Real Time

Conan the Barbarian (1982) opens with a cultist raid on a Cimmerian village: a preteen Conan witnesses his father torn apart by dogs and his mother beheaded by Thulsa Doom, a snake-worshipping warlord portrayed by James Earl Jones in an incredible wig. The surviving children of the village are marched out of their mountainous homeland through a series of dissolving shots, before their eventual sale into slavery at a monumental grist mill called the Wheel of Pain. The Wheel is massive, built of rough hewn logs, and has a towering central shaft embellished with carved monsters, snakes, and skulls; roughly forty feet tall, it’s the only structure visible on this vast and barren plain. 

Conan and his peers are shackled to the spokes of the Wheel and wordlessly instructed to push. Conan grows up in a short montage, grinding through snow and heat, day and night, year after year after year. We are never shown the Wheel stopping. Over time the other children disappear from the background, dead or sold off into other forms of slave labor, until Conan, now an adult of gargantuan proportions played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, is the sole operator of the mill. Conan no longer struggles with the task; due to his impressive physique, he is sold to a gladiatorial arena, and the Wheel of Pain finally stops turning. 

The entire scene takes about two and a half minutes but covers twenty years of Conan’s life. There is no indication that Conan has done anything but work and seethe over this time, but it has given him the body required to seek his revenge. The Wheel of Pain was an invention of writer/director John Milius for the 1982 film, whose intention was for Conan’s time lashed to the Wheel to be a heavy-handed allegory for “the fruitless toil of life itself”, making him a quasi-libertarian Sisyphus who grinds his way out of forced manual labor.  I first saw this film a few years ago while at a residency, at that midpoint where you can feel a little aimless, and was struck by its implication that perseverance and complicity in the face of oppression will eventually pay off. After a few days, I hashed out a brief proposal for elongating the scene to the two decades it’s meant to portray. Per my math, the scene comprises 3600 frames, which would mean advancing one frame every two days for twenty years straight. The work would be projected at scale, splitting the film into a series of lifesize, glowing images changing at an imperceptible pace. I never made the piece, but I’m interested in unpacking its relationship to process, the experience of time, and the development of belief.

Though I’d made a lot of work editing co-opted video and audio in the past, my shameless touchpoint for this was Douglas Gordon’s proposal for a public artwork called 5 year drive-by, which would turn the 1956 John Ford western The Searchers into a five-year-long projection out in the desert somewhere. The Searchers is concerned with a different attack on a different village, a Comanche raid on a homestead in west Texas. The Comanches take a young white girl captive, and John Wayne’s middle-aged Confederate veteran spends five years combing the plains to find her. Gordon’s argument for the piece was “How can anyone even try to sum up 5 miserable years in only 113 minutes?”, and while collapsing time and space into a digestible couple of hours is the magic / point of going to the movies, I’m inclined to agree from a conceptual standpoint. Gordon’s work frequently distorts, adapts, and re-presents cultural artifacts (especially films) to investigate moral or ethical states, political realities, and memory. The work takes time: for things to percolate and coalesce; for coincidence, serendipity, and calamity to have their effects. 

Conan the Barbarian and The Searchers are both adaptations of preexisting works in other media. The character of Conan was created by writer Robert E. Howard for a number of stories in the pulp magazine Weird Tales: born on the battlefield in the fictional Hyborian Age, and depicted as a chivalrous, combative, gigantic man with piercing blue eyes and dark hair, he can be easily viewed as a primeval power-fantasy version of Howard himself, who was a little over six feet tall, a blue-eyed, barrel-chested, passionate amateur boxer who lived with his parents in rural Texas. Howard committed suicide at the age of thirty, after being told his mother wouldn’t recover from a tuberculosis-induced coma; she died the next day. His father was granted control of the estate, despite a will leaving everything to a friend of Howard’s, and Conan became a tradeable asset nearly overnight, forming the basis of a wide-ranging intellectual property that covers comics, games, books, and films. The 1982 movie references a couple of Howard’s stories and is relatively true to Conan’s characterization, but is mostly separate from the previously established canon. 

