Schwarzenegger, Masculinity, and “Crusade”

In 1994, Carolco Pictures balked at the proposed $120 million budget for a project called “Crusade”.  Attached director Paul Verhoeven and star Arnold Schwarzenegger walked away while Carolco bankrupted itself producing legendary flop Cutthroat Island instead.  Still unproduced, the Crusade script was written by Walon Green (writer of The Wild Bunch) with revisions by Gary Goldman.  It follows Arnold as he turns from thief to crusader and makes his way to Jerusalem…

Physical bulk, martial prowess, and the relentless linear pursuit of an objective: hallmarks of Schwarzeneggerian masculinity.  Also the template for ‘80s and ‘90s action stars.  Conan the Barbarian (1982) and The Terminator (1984) installed the formula and Arnold riffed on it with declining success for the next two decades.  Imitators latched onto Arnold’s ankles and were dragged to stardom.  Rocky got ‘roided out and oiled up.  Segal slapped on a hairpiece and stepped into the fray.  Chuck Norris hit his Total Gym a little harder.   Dolph Lundgren  and Van Damme popped up and now linger like greasy fart stink.

Arnold movies are propelled by the threat of emasculation, the disruption of the Arnoldic mode of masculinity.  To emasculate Arnold, you must best him physically.  You must prevent him from reaching his goal.  An Arnold movie is two hours of watching him fend off threats to his manhood while leaving a trail of carnage behind him.  He wins (rescues his daughter, kills the Predator, decapitates James Earl Jones) and all is right in the world, manhood intact.

The Arnold enthusiast part of me weeps that Crusade was never made.  It’s a panoramic, gore-tastic, donkey carcass-defiling vista view of Arnoldic masculinity.  Screenwriter Green pushes the manhood-robbing danger level to the obvious (but not really obvious) maximum level.  Here’s how:

Arnold and his men have been tricked and captured by associates of the bad guy.  Standard fare.  While in a dank cell, they watch a bad-guy discussion about them.  Standard fare.  We’ve gotten to know one of Arnold’s men, Valt, enough to make us sympathetic when he’s pulled out and strapped to a table.  Typical.  But then things get transcendant.

The bad guy takes out an instrument that “resembles a linoleum cutter”.

And cuts away Valt’s genitals.

After tossing the “indistinguishable mass of bloody flesh”, the bad guy cauterizes the spurting exposed veins and swabs the area with boiling pitch while Valt screams and vomits all over himself.  Instant eunuch.

Valt “twitches, convulsing as he is dragged” out of the cell and into a courtyard where women pack his junk-less groin with cow dung.

Arnold’s next as the guards ready him for an equally graphic castration…

This would’ve been THE indelible masculine peril moment for Arnold.  As I said, hitting this maximum threat is obvious but not obvious.  In the real world, castration would be the ultimate emasculation, but the Arnoldverse does not generally take this into account.  Arnoldverse bad guys do not aim for the junk.  It’s not in the gameplan.  Pummel him, shoot him, stab him.  Crucify him on the Tree of Woe.  But scything off his scrotum/cock and selling him into slavery as a eunuch is not an option.  Until this unproduced moment.

This threat of castration is uncharted territory.  He’ll overcome the pummeling, the stabbing, the crucifixion.  He’ll still save the day.  Shoot him in the arm and he’ll batter you with the other one.  We know this; it’s how the Arnoldverse works.  Hack off his cockwurst—and then?  What would happen?  Would he continue his crusade?  Would he kill himself?  Would he submit to his fate as a eunuch?  Unsettling, unanswerable questions. Crusade would’ve been a career-capper, a movie that bleached out the shitstains that Conan the Destroyer and Twins left in cinema’s boxer-briefs.  It would’ve been the prophylactic that prevented Jingle All the Way and Batman and Robin.  There’s no way Arnold is reduced to kiddie pap after Crusade.

I mourn not just for the loss of the retch-inducing castration scene, but also the bit where Arnold gets sewn up in a donkey carcass and left for the hyenas to eat, and when he single-handedly turns the tide of an epic siege in act three, and when he fakes a miracle to earn a pardon from the Pope, and when he pulps the bad guy’s face with an ax-handle early on, forcing the poor guy to spend acts two and three (until his inevitable bloody dispatching) as a hideous insane army-leading cannibal.

But, alas, all that’s left of this dream project is the damn fine script and the baleful moan of Arnold fans everywhere.

* piece originally published at Allography.com