schwarzeneggercommando About five years ago I had to go down to the County Clerk’s office in Downey to take my oath to serve California’s citizens as a Notary Public. I walked into a very drab room—brown walls, brown furniture, I think even the windows were brown. As I waited in a short line to raise my right hand and solemnly swear to be the best damn Notary Public I could be, I looked up and noticed a portrait of Arnold Schwarzenegger on the wall, mouth agape in a goofy grin. And I thought, “Well, that’s funny … why the hell do they have a portrait of Arnold Schwarzenegger on the wall?”

And, of course, it was funny. The setting was something out of a bad mid-1990’s comedy about “The Future!”—the cliché, beyond-cheerless office, a smattering of extras in equally dreary attire, and on the wall, a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger as some type of government official. Cue the canned laughter: in the future, Arnold Schwarzenegger becomes the Governor.

Of course, in that very moment it was also true. But just for that moment, I’d forgotten—or maybe it still hadn’t sunk in. The news was a couple years old by then, but it took that moment, seeing him gussied up in a sharp suit, framed and on the wall in a drab brown government building, for the surreal truth to sink in: we voted Arnold Schwarzenegger in as the Governor of California.

Yet as I watched last week’s TV news reports bidding farewell to Governor Schwarzenegger, I found that I was still shaking my head with a “What the hell?” Whether you think he did a good job, a bad job, or something sort of in the middle, you can’t argue that the reality of “Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger” is surreal indeed, the punchline of a joke aimed at America’s obsession with media and artifice.

Arnold Schwarzenegger. A man best known for being a cybernetic organism sent from the future to destroy—then save—the human race. A man not known for quotes such as “We believed then and now there are no limits to growth and human progress when men and women are free to follow their dreams” (Reagan) or “A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on” (Kennedy), but rather “It’s not a tumor – at all!” (Kimble) and “I eat Green Berets for breakfast, and right now, I’m very hungry!” (Matrix).  A man whose career as a public servant, as far as we could tell, saw its apex during a brief moment in 1996 when he became a U.S. Marshal tasked to protect the sole witness to a corrupt government transaction involving one heck of an electromagnetic weapon. A man who has given birth.

In recognition of the end to this strange eventuality, I chose to screen a Schwarzenegger classic—1985’s “Commando,” directed by Mark L. Lester—at this week’s Mondo Celluloid. I chose “Commando” because I feel it is the movie where we get, in John Matrix, a mash-up of the characters we’ve come to see from Arnold: the human brick wall (see him smash through walls!), the father (see him playfully—and awkwardly—roughhouse with a young Alyssa Milano!), the innovative enemy-dispatcher (who needs guns when you have a saw blade at your disposal?), the seemingly impervious moving target (50 soldiers armed with machine guns, shooting at close range, are no match for our Commando!), and yes—best of all—the seemingly limitless one-liner factory. We won’t list them here, and we won’t stop you from screaming them at the screen on Friday.

I hope to see you at “Commando.”  And I hope not to find myself 10 years from now, for similar intent, screening “Braveheart.”

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Logan Crow is the Founder and Executive Director of the Long Beach Cinematheque, a non-profit organization dedicated to celebrating classic and independent cinema by programming film screenings and multimedia events throughout Long Beach.  The Cinematheque’s cult cinema series, Mondo Celluloid, runs every Friday at midnight at the Art Theatre of Long Beach.  For more information, visit lbcinema.org.