David C. Smith- A Critical Appreciation of John Milius’s CtB

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This has been online for a while (at The Barbarian's Keep). A very good article by the guest of Honor at Howard Days 2019, David C. Smith.

I could just add the link, but I think I'll post the complete article on this thread.

Enjoy.

This article originally appeared in slightly different form in Bocere, volume 1, number 3 (August 1995) through volume 2, number 1 (April 1996), as a contribution to the Robert E. Howard United Press Association.  

You can also find David C. Smith's Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography at the link below:
www.amazon.co.uk/Robert-Howard-Literary-Biography/dp/1683900979/
www.amazon.com/Robert-Howard-Literary-Biography/dp/1683900979/

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A Critical Appreciation of John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian by David C. Smith 




1.

You don’t fret a whole lot about subtext if you’re writing . . . Conan the Barbarian.

William Goldman

Adventures in the Screen Trade

Goldman is, of course, wrong. If any movie this side of The Birth of a Nation has a subtext and was written to promote that subtext plainly and unequivocally, that movie is certainly Conan the Barbarian, renegade writer-director John Milius’s interpretation of Robert E. Howard’s heroic fantasy tales.

Milius very much wanted to make the movie, and he jumped at the chance to direct it when the opportunity presented itself. He rewrote an original screenplay drafted by Oliver Stone [1] (in which the action takes place in a post-nuclear holocaust future) and set the story firmly in Howard’s own Hyborian Age, and meanwhile brought to the reenvisioned movie the nobility of the samurai bushido code of discipline, duty, and honor and an appreciation of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s late-Romantic era concept of the übermensch or overman. The synthesis works well even though the idea of Conan as fascist strongman is counter to Howard’s own political sensibilities. (Howard was an early critic of the fascism that developed between the wars in Germany and Italy, and he expressed his mistrust of such far-right doctrinism at some length in letters to H. P. Lovecraft, who was initially sympathetic to the national-socialist agenda. A contrary, independent, and intelligent man, Howard understood immediately that an outlier such as himself would not have been particularly welcome in such lockstep, dull-normal, groupthink societies.) So unqualified was Milius’s enthusiasm for the project that he was able to stamp the movie with his persona and create an iconography whose influence still reverberates in our popular culture. The Wind and the Lion, which just as certainly promotes Milius’s pre-Enlightenment values, may be a more polished movie, but the echoes of Conan the Barbarian, its "That which does not kill me makes me stronger" and "Crush your enemies," its lone-gunslinger sympathies and its posturing manliness untouched by irony, have persisted for many more summers than anyone would have thought possible in 1982 when the movie was released. John Milius caught, and continues to influence, the Zeitgeist.

This may not be surprising, given that Conan came from the man who has proffered us such popular lines as "This is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world," "Do you feel lucky, punk?" and "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," and such memorable dialogue as Robert Shaw’s grim recollection in Jaws of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, which fellow University of Southern California film school chum Steven Spielberg asked Milius to write. He started out, after earning his degree in English, as a screenwriter and script doctor; his work for Francis Ford Coppola, another USC contemporary, on what would become Apocalypse Now is legendary. A portent of things to come in Milius’s career was the reaction to his script for Jeremiah Johnson (1972), the story of the notorious frontiersman Liver-Eating Johnson, who waged a one-man war against the Crow after his family had been massacred. The screenplay was heavily rewritten because director Sidney Pollack was dismayed by the violence in Milius’s original draft. (Pollack was quoted in 1982 as saying, "[In the Milius script,] Johnson’s reaction when his wife dies is to run out and eat a tree. That just isn’t my style.") Milius’s directorial debut, Dillinger (1973), accented his signature motifs: violence, outlaw glory, and a loner’s self-contained code of chivalry and integrity in a world of hypocrisy. The Wind and the Lion (1975) followed, then Big Wednesday (1978), a heartfelt, strongly biographic story of Southern California surfers on the eve of the escalation of the Vietnam war.

Just because Big Wednesday is a touching piece of Americana and so personal a movie, it is atypical of Milius, who in a 1991 interview recalled with pride that the most memorable compliment paid him was by John Huston, who said of him, "He’s not of this time." Milius has used to his advantage the opportunities Hollywood has afforded him to speak his own mind relentlessly on film, and seldom has he compromised. (For writing Dirty Harry, he requested as payment, in addition to his agreed-upon fee, a Purdy shotgun because "I do not consider paper honorable.") He decided as a young man that he faced two paths and chose to be his own person, "be a bit of a rebel and reject materialism," rather than fall into line with a safe career. This says much for him, as does his acknowledgment that the filmmakers who came before him--Ford and Huston, Hawks and Kurosawa--"were the guys who had really done it. We [younger directors] were very derivative." But those esteemed filmmakers, of course, borrowed from and built upon the work of the first generation of moviemakers. Milius has consistently paid homage to those craftsmen he respects. This is as it should be. In the arts, we stand upon the shoulders of those who’ve come before us, the better to see where we might try going next.



Conan the Barbarian was John Milius’s chance to manage a large-scale, big-budget (for the time--$17 million), world-class motion picture, and he took charge of the situation with relish, remaining as centered as any of his admired Japanese warriors clacking away at kendo practice (although he did suffer a postproduction heart attack, which gives some idea of the strain Milius and everyone else associated with the movie underwent). Kendo, in fact, has much to do with the attitude of the film. Milius said in an interview at the time of the movie’s release, "The whole idea was that if the actors had a real foundation in kendo, no matter what was thrown at them, they would know how to handle it . . . . They couldn’t make a wrong move; they were always their characters." He deliberately chose Gerry Lopez, a friend and champion surfer, and dancer Sandahl Bergman for their roles because, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, neither was a veteran performer with a movie star-sized ego to be catered to. All were athletic, as well--absolutely an essential requirement.

Milius variously coached, coaxed, cajoled, and bullied the three to get from them the performances he wanted. He drilled them constantly, training them as he had his hunting dogs, so that during filming, "while the camera was running . . . my voice was in the back of their minds." He wanted them to think as Zen warriors. "[Arnold] never lost his self-esteem or his ego," Milius said. "Someone who would have fought me would have lost his ego. But Arnold used the Oriental approach: ‘I am a river being directed; I must flow where I go.’" The three spent rigorous months specifically in preparation for the film--kendo practice, horseback riding, dance. Schwarzenegger, in fact, had been getting ready for the movie off and on since 1978, when he had signed an exclusive contract with producer Ed Pressman that prohibited the bodybuilder from making any other motion picture during the lengthy preproduction period. Schwarzenegger, Bergman, and Lopez also studied Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films; asked in a 1982 interview what had impressed him most about those movies, Schwarzenegger replied, "I learned the expression of serenity in combat."

This is not exactly Robert E. Howard’s Conan. The character created by the young Texan writer is one tough mother, an animal in human form, with the instincts and reflexes of the wild, a shrewd, devious fighting man formed in equal measure by heredity and experience. He is a superman, but one with a paternity reaching straight back to Beowulf and Enkidu, Siegfried and Attila, Alexander and Genseric. John Milius’s Conan is a northland barbarian youth reborn with the soul of a samurai warrior. This works well in the context of Milius’s revision, but it dramatically changes the focus of Conan’s warriorhood as it reshapes the essence of the character himself. Howard’s Conan is a brawler and a brute, lucky to be alive, forged by his adventures into a quasiclassical warrior-king; but Milius’s Conan is of a new order altogether. For the character in Howard’s stories, a sword is a tool; in Milius’s film, a sword is the warrior’s spirit and is richly symbolic of the warrior as a self-actualizing, self-overcoming new man -- the overman. In most of Howard’s Conan stories, women are prizes or wenches; in Milius’s film, Valeria is the woman of women, special and elevated, the new man’s equal, the other half of his soul. The schooling in the art of sword mastery and the rigorous self-discipline Conan attains in the movie are pure Musashi by way of John Milius, as is the reverance for the sword itself, for steel, their importance taking on a spiritual dimension--weapons "as an expression of the will directed towards a certain end," according to Jung (as quoted by Ania Teillard in Cirlot’s study of symbols). Weapons as extensions of the self, mastery of the self, the overcoming of the self--the will to power.

Which brings us to Nietzsche.

Milius’s Conan is a literal translation of Nietzsche’s übermensch, the philosopher’s personification of the will to power, the expression of human existence superior to that of the conventional, sentimental, bourgeois moral majority (to use a contemporary term) whom Nietzsche held in contempt. Nietzsche "attacks man’s moral principles," William Hubben writes in his survey of modern philosophers.

The new "superman," a term borrowed from Goethe’s Faust, is law unto himself. He is autonomous . . . , destined to fulfill our highest dreams. Nietzsche’s vision was that of the new man, the one who . . . will build himself up into a being beyond the "much-too-many," the mob. He will be a higher but, of course, also a lonely man. His secret nobility will be of an aristocratic elevation, for which no pattern exists: He has nobody to follow, and nobody should be asked to follow him.

