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On a chilly, fogbound evening last week, small clusters of friends strode past the Roxie Cinema, en route to the appointments of their Mission District night lives. Ad hoc movie posters, made from grainy black-and-white photocopies of publicity stills, papered the theater wall. Eyes were caught, and, almost imperceptibly, paces slowed. Animated conversations lulled, as during that moment in a road trip when the radio dial lands on a song everyone has agreed to hate, but the station mysteriously doesn't get changed, the music somehow becoming the only sound.
As the posters bulgingly indicated, the Roxie had devoted its week to Pumping Iron, the 1977 bodybuilding documentary that recently re-emerged as an 86-minute gubernatorial campaign commercial. The matter of which campaign it advanced is open to interpretation, but a sense of historic eminence is widely acknowledged. As many have observed, Paul Butler and Robert Fiore's movie is the first whose credits say "Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger."
To get a proper feel for the mood of the electorate, and risk being diagnosed with fetishist tendencies, Dog Bites had been attending consecutive screenings. (We swear we didn't know columnist Matt Smith was going to go see P.I. this week with mayoral hopeful Matt Gonzalez. Swear.)
People sheepishly approached the box office window, by themselves or in dawdling pairs. In the lobby they skulked, glanced over their shoulders, in the way people sometimes do when they get near a voting booth. But Sam Neira, of San Francisco, was in an outward, sportive mood. "I don't really know anything about the film," he said, his eyes bright and curious. Neira had the affable air of a political moderate and movie buff. "But I'm fairly confident that he's going to be our next governor." He took a fistful of popcorn. "I think it's going to be a good insight into how his presence really helped his career." Neira didn't figure the movie would change anyone's mind, at least not in these parts, but he admitted his own inner conflict: "I'm still torn. I'm not gonna vote for him, but I'm definitely a fan. Over the last two months, I've tried to see every one of his films." Suddenly Neira's face fell, twisted with the memory of an ancient trauma. "With the exception of Red Heat," he added. "That one is awful. I mean, poor Jim Belushi."
The tiny lobby was filling up. No "Total Recall 2003" T-shirts were in evidence, nor any (declared) opposing candidates, and in physical stature the average moviegoer tended more toward the 98-pound-weakling type than the Charles Atlas. The gathering crowd of about 50 did contain a proliferation of young couples, sharing sweets, toying with each other's hair, and otherwise lending the disquieting impression that Pumping Iron might also have become a date movie.
"I figured people would read into it what they wanted to read into it -- pro or con," Roxie owner Bill Banning said later. "We just thought that people -- voters -- should be informed." The Roxie had not been authorized to screen it, and the film eluded Banning for a while, but "about three weeks ago, we discovered a collector had a print. We decided, 'Well, let's just show that.'" The theater would then donate proceeds to the Hunters Point Community Youth Park Foundation, on behalf of Mr. Schwarzenegger. "That might allay any legal problems," Banning explained.
Pumping Iron, which was recently described in The New Yorker as "the Rosetta stone of Schwarzeneggerology," sets the bodybuilding scene, and watches the then-28-year-old heave and undulate his way toward a sixth consecutive Mr. Olympia title in 1975. Of all the faces on which Butler's camera spends any time, Schwarzenegger's is the only one that never looks worried -- not even in one memorable close-up, extreme by any definition, of him prostrate in the gym, bench-pressing God knows how many pounds, and writhing in the glorious agony of pumpitude.
The offending champion recounts his boyhood dream of making it huge in America, and his commitment to not interrupting his training, whether it be to faint, throw up, or attend his father's funeral. His resolve is unbreakable but jovial, even insouciant, and he makes short work of barbells and opponents' psyches alike.
"I'd thought he was mean and venal," Banning continued. "My recollection of the film was somewhat corrected when I saw it again." In other words, the nature of competition is what it is; everyone knows it takes a killer instinct to become a champion, let alone an electable public servant. "It just seemed a little more benign than I'd recalled," he said. Banning spent most of the week at a film festival in Canada, so he hadn't had the chance to learn how locals were responding to Pumping Iron.
"Were they enjoying themselves?" he suddenly asked.
Among the sounds emanating from the theater during a given screening were frequent gasps, hisses, cautious applause, whispers of "Jesus," a collective "Awww" when something cute happened, or an "Ewww!" to acknowledge the grotesque grunts and guttural roars -- these from within the film, and without -- and, most commonly, laughter. If the home stretch of a California recall campaign could have a soundtrack, this was it.
There was also the swanky soul-fusion throb of the music, to which some heads wagged. We couldn't help but imagine another cut in which the director gamely confronted the film's gay-porn subtext head-on, as it were. Had this occurred, who knows how it might have affected the candidate in the long run, but Dog Bites sensed that the Roxie audience giddily would have gone there.
All of this was summarized to answer Banning's question. "That's good!" he finally said, sounding relieved.
As he left the screening, Sam Neira's eyes were brighter than they'd been going in.
"It was an awesome movie!" he said. "I never knew even a small amount about bodybuilding." But the real subject of his education, of course, was the star.
