When Did Body-building Take Off?
Bodybuilders and bodybuilding are a fact of life. We've seen them on beaches and gyms and in photographs. What's interesting is that they are a fairly new phenomenon that more or less grew out of the 1970s and '80s. Since the late nineteenth-century, there had been bodybuilders and bodybuilding, but people who did this were considered marginal, eccentric, and lower class.
Today, many men and women aspire to become bodybuilders, and many more admire them for their looks and the discipline that got them there. The rise of the bodybuilder from the late 1970s is yet another chapter in the rise of the doll and the cyborg in our contemporary lives: the body is heavily controlled and mediated. The body is a thing apart. The body is a machine and a product of technology (nutrition, steroids, and machines).
It all Started With the Documentary, Pumping Iron
Before the 1970s, bodybuilding was still a specialized niche sport practiced by hapless, morbidly obsessed people, cashouts, and odd-bods. It entered into the popular mainstream with the documentary Pumping Iron (1977), which catapulted Arnold Schwarzenegger to celebrity status, assuring some screen fame for Franco Columbu and Lou Ferrigno would go on to play the Hulk in the televisions series in the 1980s.
Directed by George Butler, Pumping Iron tells of the 100 days before the Mr Olympia and Mr Universe competitions in Pretoria in 1975. Still watched today, the film offers a penetrating and personal insight into a sport and an obsession that had previously been treated with skepticism, and to some extent, feared.
And the influence of this film and the ‘Arnie phenomenon’ that followed it was inestimable.
As the follow-up documentary Iron and Beyond states, where once bodybuilding was reserved for the backs of comic books and the activity of ‘freaks and fools’, it led to the multi-billion dollar fitness revolution of the 1980s.[i] A spin-off ‘sister’ version involving women, Pumping Iron II: The Women, was produced in 1985.
Pumping Iron was followed by a small flurry of film and telemovies, including The Hustler of Muscle Beach (dir. Jonathan Kaplan, 1980), about a competition at the muscle mecca, Muscle Beach in Venice California, and which including appearances from Columbu again, and Frank Zane. Somewhat eclipsed by Schwarzenegger's stellar career (who in the muscle world is affectionately referred to as just 'Arnold'), Zane preceded him as Mr. Olympia is one of only three to have beaten him in a contest (1968).
Zane was instrumental in ushering in the distinction in bodybuilding between considerations of proportion and beauty over basic mass.
Zane effectively introduced the category of 'aesthetics' into bodybuilding, a category that has gone a little by the wayside in favour of mass in our time.
Zane would also author numerous self-promoting books about the virtues of bodybuilding. But in the words of Sylvester Stallone, Schwarzenegger’s ‘place is secure as the father of the new wave of pumpology’.[ii]
Frank Zane (year e.g. 2005), https://physicalculturestudy.com/2016/02/16/frank-zanes-growth-program/
Schwarzenegger and Pumpology
After the sequel to Pumping Iron, The Comeback (1980), Schwarzenegger began his film career as Conan the Barbarian (1982). Deriving from the comic book series, what distinguishes this move from other films of this ilk until this time was, to put it plainly, Arnold’s body.
Although he had appeared in a film before, such as the ill-fated Hercules in New York (1969), Conan's historical fantasy element, while never pretending to be a Visconti masterpiece, lent the main actor. The latter grunted his few lines, an air of mystery and otherworldliness. Early films such as Hercules (Pietro Francisci, 1958) had involved muscle men, but steroids and other weight-gaining supplements did not assist them.
The maximalized, hypertrophied body that would come to be identified with the brashness of the 1980s was definitely of a different order and has come to define benchmarks in film ever since. One only needs to compare the still muscular but now comparatively scrawny body of Charlton Heston in Ben Hur (1959) or Kirk Douglas in Spartacus (1960) with that of Gerard Butler in an antiquity flic of more recent vintage 300 (2006).
The implausibly high level of buff-to-fat ratio of such a film results from nutritional technology and sophisticated training techniques.
Arnold Schwarzenegger as the title character in Conan the Destroyer (1984), directed by Richard Fleischer — https://www.britannica.com/topic/Conan-the-Barbarian-fictional-character
Hardbody Films
The furious rise in popularity of bodybuilding in the 1980s—which also saw the first female bodybuilders and bodybuilding contests—is also attributable to the age of economic rationalism and aggressive foreign policy, the Reagan era. In Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era, Susan Jeffords makes the strong case that the kinds of films produced in the 1980s were a clear reflection of a culture that had grown uneasy and impatient with what was widely considered the emasculating pacifism of the Carter era. This era saw the rise of what in film circles is called the ‘hardbody film’.
