The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Why Arnie’s brand is as indestructible as his biceps
After winning Mr Universe, conquering Hollywood and governing California Arnold Schwarzenegger has nothing left to prove – so what’s he doing on TV?
It was back in 1984 when Arnold Schwarzenegger first uttered that immortal phrase “I’ll be back” in The Terminator... and he’s barely stopped uttering it since. He’s chucked it into numerous movies and innumerable political speeches, flogged it on caps and T-shirts, preserved it in cement on Hollywood Boulevard and even recently, and rather glibly, scrawled the phrase in the Auschwitz Museum guestbook.
It’s a threat that Schwarzenegger has undoubtedly made good on. There’s no escaping the relentless, five-decades-and-counting global cultural onslaught of Arnie-ness.
He’s reinvented himself from the world’s greatest bodybuilder to the world’s highest-paid movie star, to the leader of (what was then) the world’s sixth largest economy.
“The beauty of ‘I’ll be back’ is that Arnie lives it,” explains marketing expert Ashton Bishop, who, with his company Step Change, has run million-dollar campaigns for brands such as Sony Pictures. Bishop has cited Schwarzenegger as one of history’s greatest strategists. “It says he will never give up. He moves forward with unbridled discipline and focus. It’s actually a Winston Churchill quote that says ‘I see only my objective and all obstacles must give way.’”
Now, aged 75, the man who might well have been US president, were he not disqualified by his Austrian origins, is back, yet again, with Fubar, his first scripted TV series. “ARNOLD. IS. BACK” shouts the Netflix trailer. “I’m back, baby,” Arnie then growls, smugly, in case we were in any doubt. But back to achieve what, exactly? What’s he got left to prove?
It’s got to be something bigger than Fubar. A fun yet expendable action-comedy, it co-stars Schwarzenegger and Monica Barbaro as a father-daughter duo who, unbeknown to each other, are both secretly living a lie as CIA agents. Artistically speaking, Fubar is a retread, as Arnie himself unashamedly attests. “People always ask me when I’m going to do another big action comedy like True Lies,” he’s stated, referring to James Cameron’s 1994 film. “Well, here it is.”
But pushing the acting envelope has never been “the Austrian oak’s” prime objective. Which is just as well given his typically wooden performance in Fubar. His next movie, Breakout, a jailbreak action thriller from the director of The Expendables 4, promises to leave the Arnie mould similarly unbroken. Possibly he just makes this stuff for fun, or to ensure his swansong movie isn’t a flop like his last Terminator film, Dark Fate, proved, or to keep his ex-wife in alimony.
Because what drives this orangetanned, Nietzschean Übermensch is something deeper.
Iron-clad discipline was drilled into Arnie by his father, a violent, alcoholic, former Nazi. “We had to earn our breakfast by doing situps,” he recounts in his candid 2012 autobiography Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story. And in his rural Austrian village, hard daily labour was a given. “My earliest memories are of my mother washing clothes and my father shovelling coal.” (Every morning Schwarzenegger still starts the day by shovelling up the poop left by Lulu, his miniature donkey, and Whiskey, his miniature horse.)
His mind was similarly formed by repetition. Every Sunday, Arnie and his brother had to write a report at least 10 pages long on a family outing. They were sent back covered in red ink: “If we had spelled a word wrong we had to copy it 50 times over.”
Most children would have buckled, but Schwarzenegger Jr used
this battering to forge a will to power. Even pleasure. “The most satisfying feeling you can get in a gym is ‘the Pump’,” a young Arnie cheekily declares in 1977 body building documentary Pumping Iron. “Your muscles get a really tight feeling like your skin is going to explode. It feels fantastic. It’s as satisfying to me as c------, you know?” No wonder he never misses a day in the gym.
He trained obsessively and won Mr Universe four times, but to keep up the burn, Schwarzenegger has had to keep raising the bar to new heights. “I want to do the things that everyone says are impossible,” he declares in Arnold, his inevitable upcoming Netflix documentary (out on June 7).
After Mr Universe came his mission to become, in every sense, the world’s biggest movie star. “Everyone said it can’t be done,” Schwarzenegger said in a 2009 commencement speech at the University of Southern California. “They said ‘Look at your body. You have this huge monstrous body, overly developed. That doesn’t fit into the movies. Agents said: no one ever became a star with an accent like that. And imagine Arnold Schwarzenschnitzel, or whatever your name is, on a billboard.’’’
But Arnie stuck to his guns and, much like The Terminator, blasted any naysayers in his path by operating with machine-like efficiency. Those monstrous muscles got him cast as Conan the Barbarian, which led to The Terminator. And, as he sees it, “I’ll be back” became “one of the most famous lines in movie history, all because of my crazy accent”.
“What makes brands famous is not differentiation, it’s distinctiveness,” explains Bishop. “It’s: ‘Can we stand out in the crowd?’”
Bishop attributes Arnie’s “outlandish” success to his enduring “brand code”. What’s enabled him to keep coming back is that “he is still being true to that core of strength of body, strength of mind, strength of voice”. However, Bishop believes that “his secret weapon was always the ability to look inside for introspection”.
Introspection? Arnie? Stay with us here. True, Schwarzenegger may not sit around contemplating his emotional belly button. He tried therapy once, in his sixties, and called it “the biggest mistake” he’s ever made. Yet he’s a firm believer in following his gut instinct. So where’s it taking him?
Fubar’s tagline might be “Heroes don’t retire. They reload” but Schwarzenegger has seemed adrift since 2011, when he reached his term limit as the Republican Governor of California and separated from his wife, journalist Maria Shriver, who went on to divorce him following revelations he’d had a secret love child by their housekeeper.
Arnie returned to acting, but recently signs are that he’s finally found a new vision. Yes, the “governator” has reinvented himself as… the “guru”. On his 75th birthday last July he published his “Seven Unreasonable Birthday Goals”. “Realize the tremendous power you hold inside of you, no matter who you are. Then use your power to make the world a better place” he wrote as a sign-off.
Goal number four is “Terminate Pollution”, so that should keep him busy enough. But the key one is goal two: “Be Useful”. Also the title of his new self-help book (published this October), it’s a motto he’s cleaved to all his life. “My dad always said ‘Be useful, Arnold’. When I was young, I listened, but it didn’t mean as much as it means now. Seventyfive years of life has taught me that it means everything.”
“If we look at the human drivers, most of us are looking for variety, certainty, significance and connection, and you have to admit Schwarzenegger’s scoreboard is amazing,” marvels Bishop. “If we get beyond that we look for personal growth and contribution. I think Arnie’s getting to that stage of his life.”
Which means that although “I’ll be back” is his catchphrase, Schwarzenegger is not looking in that direction.
“Because you can’t hold on to the past,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post. “What you can hold on to, though, is your usefulness. Your purpose.” And to find your life purpose simply sign up to his newsletter called, wait for it, The Daily Pump. “Do it!” Arnie barks.
He’s still counting those reps, then, but bicep curls and squats have been replaced by chasing those “likes” and “subscribers”. The Daily Pump launched in January and already has 400,000 sign-ups. Arnie has stayed the same, yet he’s stayed relevant. He’s reinvented himself for our anxiety-riddled age. Less “I’ll be back” than “I’m giving back”. Doesn’t quite have the same ring though, does it?
For our anxietyriddled age, he’s less ‘I’ll be back’ than ‘I’m giving back’