The Searchers is based on the 1954 novel of the same name by Alan Le May, and is roughly similar to the source material, though John Ford took a few liberties with the text, in collaboration with screenwriter Frank Nugent and producer Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney (whose mother founded the Whitney Museum). One notable change included making young Martin Pawley, played by Jeffrey Hunter, of partial Native American descent, to add a racist motivation to John Wayne’s character Ethan Edwards’s hatred of the boy. Additionally, this Ethan survives to a happy ending, vengefully scalping the Comanche chief (played by a white man named Heinrich von Kleinbach), and carrying a young Natalie Wood back to the homestead. Conan the Barbarian ends similarly, with Conan decapitating his parents’ killer Thulsa Doom and returning the kidnapped Princess Yasmina to her father’s kingdom.

John Wayne and John Ford made fourteen films together over fifty years, with a break in the middle because of World War II. Ford spent the war as the head of the OSS’s photographic unit, which John Wayne desperately tried to join but was turned away from, so Wayne filed a draft deferment to get out of fighting on the front. Wayne, who mostly played strong-minded cowboys and soldiers, did several USO tours of the Pacific Theater during WWII, where he was often booed for his lack of participation in the conflict. A staunch anti-communist (he and Ford were ardent supporters of McCarthyism), he went on another USO tour more than two decades later, this time to Vietnam, and was met with cheers. In a 1971 interview with Playboy Wayne claimed he was a socialist in undergrad at USC, but now unabashedly called himself a white supremacist, saying “I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from the Indians. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves”. Later in that same interview, while reflecting on the promises and complications of the past, Wayne remarked, “I think tomorrow is the most important thing. Comes in to us at midnight very clean, ya know. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday”, which would end up on his tombstone twenty years after his death.

John Milius, who got his start in Hollywood writing Apocalypse Now and Magnum Force, is a narrator on the short documentary A Turning of the Earth: John Ford, John Wayne, and The Searchers, which is included as a special feature on DVD copies of The Searchers, and praises the film as one of the greatest depictions of duty, honor, and responsibility ever put on screen. You can see the contours of John Ford’s westerns in a lot of Milius’s work, in men operating by their own moral codes, squinting in blasted landscapes under painfully blue skies. He too went to USC, and was rejected from the Marine Corps for chronic asthma in the late 1960s, becoming forever frustrated that he didn’t get to fight in Vietnam. He later said that he “missed going to my war”, adding that he was "dying to be able to... go prove myself in battle—the same as all young men long to do, if they are honest with themselves, whether it's right or wrong or even sane, which is a debate that's been going on since we left the caves. Only there was no way I could found my own unit, so I did the second best, which was to write it. Every writer wishes he could actually be doing the thing he writes about." The original script for Apocalypse Now, a loose adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, was written while the war was still going on, and from the start contained nearly all of the memorable scenes that made it into the film, including the helicopter village raid set to “Ride of the Valkyries”. Where that first version differs is that it showed an America triumphant in Vietnam, and triumphant over communism; it was a jingoistic piece of fan fiction, which Coppola spun into an antiwar classic a decade later.

Milius has maintained that his conservative politics got him blacklisted in Hollywood, especially after the release of Red Dawn, his next film after Conan, in which Soviet, Cuban, and Nicaraguan soldiers invade small town Colorado at the start of World War III. A group of high school students, led by a young Patrick Swayze, fight back using guerrilla tactics. It was panned by critics, but Ronald and Nancy Reagan reportedly loved it. It shares a certain surrealism with Conan, a level of conviction in its thinly drawn leads so powerful that it overrides any need for nuance, politically or otherwise. Both can be read as cinematic throwbacks to the simplistic, mythic propagandas of John Ford. 