Or, as Nietzsche himself wrote (in Thus Spake Zarathustra: Second Part): "Hungry, violent, lonely, godless: thus the lion-will wants itself. Free from the happiness of slaves, redeemed from gods and adorations, fearless and fear-inspiring, great and lonely: such is the will of the truthful."

Conan the Barbarian is John Milius’s recipe for creating the übermensch, and he makes very clear in the heading that opens the movie the secret ingredient required for cooking up a super self-overcomer: "That which does not kill us makes us stronger," his paraphrase of maxim 8 from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols (which, in full, in Kaufmann’s translation, is, "Out of life’s school of war: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger"). Thus does John Milius marry Nietzsche’s dream of the self-actualizing, self-creating overman with the means by which to accomplish this overreaching goal, the self-discipline, the mastered ego, the directed will of the samurai warrior. This is not Howard’s Conan, but it is nonetheless a Conan he could have appreciated and understood.

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A Critical Appreciation of John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian by David C. Smith, part 2



2.

Despite its modification of Conan into a Nietzschean, Hyborian Age protosamurai, John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian succeeds superbly as Howardian heroic fantasy (and of course as generic sword and sorcery) because Milius himself is thoroughly at home with the pagan worldview of Howard’s fiction. Milius understands the conventions and motifs fundamental to Western heroic mythology; they are, after all, the material from which he has crafted his own screenplays and movies. He appreciates the sentiments inherent in heroic fantasy: the keenness of life lived from moment to moment in perilous circumstances; the inherent dignity of the individual who lives life on his own terms; a heart-deep sense of aloneness, and the integrity that comes from it. And although the element of fantasy was new to Milius with this movie and is a device he has not used since, he was equal to integrating it into the structure of Conan the Barbarian.

In Robert E. Howard’s stories, sorcery is the expression of ungoverned or unnatural forces, an affront to be held in check, and Conan’s reaction when confronted by sorcery is one natural to the primitive: run away or get out of the way or, if that is not possible, meet it head on and kill it, or go down trying. Milius, using sorcery as a dramatic device within the practical restraints of a self-contained motion picture scenario (in contrast with Howard’s open-ended series of picaresque short stories), shrewdly portrays Conan and Thulsa Doom not simply as warrior and sorcerer or as hero and villain, not just as created and creator, but as life forms for whom coexistence is manifestly impossible. By developing a dramatic situation (one with eerie Oedipal undercurrents) in which Thulsa Doom is indirectly responsible for Conan’s very existence and thereby, a figurative father, responsible for inviting his own death at the hands of his putative son, Milius makes of Howard’s exotic Hyborian milieu a formal and very carefully structured stage for pitting the new order against the old, for presenting Conan’s successful revenge as the ascension of Nietzsche’s triumphant übermensch.

Conan is man--humanity--at the pinnacle, the embodiment of the greatest that can be achieved: the survival of the fittest, a keen mind in a superlative body, and that body a physical mechanism mastered by and answerable to a supremely trained will. Thulsa Doom by contrast is the lowest, the animal--indeed, the reptile--that which we have left behind in our rise toward humanness. He is the gutter; he is a cannibal; he is a shapeshifter, mocking Conan and us with his pretense of being human while relying on attributes that are not skills won by hardship, self-discipline, and a triumphant will but that are simply emanations of his own bestialness, his own reptilianness. He stares, and his serpent’s eyes transfix his victims; no challenge is met, no contest won. His mind is keen with animal cunning, and he lures his victims, his followers, with the promise of easy answers, mysteries explained by platitudes, the paradoxes of life dismissed as superfluous to the ready-made convenience of his doctrine. One need not work; one need not master oneself; one need only follow and accept what is, for this is all life has to offer. And by doing so, one avoids causing trouble that one can’t handle. "People have no grasp of what they do," Thulsa Doom tells Conan, and it is an accusation hurled at a young man who won’t follow and accept, a troublemaker who shows no respect for the sorcerer who has made Conan into what he is. Actions have consequences, in other words. To take action means to take responsibility, confront peril, defy failure, rely upon oneself and trust oneself. Conan can appreciate the simple truth of these things because his life has been a series of arduous drills in the reality of them--and being beaten into a bloody pulp by Doom’s personal guards is only the latest consequence in the series.

And Conan understands, too, implicitly if not explicitly, the riddle of steel, the enigma, the paradox that his father had tantalized him with when Conan was very young, the obvious explanation of which Thulsa Doom, his spiritual father, supplies: "Steel isn’t strong, boy. Flesh is stronger." He motions to a young woman standing on the cliffside overlooking them, and she steps forward at the command of the sorcerer to fall to her death. "That is strength, boy!" Thulsa Doom exults. "That is power! The strength and power of flesh! What is steel compared to the hand that wields it?" In illustration, Doom clenches one of his own hands, just as the reinvigorated Conan himself will do later on the shore of the Vilayet Sea, when he will sense that which the jealous Thulsa Doom can never know: the will to power of living human flesh. What is steel compared to the hand that wields it? The answer is plain: steel itself is nothing; the sword itself is not powerful; its power comes from the mastered will that directs it. When did a sword (or a reptile) ever have a will to be mastered? Only human beings have that strength, not swords, not steel. The riddle of steel is that, as strong as a sword may be, it is not nearly so strong as a human being’s will to power, and that, without a will, steel is certainly unable to relinquish voluntarily that which it does not have, to sacrifice itself in the service of a creature less than itself. (The will must be mastered and directed; otherwise, it will turn upon itself. People have no grasp of what they do.) Steel isn’t strong; flesh is stronger. Flesh can deny itself; flesh can die; flesh can be killed; but flesh has a will.



Conan the Barbarian is thoroughly suffused with a pagan spirit. It revels in this paganism, celebrates it with gusto, and explores it with the delighted enthusiasm of--well, of a Conan set free of his chains and able at last to romp and run unfettered by the choking restrictions of authority, manners, politesse, duty--civilization, in a word. It is John Milius who is enthused; it is Milius romping. "Howard," he said in an interview at the time of the movie’s release, "seemed as highly suspicious of civilization as I am. You know, people ask me how I could be interested in pagan, Teutonic cultures, and I tell them I cannot help myself--voices sing to me. I tell them there might be something we can learn from them." The illusion in the movie of a prehistoric era is complete, conveying the satisfying sense of a re-creation of a bygone time rather than the novel creation of an epoch that did not exist. Diverse cultures and customs shouldering one another in frontier towns and cosmopolitan cities, witches and subhumans still alive and kicking on the fringes of slowly expanding civilization--Milius’s Hyborian Age, like Howard’s, is a dramatic character in its own right, not merely a makeshift backdrop. Milius and designer Ron Cobb concocted the Hyborian era from scratch. "We decided to make a picture as though there was a [sic] Hyborian world," Cobb said in an interview in 1982. "Howard didn’t just imagine it. It was real."

The celebration of paganism that so dismayed some critics is precisely the element that is so alluring about the movie. Although its sense of rightness or correctness, of truthfulness, is jarring to refined, modern sensibilities, this paganism sounds deep chords of archetypal resonance, of primitive honesty about the world and us. As Jung wrote:

What psychologists call the psychic identity, or "mystical participation," has been stripped off our world of things. But it is exactly this halo of unconscious associations that gives a colorful and fantastic aspect to the primitive’s world. We have lost it to such a degree that we do not recognize it when we meet it again. With us such things are kept below the threshold; when they occasionally reappear, we even insist that something is wrong.

Every age has its built-in paradigms, its foundation of assumptions, its sacred cows; among the most sacred of cows in our time is the conceit of rationalism, the "culture of abstract intelligence," the presumption that human beings essentially are stable, thinking beings (despite evidence all around that refutes such idealism). "Rationalism," Ortega y Gasset wrote,

is a gigantic attempt to destroy spontaneous life through irony, regarding it from the point of view of pure reason . . . . [But] pure reason cannot supplant life: the culture of abstract intelligence is not, when compared with spontaneity, a further type of life which is self-supporting and can dispense with the first. It is only a tiny island afloat on a sea of primeval vitality. Far from being able to take the place of the latter, it must depend upon and be maintained by it . . . .

It is this primitive spontaneity that Conan the Barbarian celebrates, and John Milius, with unrestrained bravura, even at times with condescension, reminds us every minute that our self-assured reliance on the "tiny island" of abstract reason is a fiction--reminds us every minute that Ortega y Gasset’s perilous "sea of primeval vitality" and Jung’s mystical, natural "halo of unconscious associations" define us far better than our presumptuous rationalism does. Snakes. Swords. Sorcerers. Wolf-witches and life’s school of war, blood and loss and suffering and death and resurrection, friendship and codes of honor, self-discipline and vows of revenge--this is where we live, this is who we are. Our conscious rational life is only a small part of us, perhaps the least part, perhaps no more than an affectation, and certainly no more than an adjunct to the will to power.