Schwarzenegger's films, such as Terminator (1984) and Sylvester Stallone’s acclaimed Rambo series that begins with First Blood (1982), decisively demarcate an age of U.S. male heroism made possibly by unfeasibly large muscles. And in each case, the character has some degree of dehumanization, reduced to an object, an instrument, not only through military training but also, one can add, by excessive muscle training. (Note also that there are dolls of all these characters, many of which are valuable collectors’ items.)
Jeffords then observes a new relationship that she sees as epitomizing the Bush-era just after Reagan (which presages the new millennial cyborg doll-body to be discussed in the final chapter). As opposed to Rambo, who despite his forcefulness and implacability still shows signs of affect, and therefore humanity, Batman offers us a new scenario:
Batman shifts the focus on masculine identity away from hard-bodied heroism to manhood divided and troubled.…Batman exteriorizes that ambivalence by dividing the body and the emotions, depicting that body as something to be put on and off at will…As in the Bush presidency, the hard body is being rejected and embraced, recognized as a burden and as a necessity, as something to hide at the interpersonal level and as something to display in the public arena, as a source of fear and of attraction, or goodness and destruction.[iii]
What Jeffords describes is the ultimate ambivalence within the body-object, the body-as-sculpture, the body-as-doll in relation to ‘nature’ and humanity. For if they exist together, as with Batman himself, it is always an uncomfortably fraught union.
Confessions of a Bodybuilder
Among the more arresting and amusing accounts of the bodybuilding, travails are to be found in the memoir of the Oxford graduate-cum-competitive bodybuilder Samuel Fussell in his book Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder.
He describes the staggering regimen of two work-outs a day, the supplements, the steroids, and the sleep, how one sculpts one's own body that becomes an obsession where one has not much time for anything else. ‘”Bodybuilding. It’s not just about size, it’s about symmetry,” was a line as common in the gym as in the magazines, “The Apollonian Ideal,” this symmetry was called, after classical Greek sculpture. The neck, the calves, the arms, should all be the same size.’[iv]
Fussell, whose experience is embedded in the 1980s, witnessed a radicalization of the body that was not mere building. Still, sculpting—‘body sculpting' is a now a stock phrase within the bodybuilding and more expansive gym repertoire—and the proponents would actively become sculptures, assuming classical poses such as the contrapposto, exemplified by Michelangelo’s David.
In recalling his bodybuilding days in a more recent interview, Fussell confessed that he ‘had a girlfriend who simply stroked my arms and stared at them. I was reduced to a body part. But given I had reduced my own life to building a body part, how could I object that she was significantly more interested in my bicep than in me’?[v]
Fussell mentions 'The Walk', a gait proper to bodybuilders that are not only a result of their bulk but also a physical signature. In the lead up to competitions, the body is subjected to a radical kind of diet intended to reduce the fat for the showing of muscle definition, a process that leads to vertigo and pain.
He even deprived himself of toothpaste because of the sodium levels, which led to water retention.[vi] Evidently, the price of the appearance of absolute 'fitness' is extreme bodily disquiet. In preparation for his final competition, to 'get ripped', shed fat, to be 'shredded', 'shrink-wrapped, and 'sliced and diced', Fussell recalls the way he was reduced to a vulnerable shadow, perceiving average temperatures as cool, and with a fat content so low that the lack of padding on the soles of feet, given his body weight, made it painful to walk.[vii]
Unlike Kleist’s marionette, In this pursuit of melon-like bulges, the professional bodybuilder becomes a paragon of self-consciousness in becoming an objectivised ideal.
References:
[i] McVeigh, David and Scott McVeigh, Iron and Beyond, 2002, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiXxifU5ilQ
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era, New Brunswick: Rutgers U.P., 1994, 97.
[iv] Samuel Fussell, Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder, New York: Avon Books, 1991, 185
[v] Michael Joyner, ‘Sam Fussell: an interview with the author of Muscle’, Human Limits, 10 June 2014, http://www.drmichaeljoyner.com/sam-fussell-an-interview-with-the-author-of-muscle/
[vi] Fussell, Muscle, 223.
[vii] Ibid., 216.
