“The arrogance is there as well”: The Meryl Streep performance inspired by Arnold Schwarzenegger
The lines between American politics and American cinema have become increasingly blurred over the years.
It all kick-started in the 1980s, when silver screen regular Ronald Reagan successfully ran for office, and did away with the idea that politics should be left solely for politicians. His pursuit of the heroic protagonist of real life, like America, resulted in a capitalist boom that is still scattering its debris all over the world today. And emerging from that rubble in the subsequent years were entertainment copycats who similarly saw no issue with blurring the lines between politics and entertainment.
One of them was a bodybuilder turned actor turned Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. In his institutional reign over America’s ‘Golden State’, he became something of a Reagan copycat, championing a proud Republican identity that encouraged an ambitious sense of capitalist enterprise. But within that movement, Schwarzenegger began to tie himself in verbal knots and garnered a rather controversial reputation on social views.
In his 2004 campaign, he famously labeled Democratic opponents as “girly men” to criticise their lack of political backbone, saying, “If they don’t have the guts to come up here, I call them girly men”, and so, in the very same year, when Meryl Streep was gearing up to play a ruthless, power-hungry US senator in The Manchurian Candidate, Schwarzenegger made for an unlikely, albeit easy launch point for the actor.
“Senator Shaw is a recognisable trope,” explained Streep, “In fact, most of the models I looked at for the character were men. Behaviour such as hers, how she is in a room, how she takes over, how she strategises, how she leads the discussion, is just off-putting because it’s done by somebody in beads and a bubble haircut. If it were a man, people would say: ‘Fantastic! That guy has balls!’ And balls are not attractive on a woman.”
She continued to label Schwarzenegger in particular, citing her previous comment about ballsy women being a play on his criticism, while using it to explore wider themes of masculinity and power in the political spectrum. She continued, “I looked at him, too, when I was preparing for the role, because she has a charm about herself, as he does, and the arrogance is there as well”.
But Streep continued to explain that while Schwarzenegger was a useful creative tool, his irreverence as something of a political caricature didn’t have lasting depth for her character, and instead, she looked to Tom DeLay, the Texan congressman as a source of true inspiration.
She explained, “He’s the power in Congress, the Republican muscle. I looked at him because he is the man who runs the president and keeps him on message. People such as him are animated by a kind of certainty that’s just breathtaking, and yet it’s what we demand from our political leaders.”
Whatever Republican ingredients Steep put in the sauce seemed to work, for her performance in The Manchurian Candidate was yet another brilliant turn from the Oscar winner. It begs the question: if the film had a more contemporary follow-up, who would she use as inspiration this time around?