Not even the gods count for much in such a vitalistic, willful world; in fact, the gods probably do not exist, or if they do, then they are no better than we are: "Battle pleases you, Crom, so grant me one request. Grant me revenge. And if you do not listen, then to hell with you!" "The old values have lost their force," E. L. Allen has written, discussing Nietzsche.

The supernatural has gone because there was no longer any place for it . . . . To be sure, men continue to bow to it in respect as though there were still something in the place that has been left empty by its departure. They are not yet aware of the frightful hazards to which they are exposed, now that they have been deprived of the old security. What stares us in the face is--just nothing! Nihilism menaces us. The old values have lost their force. But man cannot live without values . . . . He must therefore give them to himself.

Which is precisely what Conan does and what he represents in the movie, new values for a Hyborian world fallen into decadence: Osric the conqueror besotted on his throne, his daughter one with her generation in following a false god. New values embodied by the new man--or at least time-tested values and virtues, as John Milius presents them.

E. L. Allen is referring specifically to the death of God (as announced by Nietzsche) when he writes that "the supernatural has gone," but he could as well be describing Conan’s murdering Thulsa Doom and his freeing Doom’s followers from the monster’s seductive hold on them. "When Doom is undone, it’s almost as though he has to do it," John Milius said in an interview in 1982. "He realizes, just a bit, that he’s helping fulfill his own destiny. That another force must replace him." He elaborated:

Doom says, "I am the spring from which you came. When I am gone, you will never have been." This is direct from New Guinea folk religion, and all pagan religions have that statement. There is always a figure, whether it be Wotan or the sea or the winds or the airplane god, who finally says to man, "If you take me, you will never have been. I am the wellspring from which you come." Doom merely reflects this.

Conan deprives Doom’s cult of its security in their false god and deprives himself, as well, of the enemy who has given him his purpose in life. Now he is staring into the abyss; now he is the rope hanging over the abyss; but now he, the übermensch, facing nihilism, facing the nothingness, the emptiness, that results from his defiance, is free to create himself howsoever he will. He has accomplished that which he as übermensch necessarily had to do: fulfill a transvaluation of values (the phrase is Nietzsche’s). "The currency of moral judgment," Allen writes,

is to be melted down and minted into a fresh set of coins . . . . Man must begin . . . by the acceptance of a rule imposed upon him from without; only so can he become free and reach the stage at which he can defy with his "I will" the dragon that confronts him with "Thou shalt."

And what new values will replace those that have been overthrown? "[T]he final stage," Allen writes, "is not the self-conscious assertion [‘I will’]: it is a new naturalness and spontaneity, to accept and live out one’s life in simplicity and directness."

Simplicity and directness--as concise a description of Conan, Howard’s or Milius’s, as one could ask for.



True, too, to its pagan spirit is the manner in which Conan the Barbarian portrays the redemption of the hero at the conclusion of the movie. "In the classical monomyth," Jewett and Lawrence explain in The American Monomyth,

the beautiful maiden must be redeemed from the clutches of the sea monster, the endangered city spared from its peril, and the protagonist redeemed by fateful interventions in the nick of time. This pattern is much more diffuse in the classical monomyth than in modern materials standing closer to the American pattern. The classical hero may experience supernatural aid as he crosses the threshold into the realm of initiatory adventure and then returns, and he may confront trials embodying the redemption of others. But his own redemption takes the form of gaining mature wisdom, achieving atonement with his father, enjoying union with the goddess, and returning home with benefits for his people.

Conan the Barbarian fulfills this pattern perfectly because Milius has constructed a story firmly grounded in the traditions of Western heroic mythology. Closure such as this may not seem particularly unconventional or unusual until we reflect upon what has been the typically American pattern of redemptive denouement--Christian, moralistic, and self-righteous, its roots in Victorian-era popular entertainment. "The [American] redemptive scheme," write Jewett and Lawrence, ". . . has nothing to do with the maturation process. It fits rather the pattern of selfless crusading to redeem others." Their definition of redemption is that it is "the decisive rescue of [an] individual or community from the threat of evil"--which momentarily sounds like the plot of Conan the Barbarian except that Conan is not motivated by the moral impulse to free anyone from evil; he is motivated by revenge. Neither does Milius’s (nor Howard’s) Hyborian world resemble the requisite monomythic Eden, a threatened "benign community" rescued from imminent peril not by coming to terms with the matter but rather through the intervention of an outsider who represents order and moral certitude.

On another level, cloying, self-satisfying, personal redemption can be taken, as it frequently was in American big-budget studio dramas of the 1930s and 1940s, to an ultimate "transfiguration," as Ian Hamilton calls it: "the redemptive personality change, instantaneous, visible, and putatively cleansing for those who get to witness it." He lays the blame for these "sheer Hollywood, mawkish, melodramatic" scenes on Dudley Nichols, an enormously successful screenwriter of the period and author of scenes such as the climax of The Informer, for which he wrote the script:

[The] wretched Gypo Nolan gets what’s been coming to him. Traitor, drunkard, wastrel, overactor, he meets his Maker with a smile because his victim’s mother has decided to forgive him: "Gypo shivers from head to foot. A great joy fills his heart. Mercy and pity are upon him at last. He turns towards the front of the church and cries out in a loud voice of joy: ‘Frankie! Frankie! Your mother forgives me!’"

Not exactly Conan cutting off the head of a snake with his dad’s sword, is it?

Milius may not be treading terribly thin ice with his classically inspired, guilt-free, beyond-good-and-evil ending for Conan the Barbarian, but that ice nevertheless is not as solid as it could be. It’s the same slippery terrain that Martin Scorcese and David Lynch stand on and on which the late John Cassavetes prowled, that frozen patch of water of the sanctimonious, have-one’s-cake-and-eat-it-too variety that is so commonplace in corporate Hollywood movie scenarios being prepped for the multiplex. Quentin Tarantino, no stranger himself to playing fast and loose with the rules, explained this built-in hypocrisy in an interview with Dennis Hopper:

The Harrison Ford movie Patriot Games is the perfect example of an uptight American action movie. It’s supposed to be a revenge movie, all right? And as far as I’m concerned, if you’re going to make a revenge movie, you’ve got to let the hero get revenge . . . . But then they get into this stupid fight on this boat, and they do the thing that I despised the most: Harrison Ford hits the guy and the guy falls on an anchor and it kills him. And it’s like you can hear a committee thinking about this and saying, "Well, he killed him with his own hands, but he didn’t really mean to kill him, so he can go back to his daughter and his wife and still be an okay guy. He caused the death but it was kind of accidental."
As far as I’m concerned, the minute you kill your bad guy by having him fall on something, you should go to movie jail. You’ve broken the law of good cinema.

Not a single anchor is to be found in Conan the Barbarian, not a one.

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A Critical Appreciation of John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian by David C. Smith, part 3



3.

John Milius is not a particularly polished film director. Primarily a writer--he understands the three acts and a conclusion better than most other storytellers claiming the label do--his movies feel a little old fashioned, more solid than fluid, without much of the panache or high gloss usually associated with Hollywood product. But this tendency to never mind the rough edges or the stagy bits has worked to his advantage because of the virile nature of his movies. By emphasizing story content and character and not worrying about the seamlessness of the montage, Milius seems to be closer in spirit to international filmmakers, especially those of the generation just before his, than to the flashy auteurs who fabricate smoothly honed Hollywood goods. Conan the Barbarian is not eye candy, and John Milius is indeed not of his time. (This is, after all, a writer who resurrected in his screenplay for Conan the World War I battle cry "Do you want to live forever?"--and gave the line to Valeria.) Milius is a throwback to the directors he admires, John Ford and John Huston and Akira Kurosawa--masculine, literate storytellers and filmmakers who produced reflective movies emphasizing points of view that are cool and sober rather than warm and superficial, challenging rather than comforting. In their stories, events occur because of an inherent causality that human beings bring with them in their lives, not because an explosion or chase scene is required to keep audience interest from flagging. "Ford is the consummate filmmaker," Milius said in 1982, "and with Ford, technique is simple. He tells the story and gets his own personality and views into the film."

