Arnold hits the halls of academe
Standing before a roomful of fellow PhDs, Louise Krasneiwicz wears an untucked beach shirt -- a multihued collage of musclemen and “championship” banners. Perched on a chair near her podium is a poster from Flex magazine featuring a bare-chested Arnold Schwarzenegger from his bodybuilding days.
“We think that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s extensive influence and remarkable presence in late 20th century American culture has gone beyond inspiration, hero worship and entertainment,” she tells the captive audience at the School of American Research here, where she is a research associate.
Many of the social scientists take notes.
Schwarzenegger has been many things in his life: immigrant, weightlifter, action movie star and now gubernatorial candidate. A less known role has been academic study subject.
For the last two decades, Krasneiwicz, a cultural anthropologist, and her intellectual partner, Michael Blitz, the tenured chair of “thematic studies” at John Jay College in New York, have examined his role in popular culture. To the bewilderment of some peers, they have collected hundreds of articles and advertisements with references to Schwarzenegger, attended the bodybuilding competition he sponsors, taped the sounds inside his restaurant bathroom, watched his 30-plus movies dozens of times -- including rare finds like the 1980 TV drama “The Jayne Mansfield Story,” co-starring Loni Anderson. (Arnold played Mickey Hargitay.)
It has been a pursuit so consuming that they regularly dream about their subject -- and have posted more than 150 of those dreams, ranging from the bizarre to the erotic, on their Web site (Google search: “dreaming arnold”).
Avowed postmodernists, the researchers say the point of their collection is not to quantify Schwarzenegger’s influence as a cultural icon -- though they do contend that his importance far exceeds that of any other living celebrity -- but to arrive at some vision of America.
“We’re not really interested in studying him as a person but as a reference, a point in our culture,” Krasneiwicz says.
She has many examples. An issue of Lingua Franca includes an article called “Terminating Analysis,” a profile of the “Schwarzenegger of Freud-bashers.” An automobile advertisement declares that “The Dodge Viper is the Arnold Schwarzenegger of sports cars.” A Time magazine piece on pectoral implants proclaims the “Schwarzeneggerization of society.” A Los Angeles Times piece on HIV research refers to the “Arnold Schwarzeneggers of science.”
In other words, the references go far beyond weightlifting or Hollywood. Schwarzenegger has become “a prototype of power, influence, connection, of getting things done,” Krasneiwicz says.
She and Blitz were fellow doctoral students at the State University of New York at Albany in the mid-1980s, the same era that “Hasta la vista, baby” joined the American lexicon. Schwarzenegger became a bridge between their disciplines (anthropology and English), the topic of a long-running conversation and the cement of their friendship.
By 1990, Krasneiwicz had moved to UCLA and Blitz to John Jay College, and their interest in Schwarzenegger had become a mild obsession.
Los Angeles, of course, was the ideal place to observe the man himself. Krasneiwicz often spotted him -- pulling into traffic in his Hummer; in a neighborhood pumpkin patch with his wife, Maria Shriver, and their children; at a Santa Monica shopping mall shooting a scene for “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.”
On that occasion, she managed to snap several shots of Schwarzenegger before security guards ordered her to leave.
“It was a great chance to watch people watching Arnold,” she says.
Nobody, though, could keep her out of the bathroom at Schatzi on Main, the Santa Monica restaurant Schwarzenegger once ran. She recorded the sound that was piped into the restroom -- a taped lesson in German, the actor’s native tongue.
The star’s domain, of course, extends far beyond California. In 1991, Krasneiwicz and Blitz flew to Columbus, Ohio, for the “Third Annual Arnold Schwarzenegger Classic,” a bodybuilding competition. There they employed the classic anthropological technique of “participant observation,” paying $50 each to join a long line of fans waiting for Polaroid photographs with Schwarzenegger.
Watching the people swarm around Schwarzenegger, they realized that he was more than a celebrity. One woman who had been injured in a car accident thanked him for her recovery.
“Everybody had something to say about their attraction to Arnold,” says Blitz. “A lot of people spoke about him very familiarly even though they never met him.”
Their Arnold sensors on alert, the academic pair kept hearing more Arnold references. In a grocery store, Krasneiwicz overheard a man advocating a halt to illegal immigration by building a massive fence -- “one that even Arnold Schwarzenegger could not climb on a good day.”
