Schwarzenegger atop the fifth largest economy in the world was greeted by members of the cultural elite as if they were staring a cultural apocalypse right in the pumped-up face. Political competence and ideological substance, it was widely argued, had suddenly been usurped by bulging biceps, a Hollywood fortune and a mythic biography etched by screenwriters.
For many on the left, the ascendancy of Arnold meant reality television run amok; Hollywood given too much power; artifice allowed to triumph over tough realities. For many on the right, here was a card-carrying member of the Left Coast branch of Sodom and Gomorrah trying to steal the thunder of true conservatism. From either pole, it looked suddenly like a cultural hell on earth, with Schwarzenegger the Actor cast as a groping Satan.
Yet there’s evidence that the governor-elect of California deftly overcame one of America’s oldest moral prejudices — that against entertainment figures in general and actors in particular. And — even more intriguingly — some cultural thinkers are beginning to explore the notion that entertainment celebrityhood not only is one of the few sure ways to get elected these days, but it might actually be a workable base (maybe even the only workable base) upon which to govern effectively. Especially if one is governing the state of California, which churns out the world’s most persistent and pervasive narratives — movies and television programs.
The message may be sinking in to professional politicians: Thursday’s
meeting between President Bush and Schwarzenegger, according to news reports, appeared to be staged in a way that the actor would not upstage the president.
But during the election, the first take for Schwarzenegger meant attacking disdain for the actor. For while people profess adoration for thespians, many say distrust lies just below the surface.
“We are deeply prejudiced against actors,” says Gil Troy, a professor of history at McGill University in Montreal who’s currently at work on a new cultural history of Ronald Reagan’s America. “Even though lawyers don’t usually know how to manage multimillion dollar state budgets any more than actors do, we still have it in our heads that certain professions are more legitimate than others in government.”
Fred Thompson, a former U.S. senator from Tennessee who joined the cast of television’s “Law and Order” after a number of movie roles, puts it this way: “People think of acting as a frivolous endeavor. One of my pet peeves is the perception that anyone who is not a professional politician lacks the right experience.”
“People are snobbish against performers becoming politicians because they assume they don’t know anything,” says Darrell West, director of the Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University and the author of a recent book called “Celebrity Politics.” “Yet it’s not like career politicians have done such a great job of running the country.”
Actors, of course, have struggled long and hard against the sense that they are neither smart nor respectable. In Moliere’s day, thespians weren’t allowed to be buried on church property. In the 19th Century, says Leigh Woods of the University of Michigan, actors were “subject to bourgeois attacks because they worked at night and hung around in bars.” But the hatred of actors, many arts historians think, went beyond lifestyle issues. In many ways, it was a consequence of widespread confusion between the performers themselves and the kinds of characters they played.
“The intellectual history of the anti-actor prejudice revolves around fear: actors were seen as shape-shifters,” says Janelle Reinelt, a cultural critic and historian who teaches at the University of California, Irvine. “It was felt there is no solid, integrated self behind the image. That’s why the church always was uncomfortable with actors. Extrapolated from the image of the shape-shifter was the fear that the person had no center or moral integrity.”
He may have come to prominence as a bodybuilder, but the belief that Schwarzenegger is, in person, merely a version of his fictional movie heroes is patently absurd. And yet it persists in most of the media coverage of his ascendancy. The temptation to equate his character work in “Predator” or “The Terminator” with his personal political identity is too much to resist.
“An audio-animatronic action figure,” harrumphed Frank Rich in The New York Times, describing the new governor’s campaign as being “as hollow inside as a movie set’s facade.” “Elvis had to die to reach the next level of fame,” kvetched Sean Mitchell in the Los Angeles Times, “but Arnold Schwarzenegger, it seems, can get there by aiming his Hummer up the I-5 and hitting the accelerator.” Even Variety had qualms about Ah-nold, one of Hollywood’s own: Elizabeth Guider suggested in its pages that Schwarzenegger actually owed his victory to “American Idol,” in which pseudo-stars are invented overnight, bucking the rules of the arts and entertainment establishment with its pesky habit of making newcomers actually pay some dues.
Then again, Schwarzenegger certainly made few efforts to stop this narrative. He refused most debates and avoided hard questions. To widespread disdain, Schwarzenegger made his personal sale not through the standard avenues of political discourse, but through cozy, entertaining relationships with the sycophantic Jay Leno, who abandoned any semblance of neutrality. The traditional political biography — culled from the candidate’s actual life — had been replaced by a fictional, action-hero narrative recalled in Technicolor by a public obsessed with snagging a melodrama hero and then asking him to solve all the messy, oft-tragic dilemmas of actual life.
Schwarzenegger never denied that he had behaved offensively in the past toward women. And he even named his campaign buses after his movies: The press rode on “Predator 1,” “Predator 2” and “Total Recall,” while Schwarzenegger cruised along in “The Running Man.”
Love of a good story
Yet therein lay Schwarzenegger’s main and brilliantly successful defense against the anti-actor prejudice. He understood that while America long has disliked those who deliver them, it still loves and needs stories. Indeed, in a world where media narratives have grown ever more important, Schwarzenegger understood what had to be done.
