Monsters & Mullets: Conan the Barbarian (1982)

Oh man, Conan the Barbarian.

This is the barbarian movie of the 80s, and a film with a proportionately outsized influence on fantasy as a supergenre. It launched Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s Hollywood career, provided gallons of inspiration to generations of authors, artists, filmmakers, and showrunners, and remains arguably one of the greatest fantasy films of all time. It’s also profoundly violent, glorifies individualism to the point of nihilism, and proudly sexist. Often imitated but only rarely matched in ambition, production, passion and quality, Conan the Barbarian is perhaps the most important Monsters & Mullets film of them all.Conan's also really hard to write about. (She says, at the top of a very long essay about Conan.) I respect the film as a thematically consistent and well-produced work of art, and I enjoy it as a spectacle. And yet I loathe the film's depictions of women, the way it worships violence and privileges reactionary individualism above all else. I wondered, as I loaded the DVD into the player to watch this film for the 77th time, whether its hold over me is purely nostalgic; I discovered it when I was an angry 11-year-old, when stories of high adventure and ass-kicking really spoke to me, and perhaps I've never tried to view the film outside of my personal context. But no: watching Conan the Barbarian as an adult, and one bent on reviewing and analysing it, satisfied me that the film is really, truly, well made. It's problematic as hell, features some really dire acting and many too many naked, nameless, voiceless women... but it's incredibly well-made, with a script that actually uses the medium of the barbarian film to explore the message inherent in a barbarian film. I've seen hundreds of them fantasy films, and rarely do they bring Conan's levels of storytelling, thematic coherence and high-quality production to the table. TL:DR: it's complicated. Let's get to it.Conan the Barbarian’s opening credit sequence has basically everything we now associate with cinematic (and televisual) fantasy: an opening quote-card designed to make 16-year-old boys feel smart, pounding music, a voice-over that hints at prophecies to be fulfilled, and the forging of a sword. The film then subverts the shit out of most of what it established in the opening credits: this is not a film about Conan fulfilling a prophecy, but instead a pretty basic origin story, while the sword is stolen in the first ten minutes and only reappears, broken and very dull, at the end of the movie.The film proper begins with Daddy Conan, forger of the opening credits sword, giving Baby Conan a lecture about how you can’t trust anything except steel. Later, Thulsa Doom will provide the counterpoint to this argument, telling Conan that real power lies in ‘flesh’. Flesh and steel – these are the twin thematic foci about which the film orbits. What is the nature of power, who wields it and to what end? Thulsa Doom will collect thousands of followers over the course of his career as a cult leader, but his hold on their minds is ultimately proven to be weak and easily broken. Conan has only a few friends, but they’re loyal to the end – and beyond. What is the riddle of steel, the film asks? By the end of the movie, we’ll have an answer.The plot kicks off when the Thulsa Doom gang rides into town. Daddy Conan gets an axe to the back and then mauled to death by dogs. It’s not long before the Conans mother and child are the only villagers left standing. Doom’s generals remove their helmets to reveal themselves as two kinda doughy guys with Spinal Tap-esque hair. One has a mullet and uses a giant war-hammer as a weapon; the other has a mullet, a mustache and wields an axe. They have names, but those names are only spoken twice in the entire film, so for our purposes they’re Spinal Tap Hammer and Spinal Tap Mustache. Spinal Tap Mustache takes Daddy C’s sword.And then Doom rides up and removes his helmet, and it’s James Earl Jones with the Spinal Tappiest hair of them all. He stares at Mommy Conan until she lowers her sword (because she’s hypnotized because he has snake powers, you see?) and then he stone-cold beheads her – this is done technically off-screen; all we see is a flash of hair that falls in slow motion past her body as it collapses to the ground. It’s extremely effective without being explicit. Director John Milius was made to tone the violence down after filming and arguably this makes for a stronger film; suggestion is a more powerful tool than explicitness (and ages better, too). The Doom patrol rounds up the village kids, who are taken to the Wheel of Torment, a giant wheel in the actual middle of nowhere. The kids are chained to its spokes and left to turn it. The why doesn’t matter; this is the most basic (and efficient) of fantasy storytelling. Kids get kidnapped and tortured for years; time passes; one survives and goes on to kill a lot of people. That one, of course, is Conan.