Milius’s movies are identifiable by his signature epiphanies, as they have been called--moments of isolated effect or style or display that serve as punctuation marks in his stories, as climaxes to individual sequences, or as cues to developments to come. Sometimes these epiphanies are forced and artificial, but just as often they are simple, honest, and direct--almost spontaneous. They are the visual counterparts to Milius’s taglines, his popular one-liners. (Without much effort, we can imagine Conan holding the edge of his sword to the throat of a defeated antagonist and, contemplating the wretch with more cool than a polar ice cap, saying, "This is a Cimmerian longsword, the most powerful weapon in the world. So you have to ask yourself, ‘Do I feel lucky today?’ Well, do you, punk?") Conan the Barbarian is chockful of these epiphanies, right from the start: Conan’s father, the Master, the swordmaker of the Cimmerian village, sitting with his young son on the height of a mountain, explaining that in this world, one can trust neither man nor woman nor beast but--holding up the latest, finest example of his workmanship--"This you can trust." The boy Conan staring at his mother’s hand as she falls dead, beheaded by Thulsa Doom. Conan the pit-fighter, arms raised in victory, now with "a sense of his own self-worth." Conan cutting away his chains with the Atlantean sword he has found and, with the tables now turned, cunningly eyeing the wolves that chased him across the steppe. Conan, revived from near-death and a changed man, as grim and unforgiving as a deathstroke, sharpening his sword at the campfire and giving no reply other than a scowl and the scraping sound of his whetstone to Subotai’s "We kill Thulsa Doom another day, agreed? Conan? Agreed?" That same scowl not long later when Conan, Valeria dead in his arms, looks back in the darkness toward her killer, the unseen Thulsa Doom. The immolation of Valeria on her funeral pyre, accompanied by Subotai’s "He is Conan, a Cimmerian. He won’t cry. So I cry for him." [2] And, after surviving the Battle of the Mounds, Conan bowing in deep respect, as he did when he was a pit-fighter, to Valeria’s ashes because she returned from the dead to aid him during Conan’s showdown with the murderous Rexor.

Other evocative scenes abound. Because of John Milius’s mastery in highlighting the dramatic moments of even relatively brief sequences, the episodes he adapts from Howard stories are knit well into the fabric of the movie’s narrative: the Wolf Witch sequence, likely derived from a scene in the Bran Mak Morn short story "The Worms of the Earth" (but surely based, as well, on a similar development in Kobayashki’s Kwaidan); the crucifixion on the Tree of Woe, well known from "A Witch Shall Be Born"; the ghostly return of Valeria, based on Bêlit’s supernatural reappearance in "Queen of the Black Coast." [3] Sequences inspired by Japanese movies also succeed: the resuscitation of the nearly dead Conan by the demon ghosts, based on a similar episode in Kwaidan, and the Battle of the Mounds, a homage to Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (as, indeed, is the character of the Wizard, to no small degree influenced by Toshiro Mifune’s portrayal in that early Kurosawa masterwork). Some of the most impressive lines in the movie are those of King Osric, spoken during his interview with the three thieves when he hires them to "steal my daughter back": "There comes a time, thief, when the jewels cease to sparkle, when gold loses its luster, when the throne room becomes a prison, and all that is left is a father’s love for his child." Impeccably delivered by Max Von Sydow, the words are purely Howardian in spirit and cadence, reminiscent especially of the melancholy opening of "The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune": "Then the gold of the throne is brass, the silk of the palace becomes drab. The gems in the diadem sparkle drearily . . . ." [4]

In another sequence, a quiet montage presented almost exactly at midpoint in the story, separating what has been from what will be and, for Conan, what he is from what he will become, the warrior rides alone to find and confront Thulsa Doom. He has made an important decision, although he surely has no choice other than the one he has made. He is riding to his death, no doubt. He has left Valeria (pregnant?) and Subotai because they clearly prefer to keep King Osric’s jewels and forgo a confrontation with the sorcerer to rescue the princess. But Conan now requires more of life than material wealth; he is motivated by memories and by an ambition presumably outside his companions’ experience and ken. A knight errant on a quest for revenge (and, whether or not he realizes it, on a path leading to a "transvaluation of values"), Conan on horseback is an image straight out of the legendary American West--and straight out of the dawn of storytelling. Unavoidably, he is searching for his grail, looking for his father, seeking the meaning of his life--or at least fulfilling his self-imposed purpose in life. He is Nietzsche’s übermensch, the spirit undergoing the three metamorphoses described in Thus Spake Zarathustra: First Part: "the spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child."

There is much that is difficult for the spirit . . . but the difficult and the most difficult are what its strength demands . . . .

All these most difficult things the spirit that would bear much takes upon itself: like the camel that, burdened, speeds into the desert . . . .

In the loneliest desert . . . the spirit becomes a lion who would conquer his freedom and be master in his own desert. Here he seeks out his last master: he wants to fight him and his last god; for ultimate victory he wants to fight the great dragon . . . .

"Thou shalt" is the name of the great dragon. But the spirit of the lion says, "I will." "Thou shalt" lies in his way, sparkling like gold, an animal covered with scales...

Values, thousands of years old, shine on these scales; and thus speaks the mightiest of all dragons: "All value of all things shines on me . . . ."

[W]hy is there a need in the spirit for the lion? Why is not the beast of burden, which renounces and is reverent, enough? . . .

He once loved "thou shalt" as most sacred: now he must find illusion and caprice even in the most sacred, that freedom from his love may become his prey . . . .

But . . . why must the preying lion become a child? The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred "Yes." For the game of creation . . . a sacred "Yes" is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who has been lost to the world now conquers his own world.

The parallels between this famous passage of Nietzsche’s and the general theme of Conan the Barbarian are distinct: Conan’s evolving from a slave, a "beast of burden," into a lion who challenges and defeats the dragon representing "all value of all things"--tradition, the values and sentiments alluring to and held sacred by the "much too many," Doom’s followers--then Conan’s further development into the child, "forgetting . . . a self-propelled wheel . . . the spirit [that] now wills his own will." Is it too much to read into Milius’s Conan that the "freedom from his love" means for the character freedom from the parents and tribespeople he remembers, freedom from the disciplining yoke of "thou shalt" that forged him into a supreme warrior, freedom even from Valeria, who would hold him back from his righteous quest? Certainly Conan is seeking out "his last master . . . for ultimate victory." Certainly he is creating himself, conquering his own world and willing his own will, when he beheads the Thulsa Doom who beheaded his mother and uses his father’s sword to do it, to kill the Thulsa Doom who is his spiritual father, who created Conan in every way except literally. And the sword is broken. ("This you can trust." The sword itself is not powerful; its power comes from the mastered will that directs it.) Conan’s last link to what he was and where he came from is broken, and he is indeed free, the new man, the past behind him, ready to utter the sacred "Yes" and move on. He has honored his father, his actual father, the Master, by avenging his death, but Conan has also slain his father, his spiritual father, Thulsa Doom, and has thus made of himself something unique, something new, a new man and a new type of man--"violent, lonely, godless . . . redeemed . . . fearless and fear-inspiring, great and lonely"--the übermensch.

The lion, now reborn and awakened in his own world of his own making, is a child, "innocence and forgetting," first cousin to the archetypal Holy Fool or Wise Fool of folklore, a figure divinely inspired but having little to do with the commonplace affairs that motivate most citizens, the "much too many." The Wise Fool is in the world but not of it, in Hazlitt’s well-known phrase. John Milius in interviews published at the time of the movie’s release stressed that he saw Conan as this sort of innocent: "While he was on the Wheel, he was like a beast who never really knows what is happening to him. When he’s thrown into the pit to fight, he’s still very innocent, but he begins to learn . . . . I tried to make Conan as innocent as possible, continually stress his wonderful naiveté; Conan’s a child in a world of savages." Certainly Milius deliberately portrays the character as progressing from this beast of burden to the lion, disrupter of the status quo. Ron Cobb said in a 1982 interview that John Milius "is very disillusioned with civilization, and inherently believes that all civilizations are corrupt. He romantically sees destructive rage as dignified and correct . . . . And in Conan, he can vent these feelings."



Accompanying the knight-errant sequence is composer Basil Poledouris’s sensitive and melancholy "The Search," which well evokes the loneliness of Conan’s spiritual quest. Poledouris’s score is critically important to Conan the Barbarian and as inseparable from it as Maurice Jarre’s is for Lawrence of Arabia and Sergei Prokoviev’s for Alexander Nevsky. From the pounding, elephantine introduction to the subdued, elegaic conclusion, with its reminiscences of Holst and The Firebird-like coda, the music is a sustained series of leitmotivs and thematic developments that echo and enrich the story’s events. The composer wrote "two hours of music for Conan," he said in an interview in 1982. "It was always in John’s mind that Conan would be solid music--much like an opera . . . . From the first frame of reel one to the end of the Wheel of Pain sequence, somewhere in the middle of reel three, is one long cue without any break. I was terrified when I first realized that." Poledouris was intimidated too by the thought of having to equal the music of great composers--Wagner, Prokoviev, Stravinsky, Orff--excerpts from whose works Milius had originally intended to use. But John Boorman’s Excalibur, released while Conan was shooting in Spain, used the same selections from Carmina Burana and Wagner’s Ring cycle that Milius had meant to rely on for the Conan soundtrack. Poledouris was equal to the challenge, however; Milius, watching the final cut of the movie in Rome, where Poledouris was recording the finished score, told the composer, after seeing the raid on the Cimmerian village with full orchestral accompaniment, "Prokoviev would be proud."

