Arnold Schwarzenegger is not so much an actor as a body – the beefcake whose best years, the 1980s, were spent pecs thrust forward. He, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis were a new form of action hero, whose brawn was far more important than brains. When they spoke, you shivered. When they hit things, you cheered.
Schwarzenegger was the pick of the punch. They call him the Austrian Oak and, thanks to the new Netflix documentary Arnold, some of his bark has been chipped away. Of course, he went on to do more than just Conan the Barbarian. The 75-year-old is the former governor of California. But what lies beneath for a man who built a career on the idea he has zero interior is surprising. His father was a Nazi and his mother thought he was gay.
But you also remember the documentary’s locations – particularly the mountains and peaks of the Austrian Alps of his childhood to Venice Beach in LA, where his biceps bulged. He is a man who has seen it all – and now we want to see it too.
It is the sort of origin story that can help to flip a narrative. The fleshing out of a lump of flesh. He is anti-Putin and Trump – picking the right enemies as in Terminator 2, when he stopped killing humans and went for evil robots instead.
In Arnold, he says sorry for historical groping and apologises for fathering a child with the housekeeper. And, well, once that is out of the way, we can get back to his uncomplicated best: fun cinema from the 1980s, derided by critics because film critics hate fun. Yet Hollywood simply does not make them like Schwarzenegger any more – maybe that is why we remain so obsessed with him. Jonathan Dean