Great Films of the 80s: CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982)

What a time 1982 was to be a comic book addict and Robert E. Howard-ophile with a shellacked completed jigsaw puzzle of Frazetta's "Death Dealer" up on his wall and a stack of paperback reprints on his shelf (including Howard's non-Conan stuff, like all those grisly stories about sailors' bare-knuckle boxing). Suffering the 15 year-old virgin blues in a world gone mad with headlines rabid with neighborhood pedophile sex rings (careers and parents wrecked forever by hypnotized children witnesses who only later proved tragically unreliable) and tales of LSD-using hippies microwaving babies and tucking the turkey into the crib, for us Howard was like a proto-punk rocker, bidding us keep working the wheel of woe until into this hell might ride a horseman to deliver. Herald of the new world! Conan! The Thulsa Doom serpent cult was a perfect analogy for the hippie movement (which we were too young to be part of) with its focus on converting young people to blood orgies and training them to kill their parents and ignore us--their little brothers-- and the whole twin serpent motif was very pagan and old school unchristian, (everything seeming serpentine and reptilian in nature is a common line of hallucinations in psychedelic drug experiences, and exist today in our conception of the double helix and in the symbol of the American Medical Association). For kids, wondering why they weren't growing up drowned in orgies like they saw their older brothers do in the 1970s, the Thulsa Doom crown was the perfect demonization tool. We didn't do orgies by choice, not because we weren't invited. In fact, we'll crash yours, knock over the punch bowl, steal the vodka, and--while you're all too stoned to fight back--set you on fire and drag our half-naked drugged-out older sister home by the hair to face mom and dad's mighty scolding.

Directed by John Milius from a script he co-wrote with Oliver Stone, the movie was better than we could hope. You could fit the dialogue in this movie on the back of a bar napkin, but every jewel, rune-covered sword handle, and jade pendant has a whole progression of deep meanings; the orchestral score probably took down a whole old-growth forest on its own; the deceptively ornate (rich with unique Italian artistry that's never gaudy or showy) costumes change and morph naturally over the film's passage of time (we can read into Conan's progress by the upgrades in his chain mail). These are some of the reasons why it works so well as a repeat viewing mythical rite. Conan doesn't even say a word until his famous answer to the question 'what is best in life" -- "To crush your enemies, to see 'dem driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of der wimmen." 

Seeing the film for the first time with my buddy Alan (between us we had most of Marvel's Conan comics (though we pronounced it "Con-An" (like Con Air), I remember we both laughed at this first sign of Arnold's German accent and thrilled to it in a kind of pre-stoner rapture.

Still, the film would be a thunder-headed ponderous downer if not for the lively, lithe and lovely Sandahl Bergman as Valeria. She had a whole arc of her own in the Marvel comic books, where she had black hair and was a pirate captain (and looked a bit more like Catherine Zeta Jones). The Valeria of the movie is blonde, and not in it nearly enough, but that's why the film works so well as a revenge scenario, since we experience the horrible pain of Conan's childhood for the first half hour of running time--forced into slavery, forced to kill like a pit bull, forced to watch his parents be murdered and his people destroyed by Thulsa (James "Vader" Earle Jones)--and then the next ten or twenty minutes swooning as he finds this weird kind of outlaw love, and then--after kicking ass and trashing Doom's orgy room in one of the best sequences in all movies, Conan loses Valeria, also to Thulsa, this time via a serpent arrow. Oh man but seeing this for the first time as a 15 year-old, damn right you're pissed at old Thulsa by then! "I am the wellspring from which you flow," Doom tells him, and he's right. In killing him, Conan loses his entire reason for being and so the movie ends mainly watching him watch the massive stairway set burn and light up the darkened desert. And then we see a shot of him much later, during the King Conan era (a whole separate Marvel comic, from when he's older and established). We're promised, by Mako's narration, a whole series of films to come, even moodier and more adult than this one. All the more tragic, they would not come.

Though time has worn my vengeance-craving edge down to a dull memory, the scars of being a sexually frustrated, physically un-mighty teenager linger on, as does the memory of the exaltation I felt watching Conan, the sense of vindication (which would not come again in any movie until Fight Club) for my masculine angst. Finally, here was a hero we teens could get behind. He was swinging for our team, crashing our older sibling's orgy and trashing the joint, and if there's any place that howls of bloodlust are still okay, it should be in the theater, with the old ladies behind you going "sshhhh!" We may not have been raised pushing a dumb wheel in the middle of nowhere for seemingly no reason, but we could relate, in our hatred of school, of third period geometry class. Conan was our liberator. School's Aowt foah Summah!

