In “80s Hollywood: Dominant Tendencies,” Robin Wood aligns the wider film culture, of which Conan the Barbarian is a part, with a set of extremely reactionary positions that seek to re-institute a Freudian “law of the father”
complicit with patriarchal capitalism (2). Generally speaking, the sorts of critical claims made against the broad spectrum of popular movies produced during Reagan’s presidency apply to Conan. Yet turning to its characterizations, the organization of its diegesis, and the punitive economic assumptions that the film makes in the name of high adventure helps complicate this general understanding of Conan, Milius, and sword and sorcery as “conservative” by instead drawing attention to the particular ways in which the text voices an emerging and ambivalent neoliberal world.
The narrative of Conan the Barbarian hinges on a somewhat inarticulate seeking of revenge. In the long view, the movie charts Conan’s origin and early adventures, leading up to his alliance with Subotai and Valeria, and their battles with Thulsa Doom’s Snake Cult. While Conan is largely motivated by revenge,
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both for the deaths of his parents and for the eventual loss of Valeria, he is also driven by personal glory, the promise of wealth, and power. It is no coincidence that, when asked “What is best in life?,” Conan’s seemingly conditioned response is “to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women” ( Conan). As much as the film seems to be about honor and redemption for a transgression against the family, it also paints a picture of a world of mercenary opportunism and the reluctant embrace of civilizing infrastructure.
After the Nietzschean epigram “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” the film opens with scenes of a young Conan being initiated into the values of his small village. He learns of the powers of the Earth god Krom, watches the forging of weapons, and witnesses the life-world of the warrior.
The culture to which he is heir is evidently hierarchical and patriarchal. Soon, vicious marauders led by Thulsa Doom massacre the village, killing all of Conan’s family and positioning him for a life of slavery. His time spent monot-onously pushing a gigantic wheel (whose purpose is never entirely made clear) presumably provides Conan with the otherwise incredulous physique of actor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The hero, through Milius’s choice of “lingering low-angle close-ups [that] focus on the handsome face, the bared chest, the long hair flowing in the wind,” is positioned as a monstrously strong, yet malleable and adaptable, conqueror figure (Bell-Metereau 49). After the period of brute servitude, Conan comes to compete as a gladiator, whereupon the genesis of his skills are explained.
If earlier strong-man films forgo any nuance of characterization beyond their already-arrived-at status as morally pure warriors, then Conan the Barbarian overcompensates in the other direction. As a prized fighter, Conan is introduced to the possibilities of civilization: he is taught to read and appreciate literary production, is given women as prizes, forms personal bonds through training, and becomes acquainted with magic, a mysterious practice most closely associated with Eastern figures. Despite Conan’s friendship with men-tor-figure The Wizard (played by Mako), he remains somewhat positioned against magic as a result of his having been socialized into the elemental faith in Krom. Over the course of his adventure, Conan questions Krom’s relevance (as an ancient wilderness god) to his journeyman and reluctantly cosmopolitan lifestyle. Despite his relative upholding of basic lessons derived from this god —
most centrally, the importance of combat — Conan moves away from his childhood faith in favor of the promise of personal satisfaction: wealth, women, fame, and incessant questing.
Furthermore, Conan’s long period of physical and mental training justifies his eventual role as a largely self-sufficient agent of fortune. He variously uses stealth (as with his team’s infiltration of the Tower of the Snake Cult), brawn, and calculated trickery (his masquerade as a cultist before the final confrontation with Thulsa Doom). He seizes opportunities for wealth — the rumors of
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riches in the Tower, and his decision to risk life and limb in order to get them, illustrate his capacity for greed — and seems ill at ease with settling too long in a single spot, preferring instead to adventure in search of far-flung treasures.
On this somewhat abstract level, he is an ideal neoliberal subject: pliant and posed for success in any number of contingent circumstances; individualistically motivated; relentlessly competitive; dissatisfied with centralized authority (including the “good” King Osric, whom he reluctantly aides in rescuing Princess Yasmina); and predisposed to his personal (that is, privatized) allegiances, which remain unconnected to sovereign political entities.