After her son was born in 1995, Krasneiwicz started noticing references in children’s videos. In one featuring construction equipment, the talking machines have Schwarzenegger accents.
On a sleeper train to Pittsburgh, when Blitz assisted a frail old man struggling to set up his bed, the man complimented him: “You must be related to that Schwarzenegger fellow.”
“He’s like mold that grows everywhere,” says Blitz.
The actor as metaphor
It would be easy to dismiss the academic duo as mere Schwarzenegger fanatics. After all, there are dozens of fan Web sites devoted to him. But have those fans published book chapters titled “The Replicator: Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Great Meme-Machine”? Or presented a digital video called “The Ur’borg: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Inhabitants of Post-Humanity” at a meeting of the American Anthropological Association?
Along the way they have rankled some fellow academics, and not only because they have broken tradition at formal conferences by handing out barbells or piping Schwarzenegger sound bites into the background.
Detractors of their work wonder what sets Schwarzenegger apart from other celebrities created and packaged by the movie, music or sports industries. “I would have liked to see more attention paid to the political economy of the images of Arnold,” says Catherine Cocks, a historian present at Krasnei- wicz’s New Mexico talk. “Why are they so common? Who is putting them out there? What is the role of Hollywood?”
O.J. Simpson, Michael Jordan and Madonna are among many celebrities who rank ahead of Schwarzenegger in cultural weight, according to Douglas Kellner, a UCLA professor who writes about media and cultural studies and has attended a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” conference in Australia.
And while he concedes that Schwarzenegger has had a peculiar longevity in pop culture, he says, “Clint Eastwood is a much more significant figure than Arnold. And he’s made some really good films. Academically I’ve seen some really good books on Clint Eastwood. I don’t know of any books on Schwarzenegger.”
Krasneiwicz and Blitz say they have one in the works. Admirers defend the work as a serious academic pursuit.
“If I went to Russia and I were doing research in a village and there was a local person who was like Arnold, an immigrant who married into one of the most influential families in Russia and who was a megastar in the country, I would have to find out about this person,” says Liesl Gambold Miller, an anthropologist and former student of Krasneiwicz.
In any case, Schwarzeneggerology has long drawn guilty intrigue: “Each time I’ve had a job interview there is a reticent interest in Schwarzenegger,” Blitz says. “You get all these eggheads together. They want to know about your scholarship. But what they really want to know about is Schwarzenegger.”
From opposite coasts, Krasneiwicz and Blitz have traded thoughts online, making for some odd academic exchanges:
“Here’s what I remember of the Arnold dream last night: I stabbed him in the belly with a pie spatula. That is all,” she wrote on Sept. 26, 1996.
He responded the next day: “I heard some radio-head commentator say, about Yeltsin, ‘Y’know, he’s not exactly the Arnold Schwarzenegger of world leaders.’ ”
Both Krasneiwicz and Blitz have a wide range of interests and publications. But the California recall election has given sudden relevance to their studies of Schwarzenegger after a few years of relative quiet. When Schwarzenegger announced on television his decision to run, Krasneiwicz captured the moment on her VCR. Then she celebrated: “Thank you, Arnold. You just provided me with material for the next 20 years.”
On the rise are calls from reporters, usually dismayed that Krasneiwicz has only cultural theory to offer, and no dirt.
Arnold “seems to embody the idea that you can always get from point A to point B to point C with toughness, omnipresence, constant marketing, rhetoric that sticks in your mouth, physical appearance,” says Blitz.
That specter of possibility and simplicity, the academics believe, is his greatest asset in the recall campaign.
It could help explain why Schwarzenegger has agreed to only one debate (for which he was given the questions in advance) and has granted few interviews to political journalists. To stake out a position on an issue is to restrict our sense of his possibility -- and maybe hurt his chances in the race to replace the tenacious Gov. Gray Davis, who himself has not escaped comparison with Schwarzenegger’s most famous character.
In 1997, The Times asked Cruz Bustamante, now the leading Democratic candidate in the recall race, about Davis’ gubernatorial prospects.
The response? “He’s a machine. He is difficult to stop.... You blow him up and he just keeps on going. Strip him of all his flesh and he keeps coming.”
In other words, said Bustamante, “He’s like the Terminator.”