Prokoviev’s powerful score for Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938) greatly influenced both Milius and Poledouris, not least in the employment of a chanting chorus. In Conan, the chorus provides background commentary on Thulsa Doom; the somber choral sections seem to follow the sorcerer and hover near him like ghostly voices of his victims. When Milius decided not to use sections of Orff’s choral cycle Carmina Burana, Poledouris, inspired by the German composer’s settings of twenty-four medieval verses, "started looking into a lot of Gregorian chants, and also into some of the Catholic masses. The secondary theme of Doom is actually the Dies Irae." Poledouris wrote the lyrics for the choral passages in English; they were then translated into Latin. "Farewell, skies. Farewell, snows," intones the chorus during the slaughter of the Cimmerians. "Farewell, earth. We are dying; / we are dying for Doom." "Doom approaches, / bringing the Gift of Fury," announces the chorus as the young Conan watches his mother’s severed head fall to the ground. "Darkness reigns."

[Deleted]

A Critical Appreciation of John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian by David C. Smith, part 4



4.

As sincerely conceived and executed as Conan the Barbarian is, still, it is not flawless. John Milius’s sometimes-awkward mise-en-scène makes us wish at times that he had asked for one more retake. Some of the special effects are wanting, particularly the cartoonlike demon ghosts. And Arnold Schwarzenegger, who seems ideal for the title role, ironically proves to be a detriment rather than an asset in some scenes. Physically perfect for the role, Schwarzenegger appears so daunting that it strains credibility to see him in situations in which he is overpowered, even by Doom’s guards (Ben Davidson and Sven Ole Thorsen), two men as imposing as himself. [5]

More equivocal are Schwarzenegger’s age and personality. Following the introductory material, Conan reaches about age 16 or 17 in the movie; but Arnold Schwarzenegger, born in 1947, was approximately twice that age at the time of production. It shows. Accepting the movie’s Conan as an adolescent, especially in those scenes in which Thulsa Doom addresses him as "boy," strongly tests our suspension of disbelief. Just as ambiguous are Schwarzenegger’s own self-confidence and self-awareness. The actor is himself so positively motivated, so successful the competitor, entrepreneur, and self-promoter, that the forcefulness of his presence undercuts to some extent the verisimilitude of Conan as an innocent gradually awakening to his inner resources and capabilities. On the whole, however, Schwarzenegger’s performance is commendable, not least because he appears in nearly every scene and must, if the movie is to succeed, carry the whole story. Although his previous forays into acting had yielded him general praise for small roles (in the offbeat Stay Hungry, in The Villain, and as bodybuilder Mickey Haggerty in a made-for-television biography of Jayne Mansfield), Conan, tailored for him, was Schwarzenegger’s bid for international stardom and celebrity. It’s to his and John Milius’s credit that Schwarzenegger’s work overall in the movie is as good as it is.

What hurts the movie more than anything else, however, is that it was cut by approximately twenty minutes after its initial audience previews. [6] The material snipped out--a line or two here, half a page there--indicates that the full-length director’s cut of Conan the Barbarian was a much more sophisticated movie than the general-release version is.

John Milius wrote three drafts of his screenplay. The second, filed with the Writers Guild in November 1980, is substantially the movie as it was filmed. The major differences are that, in the second-draft script, Conan, not the Wizard, narrates the voiceover [7]; Thorgrim is not present, nor is the bit of business in which he figures at the Battle of the Mounds, his impalement on Conan’s spiked, counterweighted contraption, although a character named Yaro, "a huge black priest," fulfills some of what is given to Thorgrim as well as matter scripted for Rexor in the completed movie; and Rexor (the character Milius said he himself most identified with) is named Brak. Otherwise, the November 1980 draft of Conan the Barbarian is a fairly faithful guide to sequences deleted from the general-release prints. (In fact, production stills of some of these omitted scenes were published at the time of the movie’s release.)

Cut from the opening father-and-son sequence is the Master’s presenting the young Conan with the sword forged during the opening credits. "Learn the riddle of steel," he tells the boy, "and you won’t need Crom!" He puts Conan’s hand on his and together they hold the weapon. "Here. Your sword." The sword that Thulsa Doom takes, then, is as much Conan’s as it was his father’s. Thulsa Doom steals Conan’s own property, a development that emphasizes the hypocrisy of the cult leader and adds an even more personal dimension to the subtext linking warrior and sorcerer.

Quite a lot of material was clipped from Conan and Subotai’s exploration of Shadizar, including Conan’s lopping off the hand of a thief who tries to steal his sword, John Milius’s cameo appearance as a "lizard-on-a-stick" fast-food vendor, [8] and a street procession of Thulsa Doom’s followers, including what would have been the first appearance of the princess:

He sees a creature of such beauty as he has never imagined.... She smiles down, the wind blows her robe, revealing a golden thigh. She sees Conan and her mouth parts....

PRINCESS

You...warrior.... Throw down your sword...come back to earth.... 

He drifts after the procession.... Suddenly, Conan stops....

CHANT (o.s.) 

Doom...Doom...Doom.... 

Conan turns, his face distorted with confusion, fear and anger. Subotai senses it....

CONAN 

Who was that girl? The one of beauty with the snakes -- who spoke to me?

SUBOTAI 

That girl--ha! That was no girl, that was the princess of Shadizar, you fool!

A few pages later, when Conan and Subotai prepare to climb the tower of Set, they confront Valeria--whose dialogue identifying herself was left on the cutting room floor:

GIRL 

Ha! Two fools who laugh at death.

She sheathes her blade smoothly. They do likewise

GIRL 

I am Valeria.

Subotai is taken aback.

SUBOTAI 

I’ve heard of you--they call you a queen of thieves! A master! Where are your brigands?

VALERIA 

Cowards and lackeys.... Scared of Set--and-- Thulsa Doom.

With this scene removed, not once in the movie is Valeria identified or addressed by name.

Also cut from their break-in of the tower is an encounter with a three-eyed "hell-thing" that Subotai kills.

Lines trimmed from the thieves’ appearance before King Osric portray a political situation more complex and unstable than that indicated in the final cut of the movie: "Everywhere these evil towers," Osric tells the trio. "They take our youth and turn them into reptiles, vipers. My own soldiers dare not stand in their path. My fiercest warriors turn from duty . . . . Anyone who stands against them has been murdered." "Why do you not fear a dagger in your back?" Conan asks him. The question is prophetic. Doom means to be rid of King Osric, as indicated by a later, deleted scene:

THE GREAT HALL....

YARO 

My Lord, Thulsa Doom, the true prophet of Set, wishes that your daughter Yasmina may become his wife.

OSRIC 

Monstrous--you come in here and ask me that! Monstrous!

YARO 

As you wish, sire. It is the Grand Master’s wish that by an alliance of the marriage, Zamora would become the kingdom of Set.

OSRIC 

I am still king, and while I live I shall never sanction this monstrous union, this hellish corruption. Guards!

The guards step out, looking cold and efficient. Yaro looks them over....

YARO 

If I were to ask you, would you slay this infidel for my master?

Without a change in expression they draw their swords and advance on the king.... They slay him hideously. Yaro walks away. The guards follow him, sheathing their weapons.

When Conan is captured by Brak and three of Doom’s neanderthal guards, the vengeful Cimmerian is forced to endure a long speech by the sorcerer, an address to his followers that is an explicit, Charles Manson-like bid for power and social upheaval:

THULSA DOOM 

When I, your father, ask, Will you take life for me? Will your hand clutch the dagger and strike true to the infidel heart?... Many of you are about to go back to the world--to the leaders, judges and parents who lied to you and led you astray.... The day of Doom is at hand. The great cleansing.

These situations place Conan’s murder of Thulsa Doom in a far more volatile political environment than that shown in the movie as released, and they anticipate in an oblique way Conan’s eventual assumption of a throne of his own, on which he might prove to be a worthier monarch than Osric.




Some cuts, of course, helped rather than hurt the movie. John Milius said in 1982, "In one scene, Conan killed a couple of women--and we didn’t want him to do that because he’s a chivalrous fellow. I took the scene out. There were a couple of other bits with Zen touches, like where Conan thanks the Wheel of Pain when he’s released from it. It slowed up the film. In a way, you still get the idea."

Dialogue between Conan and Subotai when the Hyrkanian arrives to rescue the brutalized warrior from the Tree of Woe was left out, to the movie’s improvement. Subotai, the ever-hungry thief, can’t let the vulture Conan has killed go to waste:

CONAN 

What are you doing? 

SUBOTAI 

Taking the feathers off. 

CONAN 

You’re not going to eat that thing!

SUBOTAI 

I’m hungry. 