Generally speaking, neoliberalism distinguishes itself as “an agenda of economic and social transformation under the sign of the free market” during a
“mad heroic phase” that was coincident with the rule of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain (Connell 22). It has been read as a massive program of income, power, and social agency along the lines of market efficacy: the rich get richer while the poor become poorer. Through this “financialization of everything,” economic elites solidify their hegemonic position (Harvey 33). While this has played a part in maintaining some aspects of traditional (white, Protestant, male, educated) wealth, it has also rewarded visionary entrepreneurs who have made quick fortunes through technological and service-based innovations, including Bill Gates or Mexican telecommuni-cations magnate Carlos Slim (Harvey 34). As such, individual and corporate organizational models are favored more than those that are collectivist and state-sponsored. Pierre Bourdieu laments two of the larger tendencies of life under neoliberalism:
First is the destruction of all the collective institutions capable of counteracting the effects of the infernal machine, primarily those of the state, repository of all of the universal values associated with the idea of the public realm. Second is the imposition everywhere, in the upper spheres of the economy and the state as at the heart of corporations, of that sort of moral Darwinism that, with the cult of the winner, schooled in higher mathematics and bungee jumping, institutes the struggle of all against all and cynicism as the norm of all action and behaviour [Bourdieu].
Conan might be read as a primary-process projection of this mindset. Driven by personal goals and exceptional ability, he negotiates institutional barriers—
religious formations, monarchs like King Osric, imposed forms of social deco-rum — through his strength, ability, and cunning. Aided by a select group of hierarchically subordinate friends, he overcomes challenge after challenge.
Instead of seeking collective support, he is motivated by opportunities for fame and wealth.
One of the most characteristic positions of neoliberalist logic is to turn away from state formations— both the strictly bordered nation-state and super-forms like communism — in favor of deregulated markets and the bucking of individual and corporate restraint (Harvey 10). Here, Conan’s attitude toward
“civilization” becomes more than just incidental and personally idiosyncratic.
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Conan’s first encounter with a city — perhaps the most visibly and materially obvious emblem of centralized governmental power — is accompanied by Subotai’s warning: “Civilization ... ancient and wicked” ( Conan). Conan has never before encountered such a built-up, bureaucratized, and regulated place. A sequence shows Conan and Subotai’s initial engagement with the sensations of the city. While seemingly enchanted by the opportunity and cultural exchange possible by the metropolis, Conan is disgusted by the stink, overcrowding, pre-prepared foods: in short, the betrayal of his survivalist and independently agrarian roots. Moreover, the people of Conan’s tribe have already been idealized by the movie as noble, independent, traditional, and dependable. Suddenly, Conan is thrown
into the midst of cranks, conspiracy theorists, cultists, prostitutes, and decadent libertines. The fantasy projection of the central, liberalist state —
here, a chaotic, dangerous, and seductive city —comes to ensnare Conan in a sequence of events that complicates his personal mission. This is not the under-siege, but idealized and recuperable, Thebes of Hercules Unchained. The invented allegorical image of the liberalist state in Conan the Barbarian seems almost beyond repair.
Conan does gain power, fame, and money, thanks to his skill and the devotion of his friends. He never fully swears himself to any cause, but rather seeks opportunities that lead to personal wealth (his gladiatorial and thieving exploits) and calculated vengeance. The movie ends with a wonderfully ambivalent image. Conan is seated on an impressive throne, in lavishly ornamental armor, bearing a solemn, contemplative, and somewhat disappointed look. By this point, his quest for revenge has long-since ended. Supposedly staged at a late moment in his adventures, after Conan has amassed enough wealth and favor to start his own kingdom, this image exposes the tension underlying the application of contemporary neoliberalist logic to a fantastic tale of a far-off land.
