonus: He didn’t know me from Adam, but when I struck up a conversation he was friendly and approachable.

Arnold had a gigantic SUV with two bodyguards waiting at the curb. Since he’d been warning people against greenhouse gases – among the first Republicans to care about this issue – I told him he should be in a high-MPG car. He justified it as security precaution, which at the time (2009) I didn’t buy but now do. The point is he wasn’t defensive, was willing to talk.

I’d noticed the SUV was idling the whole 20 minute Schwarzenegger drank his coffee and chatted with local weirdos. I told him idling losses are a leading source of petroleum waste, so the bodyguards should twist the key to OFF. He responded that they needed the engine warm in case he had to get out fast. I told him modern-computer controlled ignition systems require only an instant to warm up. He responded, “Yeah? I will look into that.”

Most celebrities are not easy to talk to, and don’t care about the opinions of those who aren’t wealthy. This was just one conversation at a Starbucks, but it impressed me that Schwarzenegger was open to being criticized by a total stranger.