Over the years, Milius has called himself a “right-wing extremist”, a Maoist, and a “Zen anarchist”, saying in a 1999 interview with Film Threat that “any true, real right-winger if he goes far enough hates all form of government, because government should be done to cattle and not human beings.” These statements are at odds with his role as a consultant at the Institute for Creative Technologies, a Department of Defense thinktank founded in 1999 in collaboration with his alma mater USC. The Institute is a research center primarily focused on utilizing Hollywood expertise to develop cutting edge simulations for the US Army, a synergy that political theorist James Der Derian called “the military-industrial-media-entertainment network”. One such project is FlatWorld, a mixed-reality immersive training environment resembling a movie set, with large-scale screens where windows and doors should be. Infrared cameras track what the soldiers in the simulator are doing, and create live interactive scenes using projections. The spaces are filled with props, false walls and floors, can be made uncomfortably hot or cold, and have scents piped in, like car exhaust or burning wood. FlatWorld, in its dedication to a hazy, abstracted realism, has obvious aesthetic and immersive parallels with installation art, enfolding the participant into a constructed system of total engagement.

In sample images, the FlatWorld environment is filled with sandbags and market stalls, meant to depict a wartorn village in Iraq or Afghanistan, with real-time computer generated characters that soldiers in training are able to interrogate for threat assessment. The stated goal of this technology, and the others developed by the Institute, is to “recreate conflict zones with unprecedented accuracy, allowing troops to practice mission scenarios, refine tactics, and adapt to unpredictable battlefield conditions in a controlled setting”, to build a competent soldier out of the unreal. 

In a 2009 commencement speech at USC, Arnold Schwarzenegger credited his career to his Conan role: “And then I got the big break in Conan the Barbarian. And there the director said, ‘If we wouldn't have Schwarzenegger, we would have to build one’.” After being freed from the Wheel of Pain, Conan’s victories as a gladiator lead him to become a champion of a nomadic military force on the steppe. In a banquet scene following one of their conquests, someone asks him “what is best in life?”, to which he responds: “To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women”. When asked to describe his philosophy on governing after winning the 2003 gubernatorial recall election, Arnold Schwarzenegger said the same thing. George H. W. Bush referred to Schwarzenegger, a lifelong conservative who hated the Austrian socialist policies of his youth, as “Conan the Republican” during a 1988 presidential campaign appearance. In 1990, Bush appointed him as the chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports; Schwarzenegger's first act was to arrange, with some help from Colin Powell, for forty tons of gym equipment to be shipped to the front lines of Operation Desert Storm. Even now, as a civilian, he’s made a lot of appearances at military bases, in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other ‘peacekeeping’ fronts, to judge their fitness facilities and screen his films for soldiers with time to kill.

I spent a couple weeks in Italy this summer to finish a film piece tracing coincidence, memory, sculpture, and the remnants of political violence. I’d been working on the project, in some capacity or form, for the better part of six years. While in Rome I visited MAXXI, a contemporary art museum that happened to be showing a retrospective of Douglas Gordon’s called “Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now’ish”, which was a chaotic pile of screens displaying exactly what the title says. Nestled in an outward curve of the installation was a medium-sized monitor playing 5 year drive-by. The five-year-long public display proposal had never come to fruition, but here it was, or some version of it, looking basically as I had envisioned it: as a vibrating still image, a single frame of John Wayne, right hand across his waist, left hand blurred as he adjusts his suspenders, looking at Jeffrey Hunter, who is looking back at him, mad. The description of the work is monumental, but in practice, it’s a lot like a PowerPoint, breaking apart a film and forcing the viewer to confront images never meant to be seen for more than 1/24th of a second. As Gordon argued in his proposal, how could any feature film possibly contain all of the emotions present in five years of a life? In a studio visit with Berlin Art Link, while discussing his work Zidane, a 21st century portrait, Gordon said “ten years to make it, it’ll take fifteen years to hit home. And I’m in it for the long haul, you know? If it takes twenty five years to make sense, that’s fine.” Real time can’t be expressed, just experienced; it’s the rugged landscape in which all acts, artistic or otherwise, are situated.