Having conquered the world through a lived application of ideal neoliberal subjecthood, Conan seems bored and despondent. He has institutionalized his own state control and rules with apparent wisdom. Curiously, he is not shown to be surrounded by adoring citizens, or in the middle of his capital city’s civic life. Instead, he is perched on his abstract, purgatorial throne. By neoliberal logic, he has gained the world, and done so on his own terms. Yet, this image suggests that he is left without equals, colleagues, or rivals. In short, his methods have left him without connective humanity.
Conan the Barbarian is an exceptional and widely-lauded 1980s sword and sorcery film, and can be viewed as the point of emulation for the rest of the production cycle. Other films from this era feature revenge plots ( Red Sonja), mercenary protagonists ( The Warrior and the Sorceress [1984, John C. Broder-ick]), and characterize civilization with suspicion ( Hundra), though none do so with as much alacrity or élan as Milius’s contested epic. While I have traced a mixed-source genre lineage for the sword and sorcery film — one that can engender ideologically conservative readings at each stage — and have provided
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this to illustrate an alternative means of characterizing some of the provocative claims made about these sorts of films given by Ryan and Kellner, I have also suggested that the sword and sandal genre can be alternatively theorized through the allegorical emplacement of liberalism and neoliberalism.
While this analysis deliberately stops with the coincident moment of Reagan’s presidency and Conan’s triumphal box-office, a continued re-focusing on the political regimes that parallel the periodic revitalizations of the sword and sandal genre could help elucidate the contemporary situation. A number of high profile films— not least among them 300 (2006, Zack Snyder), Pathfinder (2007, Marcus Nispel), Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010, Mike Newell), and a high concept remake of Clash of the Titans (2010, Louis Leterrier)— have been released to enthusiastic audiences during this ever-more entrenched period of neoliberal logic. In these films, an accelerated recycling of familiar genre cinema — one increasingly dependent on direct remakes and adaptations of video game properties— meets (at some level) the widely-reverberating after-shocks of worldwide financial crises, the recent memories of Western wars in the Islamic world, and global anxieties about the promise of peace in our time.
At the very least, a continued monitoring of the ideological mindset of popular genre cinema serves as an early warning siren for larger scale social anxieties of the contemporary moment.
NOTES
1. Ryan and Kellner see fantasy as being a particularly loaded delivery-system for political assumptions. They write, “Detachment from the constraints of realism allows fantasy to be more metaphoric in quality and consequently more potentially ideological.
Fantasy replaces an accurate assessment of the world with images that substitute desired ideas or feared projections for such an assessment” (244).
2. In “The Essence of Neoliberalism,” Pierre Bourdieu characterizes a mature form of political neoliberalism as “a programme of the methodological destruction of collectives” (Bourdieu). Moreover, “neoliberalism tends on the whole to favour severing the economy from social realities and thereby constructing, in reality, an economic system conforming to its description in pure theory, that is a sort of logical machine that presents itself as a chain of constraints regulating economic agents” (Bourdieu).
3. These are the dominant messages highly visible in a schematic reading of the genre.
Counter-positions have been articulated. Alec Worley has pointed out the potential for these films to germinate gay fandoms (172–173). Moreover, Italian pepla, especially when viewed in horrendously dubbed prints, are fitting illustrations of what Jeffrey Sconce, in “‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style,”
calls “paracinema,” a kind of legitimated “bad movie” that challenges the seriousness of institutionalized academic film study while at the same time providing some room for subversive interpretation.
4. I should note that Ryan and Kellner do, in fact, use the terms liberalism and neoliberalism, but generally in already politically constituted ways. Thus, left-liberalist comes to characterize films of collective social action, whose numbers dwindle and stagnate by the mid–1970s, while (right)-neoliberalist films unabashedly support market ideology.
I am attempting to complicate this based on how the terms have been applied in intervening years.
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5. Curiously, “heroic fantasy” is a term that Alec Worley most closely aligns with the creations of Robert E. Howard, including Conan.
6. Assigning straightforward ideological intentionality to Conan the Barbarian is complicated somewhat by the fact that the script was a collaboration between John Milius and Oliver Stone. In subsequent work, Stone has proven anything but politically dogmatic and inflexible.
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