Back to Valeria for a moment. When she and Conan bond in a luxurious fur-covered tent after robbing the tower of serpents, we feel him finally beginning to relax, and the whole unbearably rough and dismal film unclenches its fists for the first time and our heart melts as these two orphaned lone wolves find a temporary peace. Though we see lots of Bergman's hot dancer thighs, some breast here and there, and of course Schwarzenegger's acres of muscles, Milius clearly doesn't intend their sex scene should titillate so much as warm our hearts a bit, sincerely and without mawkishness. Bergman is pretty in a rough sort of way, she doesn't know her angles, doesn't wear noticeable make-up; her nose is a big long and in some frames her neck kind if disappears under he chin, but she's beautiful and desirable to us. That's why when she talks about wandering alone and cold watching lovers silhouettes behind their tents in the night, you believe her, and so it's one of the best sex scenes of all time. She's a realistic 'girlfriend zone' beauty, with just as much detail on faces and textures--furs, fires, tent walls, jewels--as nudity and moaning, and it's all "earned" so to speak, through character development. Valeria's newfound love comes with a fierce devotion. We too, in the theater know what it is to pass lovers in the night, that's why it breaks our hearts, no matter how many times we see it, and when Conan leaves her to pursue his quest for vengeance we understand her sorrow and still understand his quest, because, in this case, Valeria's reasons not to ride against Doom aren't based on fear of death, but fear of losing this love so soon after she found it. 

Laugh all you want, but this was our Titanic!

Re-visiting it on DVD is cool, because there's a lot of stuff a boy who saw this film a million times on duped, cropped VHS would finally get to see again after the one time in the theater. I was always pissed that the visceral early raid on Conan's village, which blew my mind in the theater, was cropped to the point it was impossible to follow on the pan and scan. Did I only remember it that way? No. And now it all seems new, especially in the new remastered extended (!) version, which includes a monologue wherein Conan remembers picking blueberries with his father, and in it he seems for the first time both eloquent and at peace, a bit straight out of The Seventh Seal but that's okay --it's earned, even if it does kill the mood of slowly building menace (and we understand why it was removed, it's a bit labored, like a shout-out to Von Sydow who plays the king who sends them on their quest). My sharper adult eyes and the high res of DVD now notice the importance of a huge jewel stolen from Thulsa Doom, which Conan gives to Valeria which she wears around her neck from then on, and which he later takes back and wears after she's killed; and the way Doom's riders in the beginning of the film know to take off their helmets in respect to Conan's mom, via admiring the handle detailing of an animal skull on her slain husband's awesome sword. In its weird militaristic way (Milius is a great one for armor and warrior codes) this nearly dialogue-free film is stunningly eloquent. Is there a more perfect fit for Howard's prose, his love of ancient military history? If we doubt, we can just compare with the relatively shitty Richard Fleischer-directed PG sequel. 

Because of all the hack job imitations that followed in the wake of Conan's box office success we've become conditioned to dismiss 'sword and sorcery' (as it was known the) as juvenile tripe, and indeed most of the other films in its wake came weighed heavy by contemptuous screenwriters, low budgets, and incompetent directors who can't afford fight choreographerr. Some of these imitations are made with wit and mythic savvy (mostly from the Corman camp, like Deathstalker or Jack Hill's Sorceress), some are made with money but no care (i.e. the two Richard "make ten million dollar budget look like two" Fleischer Conan sequel and Red Sonja). But John Milius has respect, knowledge of ancient military history and pre-Christian iron age weaponry, budget, and Jungian mythic savvy to spare. Despite (or maybe because of) his crazy militarism, he's not just a close collaborator of artsy fuckers like Coppola and Paul Schrader, but a genuine NRA badass, and producer Dino De Laurentiis was able to give the film a huge budget. Every cent is up there on the screen: thousands of extras, vast beautiful serpentine sets, dozens of horses, a huge temple exterior staircase on a hilltop and a vast interior mountain cave with a marble orgy chamber that looks like something out of a genuine nightmare (designed by Ron Cobb, of Star Wars and Alien fame). Whatever happened to beautiful, boldly original art direction like this? What have we lost since 1982? I think I know, but if I told you, I'd go to hell, or PC jail.