He grabbed control of the narrative that starred himself, shaping it as he liked. And he avoided almost every media situation in which someone else was writing the script.
Certainly Schwarzenegger was not the first politician to discover the power of mythic storytelling — nor the first politician to shape media coverage so it relied on symbol more than substance. But like Reagan, he had a built-in advantage. Traditional politicians spend their youths in the prosaic fields of public policy and industry; they learn how to act only later in life.
“Think about George Bush’s great moment flying in as Mr. Top Gun,” said Troy, the McGill professor. “The administration was intentionally blurring the line between the president and Tom Cruise. And when the Democrats engineered that scene at the 2000 convention with Bill Clinton walking down the hallway, they intentionally were blurring the line between Clinton and a rock star backstage at a concert.”
But many times, this stuff goes badly wrong, as when Michael Dukakis stepped inside a tank and looked like a miscast fool. Many would say that Bush went too far last summer with his self-conscious, action-hero swagger aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. He didn’t inhabit that part — mainly because he didn’t look sufficiently comfortable.
But in the case of Schwarzenegger and Reagan, capable actors both, no faux entertainment iconography had to be invented after the fact. Both men already were experienced, competent performers before a camera. And thus, Troy argues, “Reagan could effortlessly play the Marlboro Man while he painted Jimmy Carter as Alan Alda — a wimpy 1970s male.” Like Schwarzenegger many years later, the Great Communicator never had to break a sweat.
Winning and good government are, clearly, not the same thing. And many of Schwarzenegger’s detractors predict his mythic identity will deconstruct when faced with the prosaic demands of government. Jesse Ventura, the former celebrity governor of Minnesota, is Exhibit One in that regard. Yet people said much the same about Reagan (unlike Ventura, a skilled actor). In Reagan’s case, the collision between artifice and reality never happened.
“Whether or not you agreed with his politics, there was no question that Reagan transformed government,” says West of Brown University. “He redirected the course of the Cold War and of U.S. domestic policy.”
And how again did an actor manage that?
Necessary skills
“Celebrities have many of the skills that make for successful politicians,” argues West. “They know how to communicate with ordinary people. They tend to be strong leaders. And their very celebrity gives them more power to break logjams than someone who has been in government for 20 years.”
In other words, West is saying that celebrities can simply do more because they are famous. John McCain, a famous senator, can stand up to his party and survive. Much of what Clint Eastwood achieved as mayor of Carmel, Calif., flowed not from policy acts but from his prior fame. In California, who’s going to dare to mess with Ah-nold?
“Name recognition costs so much to achieve today,” says Thompson. “That’s why many people have a hard time naming any of the Democratic candidates.”
One other quality that celebrities have in abundance is what Northwestern University professor of acting David Downs calls “knowability.” Whereas Gray Davis, saddled with a monochromatic moniker and a pallid personality, appeared distant and, in the minds of some voters, inhuman, Schwarzenegger already was universally known by his robust first name. Hillary Rodham Clinton, by most accounts a highly effective U.S. senator, has exploited the same quality of intimate knowability — in some ways a happy by-product of her husband’s infidelity.
In Schwarzenegger’s case, intimacy (albeit of a masculine nature) was a fine form of defense — and the most likely explanation as to why the numerous allegations of offensive behavior toward women did not stick. The women appeared anonymous; Schwarzenegger was not. However erroneous their perceptions may be, California voters clearly thought they knew the candidate on a personal level — they felt empathy when he was attacked and thus forgave him all his sins.
“People desperately want to come to know other people,” Downs says, noting that he teaches students all the time how to do this stuff on a stage by encouraging students to open up their emotional vocabulary. “Good actors know and understand the importance of vulnerability. And that’s why people are usually willing to give them an extra yard.”
Still, Schwarzenegger’s rise does seem to indicate some cultural sea changes. His comfortable election is persuasive evidence that the transferability of celebrity prowess has massively increased — celebrities are better positioned for politics than ever before. For while America’s long-standing obsession with movie stars is well documented, the current sense that they can do anything is new.
Fact or fiction?
Certainly, famous 19th Century military figures (such as Zachary Taylor) found it relatively easy to trade in their stripes for a bunk in the White House. But they were real heroes, not people who played them on a screen. These days, though, fact and fiction increasingly are indistinguishable in the competing narratives of American life.
“There’s been a real and new blurring of boundaries,” says McGill’s Troy. “There used to be a useful fame that you’d find in politicians and a useless fame you’d find in celebrities. Now the power of fame is so potent, it can be applied to every field.”
In other words, there’s never been a better time to be a famous teller of stories. Such people, it seems, are the only political shape-shifters with whom Americans are comfortable.
Perhaps this is a consequence of America’s ever-increasing size and diversity. Without fame, this line of reasoning goes, Schwarzenegger simply could never have been heard.
“In a country this large, you now need fame to get any kind of focused attention,” says Reinelt, who argues this is not the case in a small country such as, say, Finland, which she has studied. “Americans read the semiotics,” Reinelt says. “And they perceive leadership qualities whether or not they actually are present.”
“We live in a world where media narratives are increasing in power,” says Troy. “Now more than ever, the person with the best story always wins.”