CONAN 

Eat it behind me--so I don’t have to watch. 

It’s a witty exchange that helps to define the characters, but cutting directly from Conan’s delirious vision of Subotai to the magic ceremony that will revive him maintains the integrity of the implication that Conan has been brought to death’s door because of the torture he has suffered.
Conan, Valeria, and Subotai’s furtive entry into Doom’s Mountain of Power to rescue the princess is a more strenuous and bloody effort in the second-draft screenplay than is the edited escapade that made it to the screen. Once they have covered each other with camouflaging pigment, they approach Doom’s fortress by floating down a river while hugging onto inflated goatskins. Caves, tunnels, and a bridge are patrolled by mutants and neanderthals that must be confronted and dispatched. (Are these mutants a story element left over from the Oliver Stone script?) Conan spies his father’s sword hanging on the wall behind Thulsa Doom’s throne in the orgy chamber but is unable to retrieve it during the melee that erupts when he and the others charge in to rescue the princess. Milius’s writing rings with the authenticity of a talent who could write some fine sword-and-sorcery if he had a mind to:

CLOSE - CONAN
He looks quickly at the sword and beyond it, sees glowing reptilian eyes in the darkness, ready to strike. In a bound he is down among the warriors, executing three flashing cuts. A body spasms--another arches, his iron blade broken along with his spine by Conan’s Atlantean steel. Before these three fall, Brak comes, wielding an axe overhand. Conan’s double-handed parry contains the blow, and both men collide, weapons clattering to the floor.
CLOSE - CONAN AND BRAK
Immense veins and muscles strain almost to bursting as these two enormous men crash together. Brak has Conan by the throat and, having the advantage of size, hurls himself and whips Conan, smashing him into the immense central pillar. The marble shatters; pieces of rock fall on them. Suddenly, a fire-crazed leopard leaps between them, tangling Brak in its chain. Brak screams and releases Conan. With hardly a gesture, he breaks the beast’s back with a snap and hurls it away.
Conan grabs the princess, who is given the single pronoun that, in the final cut, is uttered by Rexor; and her identifying him is because of a very different association from that of Rexor’s: the princess recognizes the young barbarian from the street procession in Shadizar:

Conan turns and sees the Princess struggling away. He leaps after her, grabs her brutally by the hair, and pulls her head around. She stares up at him.

PRINCESS 

You! 

Backhanding her to knock her senseless so that she won’t cause further trouble, Conan throws the princess over one shoulder and escapes with Valeria and Subotai, swords flashing and bowstring snapping all the way back to the river, where Thulsa Doom’s viper arrow strikes Valeria. She survives the return trip upstream and dies in Conan’s arms while Subotai maintains a watch on the princess.

VALERIA 

The wizard--I told him--I would pay the gods.... Hold me! Hold me close so that my wounds bleed into yours--

CLOSE - VALERIA
Her lips part from his, her voice barely a whisper....
DIFFERENT ANGLE
He holds her there, looking into her face. She is gone.
FLASHBACK
The boy, Conan, pushing at the Wheel of Pain. A tear falls from his eye and is frozen. It was the last time the Cimmerian vowed he would ever cry.
CLOSE - CONAN
Perhaps it is only a drop of water from the river, but it slips down his cheek.


The flashback is one of several that Milius indicates in the second-draft screenplay; all but one, serving as a memory triggered when Conan sees Thulsa Doom’s standard in the well that houses the giant snake in the Temple of Set, were eliminated from the final release print. These deletions are unfortunate. Despite the convention that flashbacks are best avoided in cinematic storytelling, their judicious use by thoughtful filmmakers can add depth and strength to a story. Milius inserted a number of them during the Battle of the Mounds, [9] where they add a very satisfying dimension of closure to this biography of a vengeful warrior:


CLOSE - CONAN
His face hardens, his eyes glint.
A FISHING LINE
plops into a Cimmerian lake long ago.
A falcon rustles its wings.
A girl opens her mouth to scream.
Porridge spills into the snow.
Horses’ hooves crash through ice, snow and underbrush.
Horses’ hooves thunder across the desert steppe in the gathering darkness.
THE FIRST MOUND
Twenty iron-plated riders, black against the sky, thunder over the mound and down around the others on either side....
CLOSE - CONAN
Several riders thunder by; one goes over.
THE FACE OF CONAN AS A BOY
watching the rider go over in slow motion.
CONAN
He steps out full into their path and swings with all his strength. There is a terrible METALLIC CLANG and splattering as the rider is cleaved from his horse....
RIDERS
They wheel and group, turn and charge back down the mounds again, howling and screeching with spears and swords glistening.
CONAN
He draws his sword, holding it across his face in the pit-fighter salute, then drops it behind him in position.
CONAN’S FATHER
The Master taking a similar position in the snow years before.
RIDERS
thunder down on Conan.


The conclusion of Conan the Barbarian allowed Milius to employ the finale he had originally envisioned in his script for Apocalypse Now, the battle between a modern man and primitive warriors, and the assassination of an authoritarian degenerate. "This time I had the chance to do the ending of Apocalypse Now the way I wanted it," he said in 1982. Having prevented Doom from regaining the Princess Yasmina and, with the help of Subotai and the Wizard, having successfully defeated the sorcerer’s small army (and having done it on sacred ground, atop the ancient burial mounds and among the monumental cromlechs that have stood since the "days of the titans," warriors and supermen of the dawn of humanity), Conan has at last cleared a path to the monster against whom he vowed revenge so long ago. The grim years have forged Conan into the übermensch, into the new man unlike other men. He stands on the brink of the future, his own as well as humanity’s. What has he learned? Has he truly mastered himself? Is his will to power equal to, superior to, the reptilian seductiveness of the inhuman Thulsa Doom? And if he slays Doom, what then remains for him, what meaning, what sort of life?

THULSA DOOM

(softly) 

You have come to me, my child. Who is your father if it is not me? Who gave you the will to live? I am the wellspring from which you flow--when I am gone, you will never have been. What will your world be without me?

He reaches out and touches Conan’s shoulder.
THULSA DOOM
My son.
They stand eye to eye--a test of ultimate will.
CLOSE - THULSA DOOM
His eyes are strong, dark and filled with sorcery and power but nothing human.
CLOSE - CONAN
His expression is forceful and brave but deeply wrought with inner emotion. His eyes widen softly, his face slackens as if he has been relieved.
CLOSE - THULSA DOOM
He sees the change and believes Conan has weakened, has bent to his will.

THULSA DOOM 

My son. 

CLOSE - CONAN’S HAND
holding his father’s broken sword, moving up in a swift arc and down, chopping into Thulsa Doom’s neck and shoulder....
THULSA DOOM AND CONAN
Doom sinks to his knees.

THULSA DOOM 

You would kill your--father? 

CLOSE - CONAN
He withdraws the blade and wheels it down with another mighty chop--and another.
THE CROWD
Each blow shakes them and drives them back.
CONAN
He pulls back the head of Thulsa Doom and the body falls back, sliding down the stairs. He stands full on, looking down on the thousands of lights, the head in one hand, his father’s broken sword in the other. Silence.

CONAN (v.o.)

He was right--the answer was not in the blade but in the man.... If my father was the light of day--Thulsa Doom was my night....


CONAN
He sits on the steps and watches as the lines form myriad patterns of light far below him.

CONAN (v.o.) 

They were his children and now they were like so many orphans--but like myself-- they were free.

This is where John Milius ends his movie, his interpretation of Conan and of Robert E. Howard’s visionary Hyborian Age, with the warrior’s vengeance fulfilled and Conan, the new man, the übermensch, now beyond good and evil, in a contemplative posture--a final nod to Howard--as Thulsa Doom’s duped followers awaken from their entranced fascination and wander away, free. "What was silent in the father speaks in the son," Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zaeathustra: Second Part. And: "Only where there is life is there also will: not will to life but--thus I teach you--will to power...." Cut was a concluding scene in which Conan leads the princess back to Shadizar, and never filmed was a quiet epilogue in which Conan and Subotai make their goodbyes: "I will see you again, Conan," Subotai tells him, "when we both hang from the gates of Hell."

CONAN (v.o.) 

Thus, I went west, where the merchants were fat and the ports crammed with women, wine, and plunder. Ah, but that is another story....

[Deleted]

A Critical Appreciation of John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian by David C. Smith: part 5



5.

