Conan the Barbarian and Schwarzenegger's Pecs as Visual Metaphor

In an effort to make my corpus more legible to future biographers, I’ve decided to distill/recycle some of my Twitter threads into long(er) form blog posts. What follows is an attempt to do just that. Here’s hoping I was successful.

Robert E. Howard’s Conan cycle is fantasy as only an American--and more specifically, a Texan--could conceive of it. Here are tales of degenerate wizards and brave warriors; of monsters and other, less nameable, things lurking in dank dungeons. The crenellated walls of Castle Camelot are as far from the decadent cities of Hyboria as the verdant forests of Wales are from the desolate oil fields of Texas, as are Arthur’s high minded notions of noble chivalry and Christian honor from the titular barbarian’s ethos of rugged individuality and brute strength. Indeed, Howard inaugurated an entirely new sub-genre with the Conan stories; Sword and Sorcery.

Robert E. Howard

Described by Fritz Leiber in the late 1960s as “an earthier sort of fantasy,” Sword and Sorcery owes more to the free-wheeling American spirit than it does to the backwards-looking medieval nostalgia of someone like Tolkien or Lewis. If the aforementioned are a fine wine, then the Sword and Sorcery stories of the sort penned by Howard and his descendants are Pabst. Or Budweiser. Their heroes are self interested and sleazy. Their heroes are cut-throats and thieves. Their heroes are Americans in loincloths and brass brassieres.

"Chained" by Frank Frazetta

It is an increasingly common complaint among many self described “nerds” that John Milius’ 1982 film Conan the Barbarian does the character a disservice by portraying him as a super-fit meat-head, contra to Howard’s description of the character as a “black-haired” and “sullen-eyed” reaver cum thief cum warrior come to “tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.” I suppose I shouldn’t expect too much out of a demographic that prides itself on having well-formed opinions on Star Wars novelizations, but these lay critics fundamentally understand what Howard’s stories are about.

Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan

 

Sure, Arnold isn’t particularly panther-like or whatever, but his bodybuilder physique encapsulates the idea that Conan became king by his own hand. Arnold’s cartoonishly chiseled pecs and abs are the perfect visual metaphor for Conan’s philosophy as he himself lays out in “The Scarlet Citadel”:

Excerpt from Robert E. Howard's "The Scarlet Citadel"