On widescreen DVD, so much more is revealed: I never realized there actually lots of corpses hanging upside down along the walls in the orgy scene, though you'd expect an orgy scene to be more smoky and with more writhing. But I love the special effects here, which occur without rupturing the soundtrack, which plays almost nonstop thunderous versions of De Falla's El Brujo and doesn't break from the track to announce, ala John Williams or Mickey Mouse, "hey look, Doom is turning into a snake!" (i.e. it's what Carpenter calls a carpet score). Thus we, like Conan, don't know how to react when a giant snake starts to stir in the background. The effects are never grandstanding. For example, consider the sandy wind surrounding Conan's crucified body--covered in writing ala Kwaidan to protect him from evil spirits---is writhing like shadowy reptoid men with long wind tails. The animated bits are slight and beautiful, clearly frame-by- frame hand-painted, using the actual sandstorm wind in the scene as the jumping off point for whirling figurative specters (see below). Not since Forbidden Planet and never since has this sort of thing been done with such class.

Nothing quite illuminates that you're old like, so many decades since you were 15 in that theater, realizing the last time you saw Conan you saw him and Valeria as adults and now you see them as children. Arnold's youthfulness and pre-catch phrase sincerity make him quite charismatic; this is the film he made before launching into superstardom with The Terminator and as with that film, it's a true original, made with lots of care and imagination and research, that should never be confused with the imitative junk that followed.

A lot of us Conan fans were initially wary that a German body builder who'd never starred in a major film, Pumping Iron as himself, would be too flippant, too jovial, too A-Team, if you will, to be a good Conan. We figured he'd make sure through his contract that he doesn't actually kill anyone, just beats them up and tells them to drink milk and stay in school and don't do drugs. So we were all surprised by the gleeful amorality and downright thuggishness of his barbarian. That's one of the things that makes Conan great -- he ain't no role model. On two different occasions Conan basically breaks into someone else's party, trashes the joint, kills loads of frightened security guards, kidnaps a girl and/or kills a priceless pet snake and steals jewels, all without direct provocation. He doesn't wait for them to draw first; he kills people in cold blood, punches out a camel who was just standing there (Conan bumped into him), pushes beggars, steals property and throws witches into the fire.. And he doesn't just conk them on the head and then lament about killing to Gabrielle, like Xena used to do. He chops off their heads and kicks over their candelabras. He's been dealt a raw deal by fate and he's out to steal and kill to his heart's content, as he's entitled. And there's no dutiful cop trailing him, determined to take him down; there's no annoyingly liberal captain of police telling him to do things "by the book." Conan is not asking for the liberal government's help in getting his revenge --he's a true conservative antihero, ready and able to lead us out of the 70s, beyond even the range of Clint's .44 Magnum.

And so, to our surprise, we loved Arnold to death. Every line he speaks in the film became cherished and repeated endlessly: "Can we go over theah? Wheah the others do not see?" / "Crom, I have never pwayed to you befoah!" / "Oil the sowahd... and feed the hoahse." Man, we could crack up for hours saying lines like that in our German Arnold voices, even well past college. I don't mean that at all as a put-down. We all love Arnold. And he does a great job. He invests himself. He does most of his own stunts, as do Sandahl and Gerry Lopez. It makes a difference.

Time doesn't permit me to praise Lopez, also a fountain of quotes ("Dinner for wolve"). A surfer Milius bonded with making Big Wednesday. Lopez speaks in the broken English expected of an Asian-looking actor at the time, but isn't stupid and when he occasionally breaks into Cali bro-style enunciation, it's a joy. With Schwarzenegger a bodybuilder, Bergman a Fosse dancer and Lopez a surfer--none of the are three actual trained actors--there's a kind of outsider status amongst the three that binds them to each other and works beautifully for conveying their outsider status within the film. They are not just "high adventurers," not bland actors cast for their looks or accomplished stars burdened with a sense of responsibility for their good guy image. They're just young, motivated, physically fit people willing to try anything. They rejected society but it rejected them first. They have their own code of honor as bodybuilders, surfers, and dancers - each an insular world with its own codes and mores. They were as we felt we would become once our goddamned schools were burned forever to the ground and the world became divided by lawlessness, and warring gangs of the road had to be fought by whatever weapons one could steal from the dead. Until that day came, we would wait, and watch Conan the Barbarian over and over, and stockpile shields and swords, and later, thanks to the NRA, guns.

It would be only a matter of time before Columbine.