Conan the Barbarian is an old-fashioned movie told in a conventional way. It does not exhibit the manipulation of cinematic devices and audience expectations that since the mid-1970s has progressively been the hallmark of action movies, a reflexive instant gratification that promises audiences everything and delivers it, too. In an article published shortly before Conan was released in 1982, Stephen Schiff refers to the "repeatable experience" that formed the appeal of genre movies--Westerns, films noir, war pictures, screwball comedies--during the heyday of the Hollywood studios and points out that "true genre movies don’t exist anymore" because so-called genre movies produced today are more about a genre as defined in retrospect rather than of a genre: "It’s a matter of ontology. When a being is aware of itself, it becomes a different being. And even though Body Heat is a very good movie, it’s not a true film noir because it’s too much about the form--as Double Indemnity and D.O.A. and Out of the Past never were and never could be." [10]

In the 1970s, Schiff says, such directors as Robert Altman and John Milius’s film school contemporaries Steven Spielberg and George Lucas "began to use genre as if it were a recombinant nucleic acid--to create new forms." A "recombinant-genre" movie such as Star Wars

can give birth to what looks like a new genre . . . but it doesn’t act the way genres act . . . . George Lucas doesn’t work within or even on genre. He plugs in genre, flashing its proven elements at us as though they were special effects . . . . [R]ecombinant-genre movies delight in the viewer’s ignorance. The audience for Outland doesn’t necessarily know from High Noon, and the crowds that flock to Raiders of the Lost Ark may never have heard of Lash LaRue or Tailspin Tommy. Parts of old genres replace the nuts and bolts of narrative that used to keep movies running. More and more, genre becomes a secret junkyard.

The secret junkyard of postmodernism, that is (the term was not yet commonplace when Schiff wrote his essay). Postmodernism is concerned with demographics more than it is drama, with form more than function, with the mechanical more than the natural. It is cynical, relying for its effects on the automatic identification and instant appeal of known quantities, the "junkyard" of images, icons, motifs, and gimmicks that have developed in the kinetic, commercial, American twentieth century. Postmodernism is the sound bite, the bumper sticker, the high concept: content removed from its context and now accepted in and of itself, one dimensionally. [11] Postmodernism does not reinterpret; it merely reiterates. Purveyors (one hesitates to use the word creators) of postmodern entertainment do not as a rule respectfully borrow from and build upon the work of their artistic forebears or stand upon their shoulders; they simply take. Postmodern narrative is a series of non sequiturs lined up like so many separate squares on a game board. Cut to the chase. Go over the top. Use stick figures who do not grow or mature but who transform. Astonish with sudden shocks, or persist in ratcheting up precalibrated shocks; do not enlighten with outcomes of gradual revelation. Above all, be impatient. [12]

Schiff was prescient. His essay was written before MTV signed on via cable television, before our summer entertainment became dominated by big-budget, lighter-than-air action-adventure movies at the metroplex, before word-processing authors of popular fiction became corporate profit centers (just as their stories became assembly-line widgets that either enhanced the bottom line or were dropped to make room for more successful, more appealing products), and long before the personal computer revolution, pushed into fast forward by Bill Gates, digitized everything from payroll checks to the Five-Foot Shelf to pin-ups on the Internet. Schiff saw that Star Wars itself was the source "of a genre that transcends cinema: the video game"; little could he know that just on the horizon were new and improved, vastly more sophisticated video games as well as Dungeons and Dragons, a product that begat a whole new sensibility in action-fantasy novels, movies, and games that in turn begat such hybrid, more-context-than-content corporate falderal as the syndicated television programs Hercules and Xena, Warrior Princess--recombinant-genre products no doubt designed that way from the first strategy session.

The ease with which images and token concepts are digested and burped back up in our accelerated, manic, postmodern "communications" culture trivializes everything. As a filmmaker, John Milius is constitutionally incapable of creating such cross-pollinated, live-action cartoons as the Indiana Jones movies or Xena, Warrior Princess. Conan the Barbarian is indeed a genre movie, albeit of a genre only sporadically represented on the screen until the 1980s and not universally identified as a cinematic genre until then. It stands on solid storytelling ground and is very different movie from, for example, Return of the Jedi, with which it is more or less contemporaneous but which is little more than a marketing tool posing as a feature film.

Conan the Barbarian was not cast in the same mold as the post-Star Wars recombinant-genre movies have been. It has no secret junkyard; it is content rather than context; it is old fashioned because John Milius is himself an old-fashioned filmmaker. He is inspired by storytellers who came before him but he does not steal from them; he takes down carefully from the shelf, blows the dust off, and incorporates, borrowing sensibly and with gratitude. Conan the Barbarian ushered in or helped to usher in a tidal wave of audience-tested, audience-approved cinematic, computer, and video products--Sword-and-Sorcery Lite, Heroism Lite, Swordplay Lite. The antics displayed in these no-brainer time-wasters are not Milius’s style. Compare Conan with the action-fantasy offerings that have been produced since its release (and which have been so powerfully influenced by it), recombinant-genre movies that move but do little else. They are the effluvia of marketing department strategy sessions; they are corporate products helping to hold the bottom line with their embarrassingly unimaginative hunks du moment, laughable anachronisms, reckless, ninjalike acrobatics, and insipid dialogue. We can imagine John Milius regarding this parade of imposters and bastard offspring, shaking his head and smiling to himself. Kids today. What they don’t know. You think this is good? You think this is what it’s about? You take a look at The Seven Samurai. That is strength! That is power! The strength and power of the old masters!

After you’ve seen as many samurai movies as I have, you may begin to suspect why I’d not be amazed if I saw Conan in Japanese dress, plying a Japanese blade, and strewing the Japanese landscape with enemy spare-parts . . . .

E. Hoffman Price

Changes are inevitable when fictional cult characters are mainstreamed into the popular culture, taken from their particular media and adapted for others: witness the periodic incarnations of Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Zorro, Superman, Batman, Buck Rogers--even Popeye. John Milius’s Conan is not Howard’s Conan, true; yet the director’s translation of the character, albeit done to suit his own agenda, is generally respectful of Howard and is sincerely motivated. Milius presents us with a tradeoff: an honest if imprecise, large-scale action-fantasy movie with better production values than might have been hoped for, with the character Conan portrayed à la Milius, as a barbarian but more child, more stranger in a strange land than renegade wolf in man’s skin, and destined to become a hero, destined to fulfill a role (and a philosophical argument), rather than presented as an outlander savage carving his way through life as he pleases with no guaranteed outcomes.

John Milius’s Conan has a godlike aura not present and not even hinted at in Howard’s fiction. Milius’s Conan is destined for greatness: he is the Nietzschean superman with a "secret nobility . . . of an aristocratic elevation." We watch as this Conan suffers his successive stages of life experience, becoming stronger through each hardship that does not kill him, his learning curve right out there for all of us to see as he gains inner resourcefulness and heightened awareness, transforming from object to subject, from being acted upon to taking action. Milius’s Conan is closer in conception to the fated heroes of Greek tragedy, the superheroes and gods of Wagner, or even the kings of Shakespeare’s history plays, all of whom guess at that which we, observing them, know already: the outcomes of their fortunes. Howard’s Conan, despite the stories’ pop-exotic milieu, is the archetypal American, full of gumption, restless, wandering, as cynical and knowledgeable, as predatory and deadly as an Indian fighter or gunslinger (with some gusty laughter thrown in), a literally pagan Huck Finn lighting out for the frontier. Milius’s Conan is European in character, part medieval knight on a quest, part Teutonic warrior (even if schooled in samurai arts), reflecting the rich, violent, hampered, many-fabricked quilt or multifaceted mosaic of a milennium of continental history and culture. Howard’s Conan is a New World individual, a brash commoner; Milius’s, an Old World lord, however unlordly his formative experiences. Each, however, is heroic and a hero, exhibiting the skills and personality we expect of heroes in the Western tradition, and each inhabiting a universe of conventions we expect in tales of epic fantasy.

Aside from this reinterpretation of the character, however, Conan the Barbarian is successful because it exhibits an internal consistency noticeably forgone in other sword-and-sorcery movies. Milius and his production crew achieved the most deliberate evocation of heroic fantasy as a genre on its own terms that Hollywood has yet given us. Three equipoised elements--Conan, the pagan milieu, and the musical score--sustain the movie and each other to provide the internal balance for what is essentially the biography of a personified idea, that of Nietzsche’s übermensch. Conan is Milius’s ideal heroic character. He and his companions--Valeria, Subotai, and the Wizard--are each strong, unique individuals. They matter. They operate outside the law (as do most Milius heroes) but they represent personal values, earned through hardship and awareness, that the degraded civilized world scorns. The milieu, the Hyborian world, poses every unfair advantage to these strong people; it would prefer to chew them up and spit them out, as it has King Osric. Semicivilized, with pockets of savagery and sorcery giving the lie to its pretensions, and unstable because of Thulsa Doom’s political aspirations and the disabling influence of the age- and drink-weakened Osric, Milius’s Hyborian world is Conan’s foil. Osric, another dead father figure for the hero, must hire thieves to do what he himself as king should have done long before: deal with his enemy face to face, anticipate what was coming and prepare to manage it. Thulsa Doom is Conan’s shadow, what the hero--or Nietzsche’s spirit in the desert--must overcome to attain that of which he is capable, his development to the status of overman, superseding all that is in the world he was born into. The musical score is our guide to and an emotional commentary on these events and characters, unifying the saga, illuminating the stages of the hero’s life and struggle, accompanying the operatic storyline in a manner not unlike that of the leitmotivs in Wagner’s Ring cycle. All these elements contribute to the thematic honesty and internal consistency of Conan the Barbarian, to the movie’s folk-epic emphasis on self-reflection, memory, and fatefulness.



