Movie Review – Conan the Barbarian

Conan the Barbarian (1982)
Written by John Milius and Oliver Stone
Directed by John Milius

In 1932, pulp writer Robert E. Howard began to pen the tales of Conan, a barbarian fighting in an ancient time of magic. He’d write 21 Conan stories before his tragic death by suicide at the age of 30. The trademark for the character passed through several hands over the following decades, leading to numerous reprints of the original stories and new authors adding to the mythos. Marvel Comics acquired the license in the 1970s, leading to Conan finding his widest audience yet. During much of this time, John Milius had been a fan of what he read. This would lead to a film adaptation that was undeniably made by people who loved the source material.

Conan (Arnold Schwarzenegger) was a young boy when his father, a blacksmith, told him about the Riddle of Steel. This term refers to how important wielding a blade has been to their people, the Cimmerians. This idyll period is cut short when raiders, led by Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones), massacre the village. The children are sold into slavery, and Conan survives into adulthood. His considerable size makes him prime to serve as a gladiator, and Conan is given intense training to become the best. Conan eventually wins his freedom in combat and stumbles across the land. This leads to encounters with significant challenges and the discovery of new loyal allies. The journey can only end in one place: at the temple of Thulsa Doom, where Conan will get his revenge or die trying.

While sword & sorcery movies were plentiful during the 1980s, they were not often successful at the box office or with critics. They were the fare of low-budget VHS rental stores. Conan stands out as being the one that both critics and audiences loved. Co-writer & director John Milius was a big part of that success. He took the source material seriously and never tried to inject humor in a way that undermined the stakes for the main character. However, Milius is a controversial figure unto his own; I would argue that he’s probably the most talented reactionary artist that Hollywood has ever employed. He’s on record saying feudalism fascinates him, finds inspiration in Japanese philosophical practices, and finds Melville & Kerouac to be the greatest writers in his opinion. 

In Milius’ own words, though, he says: “I’m not a reactionary—I’m just a right-wing extremist so far beyond the Christian Identity people like that and stuff that they can’t even imagine. I’m so far beyond that I’m a Maoist. I’m an anarchist.” I don’t know how much I buy those last two sentiments. He served as the Coen brothers’ basis for Walter Sobcheck from The Big Lebowski to give you a general idea of the man’s ideas and demeanor. He’s also the writer who gave us Robert Shaw’s USS Indianapolis speech in Jaws, though Shaw claimed that he did some light rewrites. Milius is one of those figures that, while I am a communist, I will give complete credit to for being a highly talented artist.

But that’s the thing, the right-wing has plenty of talent. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, while satisfying the surface-level neoliberal demands of identity politics, is one of the most virulent right-wing successes in Hollywood. People seem to think fascism means a blind hatred of non-white people. They fail to see how fascism is perfectly comfortable using non-white actors as props & tokens. The underlying message of the MCU films is that US/Western hegemony is the dominant mode of control in the world, and that cannot change. They were going to make it far more apparent in the upcoming Captain America film with the inclusion of Sabra, the Israeli fascist superhero, but have chosen to edit around that from recent reports. But I digress.

Milius was one of the hands behind the first two Dirty Harry films, propelling Clint Eastwood into his role as a poster boy for white male reactionary thought in the US. Conan was the film that introduced the general audience to Arnold Schwarzenegger, an icon of right-wing toxic masculinity in the 1980s. You can love Arnold movies, but it would be dishonest to pretend that he didn’t come to symbolize some of the worst aspects of conservative men. Milius’s career likely wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t happened to stumble upon a theater showing Kurosawa films one rainy afternoon, a story he has told as his origin point in the industry. As much as I love Kurosawa’s work, I would be dishonest if I didn’t admit I saw a line of fascism running through it.

You often see Liberals point to ludicrous media like God’s Not Dead or the god-awful streaming offerings from The Daily Wire as proof of untalented conservatives. They aren’t wrong, but they miss the point. Yes, people like Ben Shapiro are immensely untalented; that grievance has helped fuel their current ventures. However, they are not the only conservatives working in Hollywood. Executives across every studio are profoundly right-wing and ensure their reactionary, regressive, anticommunist views remain the dominant “common sense” sentiments in media. 

Take something that is the opposite of a Milius production, the revival of Norman Lear’s One Day at a Time. There’s a nauseating scene where a character shows up wearing a Che Guevarra t-shirt and is met with rants from the Cuban-American characters about Che being the equivalent of Adolf Hitler. Disney’s “Girl Meets World”, a sequel series to the ABC sitcom “Boy Meets World” has an absolutely shit-brained take on communism that is delivered in such a heavy-handed manner that it shows its hand as capitalist propaganda. Look at the rabid defense of the Israeli occupation of Palestine by people from across the “political spectrum.” Even something labeled “progressive” like The West Wing is rife with misogynist, homophobic, and racist sentiments, all couched in the veneer of “feel-good” do-nothing Liberalism. 

I would never deny that Conan the Barbarian doesn’t capture the tone of its source material in a pitch-perfect way. This is Conan as imagined on the page brought to the screen. Yet, it is also a piece of ideological propaganda penned by one of the most talented conservatives in Hollywood to ever pull it off. Not every right-wing artist is a hack like Hitler was. Milius unironically stated that General Douglas MacArthur should have enacted a coup and installed himself as the first emperor of the United States. That is a reactionary view, a revelation of the limits of a brain that has not matured much from adolescence and is still caught up in the grand Wagnerian fantasies that all fascists seem to entertain. 

Yet he is a very talented artist. This is a contradiction anyone who has matured past the 8th grade should be expected to wrestle with.