"Write with blood," Nietzsche says in Thus Spake Zarathustra: First Part, "and you will experience that blood is spirit." Robert E. Howard understood the truth inherent in this sentiment; so does John Milius. To damn an artist for not doing what he or she never intended to do is fruitless. John Milius did not intend to produce Conan the Barbarian as a letter-perfect (or frame-perfect) rendition of the Robert E. Howard stories (not that a wholly faithful translation from one medium to another is possible, anyway). What he has provided us, however, is a heroic-fantasy movie whose characters and motivations and whose milieu were built carefully and thought through thoroughly, as a good novelist puts a good story together. Conan does not cheat us by taking for granted the powerful and fantastic (but easily trivialized) elements of heroic fantasy; it does not pander to the lowest common denominator of audience expectations. With Conan the Barbarian, John Milius achieved that which less imaginative and less caring moviemakers have not, that which Howard himself provided with his original short stories: heroic fantasy to be taken seriously and regarded respectfully.

[Deleted]

A Critical Appreciation of John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian by David C. Smith: Notes & Sources cited



Notes

1. The first screenplay for a proposed Conan movie was in fact written by Roy Thomas, at the request of Ed Summer, during Summer’s and producer Ed Pressman’s initial, lengthy negotiations from 1975 to 1977 to secure film rights to the character.

2. Actor Sab Shimomo, who dubbed Gerry Lopez’s voice in the movie, pronounces the "c" in "Cimmerian" as a soft "s" rather than as a hard "k" sound. "Cimmeria" in all its inflections, however, should be pronounced with a "k" sound. The word is spelled with a "k" in Homer, and the historical Cimmerians were known to the Assyrians as Gimirrai. (Previously, the Cimmerians were regarded by scholars of Scripture as descended from Gomer--"Gomerians.")

3. Other elements of the Conan canon in particular and Robert E. Howard’s stories in general that were adapted for the movie are Conan’s being chased by the wolves and taking refuge in the cave where he finds the Atlantean sword ("The Thing in the Crypt") and, plausibly, from The Hour of the Dragon, "I’ve trusted no one too far, man or woman" (Chapter 6); Conan’s slaying the giant serpent (Chapter 17); his disguising himself as a priest of Set to enter the temple (Chapter 18); his encounter with the seductive vampire, Akivasha, who, in a line suggestive of that of the Wolf Witch, tells him, "There is strength in you--great strength . . . ." and who is described by Howard in language that could as well suffice for the noxious Thulsa Doom ("This foul perversion was the truth of everlasting life.") (also Chapter 18); and Conan’s sneaky entry into the temple (Chapter 19), which parallels the break-in of the Mountain of Power. Borrowed from the King Kull stories are the name Thulsa Doom ("Delcardes’ Cat") and the concept of a shape-changing serpent-man ("The Shadow Kingdom"). The name Subotai is that of a character in "Red Blades of Black Cathay."

4. John Milius said in 1982 that, of Howard’s fiction, he likes "the Bran Mak Morn stories. I was really fascinated with those. I liked the Bran Mak Morn stories the best. My favorite Howard story isn’t even about Conan. It’s a King Kull story called ‘By This Axe I Rule!’ That’s a great story. It has some beautiful shadings."

5. Although it is convenient to visualize the overman as literally a perfect physical specimen or superman, this is an oversimplification of Nietzsche’s concept. True, the German philosopher championed the pagan ideals of classical Greek culture, but his emphasis was on the new man’s intellect and creativity, his autonomous self-creation, his will to power.

6. Mike Mayo, in an article published in 1983, wrote, "Violence is not the only thing cut from the American release print of Conan; the European release print is some twenty minutes longer than the truncated American version."

7. Mako, who reads these lines in his persona as the Wizard, neglects to supply the verb "came" in the second sentence: "And onto this, Conan, destined to wear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia . . . ." It is possible to interpret the line as without a verb--"And onto this--Conan . . . ."--but Howard, in his The Nemedian Chronicles excerpt, presents the sentence as "Hither came Conan the Cimmerian . . . to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet," and John Milius, in his second-draft screenplay, paraphrases Howard: "And hither came I, Conan, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth beneath my sandaled feet."

8. Retained, however, although abbreviated in the editing room, was designer Ron Cobb’s cameo appearance as the black lotos dealer.

9. As Oliver Stone had in his screenplay, Milius in his first-draft script of Conan the Barbarian plotted a large-scale battle for the movie’s conclusion. Ron Cobb said in a 1979 interview: "The battle scenes that have been structured are massive and sweeping, but John wants an emphasis on Conan as a strategist, working out logistics, luring armies into deathtraps. At this stage, he is blocking out the battles, and the tactics are very important. Conan and his freebooters and his Zamoran army are all out-numbered, so he has to be very clever."

10. This is precisely what ails lackadaisical or insincere sword-and-sorcery fiction. As soon as the story becomes an issue more of supplying its required elements rather than discovering or investigating those elements, a matter more of painting by the numbers rather than experiencing what the colors can do, a means more of exploitation than exploration, we are no longer enjoying a genre for its vital, creative possibilities but appreciating it for what it is, for how we have defined it, limited it, domesticated it, ossified it, killed it. We are nibbling rather than devouring. We are witnesses rather than participants. We are following rules rather than making or breaking them. We are within the closed room of the classical, not out under the open skies of the romantic.

11. Compare the undemanding, immediate acceptance by popular audiences today of such icons as the Smiley face and Ronald McDonald, or the unquestioning accommodation of plot holes and shallow characterization in a postmodern, popular summer movie such as Independence Day, with the wealth of allusions to Scripture, Shakespeare’s plays, Aesop’s fables, and Greek and Roman myths, as well as to modified West African folk tales, Scots-Irish ballads and tall tales, and native American stories, to which the forebears of today’s popular audiences responded. The first are accepted unquestioningly and forgotten in the blink of an eye; the latter inform and instruct as they entertain (and certainly not always with lofty ideals or sanitized morality), and they resonante with a cascade of associations to serve a lifetime.

12. It is important to clarify why Robert E. Howard’s creating the genre or subgenre of heroic fantasy or sword-and-sorcery does not constitute his merely developing a recombinant-genre form by repackaging the popular story elements of his own time. Howard incorporated fantasy, horror, adventure, historical, and even mystery fiction elements into his new kind of story (much as H. P. Lovecraft combined traditional horror story elements with scientific rationalism to create what has been called cosmic horror fiction or Gothic science fiction), but "parts of old genres" do not "replace the nuts and bolts of narrative" in Howard’s stories. He could not have successfully marketed such insubstantial work, in any event, given the literacy of the editors and readers of his period. Just as importantly, the recombinant-genre form of storytelling Schiff identifies could not have come into existence or been accepted wholesale until the last quarter of the twentieth century--that is, not until the elements of genre stories had saturated public consciousness to such a degree that these stories’ icons, devices, and formulas could be offered out of context as self-explanatory images to postliterate audiences. The actual precursors of postmodernist storytelling are the German Expressionist films of the 1920s--The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Siegfried, Kriemhild’s Revenge, Shadows, and others. In these films, characterization and narrative are minimal or even forgone; image is paramount. The worlds of these movies, like those of Georges Mèliés, Ed Wood, and underground experimental filmmakers from Salvador Dali to George Kuchar, exist in their own dreamscapes, far removed from the literal constraints of ordinary time and space that even the weakest of formulaic genre stories still grudgingly accepted. Like most advances in American popular entertainment in this century, postmodernism is rooted in technologic innovation--movies, videotape cassette players, cable television, personal computers--and emphasizes style over substance just as it emphasizes image over the written word. Postmodernist trends in print fiction developed once these innovations were under way.



Sources cited

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Howard, Robert E. "The Nemedian Chronicles." Quoted in: Carter, Lin and L Sprague de Camp. "The Thing in the Crypt." Foreward. In: Howard, Robert E, L Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter. Conan. New York, NY: Lancer Books, 1968.

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Price, E Hoffman. Introduction to The Last Celt: A Bio-Bibliography of Robert Ervin Howard. Lord, Glenn, editor and compiler. West Kingston, RI: Donald M. Grant, 1976.

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Sammon, Paul M. "Cobb the Designer." Cinefantastique, April 1982.

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[Von K]

A fascinating article, thanks for posting it Hun.

[Aryeh]

Interesting read. Thanks, Hun!