So: adult Conan! He’s a man with big muscles and a lot of hair on his head, but none anywhere else. Ah, 80s fantasy, where everyone is burnished to a shine. Conan is taken off the wheel and turned into a cage-fighter, which he’s very good at. Please note that the only dialogue so far, beyond Daddy Conan’s lecture about swords, has been a guy telling Conan to ‘sit here’ and we’re 15 minutes into the film. As he gets better and better at cage-fighting, he’s taken ‘east’, given sword training and taught to read, and also ‘bred to the finest stock' of women. Blech.And then: 24 minutes into the film, Arnold gets his first line. Conan, what is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women. Classic stuff. It’s high fantasy popcorn, but at the same time, this famous speech traces one of many lines between Conan and Doom; although we'll learn that Doom’s methods of crushing and driving are entirely different from Conan’s, it’s certainly a sentiment Doom approves of. And then, during a thunderstorm, Conan’s owner (?) breaks his chains and lets him go. Why? It’s never explained and, as with everything else in Conan the Barbarian, it doesn’t actually matter. Something happens, Conan reacts, and the film continues on. In another film this would be lazy storytelling, but this is a movie about radical individualism in the face of dangerous collectivism. We see Conan the Barbarian from Conan’s point of view; he has no idea why he’s being kidnapped, tortured, turned into a gladiator and then released. It’s all just stuff that happens to him, and he doesn’t question it because that’s not who he is. He just reacts.Conan runs across the tundra, being chased by wild dogs, and falls into a tomb where he finds the skeleton of a long-dead king and a sword. Conan is delighted by the sword and emerges from the tomb in full hero-mode. The dogs howl. Cut to:Conan, walking across the tundra, newly outfitted in a dog-fur coat. Well played, film.Conan’s next adventure is a run-in with a sexy lady who, despite being draped in about twenty pounds of fur, is still somehow mostly naked. We learn that Conan is looking for Thulsa Doom, whom he only knows as some guy who is into snakes. But then the movie cuts to some proper (and meaningless, given that this is not a film about Conan fulfilling a prophecy) sexposition. The witch groans some stuff about prophesies mid-coitus, then turns into a monster and tries to eat Conan. Conan finds a guy chained up outside the witch’s hut – this is Subotai, and because this is an action movie, they are immediately best friends. At one point, they get high and Conan punches a camel. Casual cruelty, lol. More importantly, they also decide to break into a snake cult temple and steal some jewels. They are, however, not alone in this endeavour: enter Valeria. In a superb example of this film’s treatment of women, her name is never used on-screen despite the fact that she's a main character. Anyway, she’s played by Sandahl Bergman, who does her best.  The cult tower is run by Spinal Tap Mustache. As a girl gets naked and throws herself into a pit to be eaten by a giant snake, Conan and Sobutai kill the giant snake and steal a bunch of stuff including really big jewel. Conan gives Valeria the jewel, and then they sex. A lot. It is a really long sex scene, strongly suggesting that they’re having a lot of sex at different times, because they’re into each other that way. At one point Valeria gives Conan a long, intense look then grabs his head and hugs it to her chest. Because they’re in love now, I guess, and that’s how movies by men for men about men – which, let’s be clear, that’s what this is – show that a cool girl has feelings for a guy: not by telling him or like, asking where the relationship is going, but by being silently intense after sex. You know, so that she doesn't make him feel uncomfortable or whatever.Back to the plot. Thulsa Doom talked a local monarch’s daughter into joining his cult. The king, Osric, hires our dingbats to retrieve her. Thulsa Doom, we learn, lives in a fortress known as the Mountain of Power. A+ to his marketing team.

Valeria tries to convince Conan to take the money Osric has given them and run because they're now rich and happy, but instead he… leaves her in the middle of the night without saying goodbye, because he is a MAN and to hell with ladies and their soft squishy lady-feelings; he has revenge to carry out. Valeria wakes up alone and cries a single tear because she has LADY-FEELINGS but she’s a cool girl and doesn’t get pissed off or whatever it is uncool girls do when the people they love leave in the middle of the night without saying goodbye.Conan travels across the land and eventually stumbles upon a weird kind of graveyard/tomb/beach thingie (aka ‘The Mounds’), all large rock formations and skeletons, within shouting distance of the Mountain of Power. He decides to make this his home base, and we finally meet the narrator of the film, an elderly man who claims to be a wizard. I’m pretty sure his name isn’t spoken in the film, either; he’s just addressed as ‘Wizard.’ (It’s Akiro, Wizard of the Mounds, btw.) Conan disguises himself with flowers and heads out to join the Children of Doom. He rides through a cultist encampment and it’s all people sitting on the ground meditating and giving group massages and probably talking about their feelings or whatever, and WE GET IT, MOVIE; THEY’RE HIPPIES AND YOU HATE THEM. Conan hates them too. The next morning he beats up a gay Doom priest and steals his clothes (more on that later), and so begins his infiltration of the Mountain of Power.Doom strolls out onto the parapet of the Mountain of Power, accompanied by Spinal Taps Mustache and Hammer, and the missing princess (in a major change for the depiction of women in this film, she’s mostly naked and says nothing). The Taps grab Conan while Doom speechifies, and beat on him until Doom is ready to come explain stuff. The film makes the correct decision to have James Earl Jones do all the talking in this scene, because delivering dialogue while also pretending to be quite badly beaten seems just a hair beyond Arnie’s abilities at this point in his career. Conan yells that Doom killed his parents and stole his sword. Doom, hilariously, is like, ‘ah, yes; my frivolous youth.’Then, in the thematic focal point of the film, Doom explains that power isn’t to be found in violence – it’s found in faith, which he demonstrates by having one of his cultists kill herself in front of them, at Doom's behest. I mean, he gives this speech in Fantasy Speak, all ‘true strength isn’t in steel, boy; it’s in flesh’ but that’s what he means. And look, by rights, he isn’t wrong in the larger sense. It’s just that he’s making his case to a guy who, revenge aside, only cares about going from adventure to adventure, preferably with some sex in between, and the film is on Conan's side. Anyway, his point made, Doom instructs the Tap boys to crucify Conan on the Tree of Woe. Once again, I applaud Doom’s marketing team for their branding. While crucified, Conan is attacked by vultures; he howls at one and bites it to death. No lie; it’s an awesome scene.Valeria and Subotai rescue Conan and Valeria promises to pay the penalty for the magic the wizard uses to save Conan's life. Which, spoiler alert, she will. When Conan is revived, Valeria grabs him by the face and swears that she’ll fight by his side even if she’s dead. Spoiler alert: she will. Don’t worry; this is an okay demonstration of love because she’s not talking about her mushy lady-feelings; she’s talking about murdering shit.Once Conan’s back on his feet, the three head back to the Mountain of Power to rescue the princess. Rather than storming the front gate this time, they creep in through the kitchen where we learn that Doom is feeding his followers… his followers. Yep, Soylent Doom is made of cultists. They sneak into the throne room and discover that Doom’s followers are also big proponents of free love; there’s a lot of flesh on display, and suggestive writhing, and the occasional moan, just to make sure we are very aware that everyone is sort of lackadasically orgifying. Meanwhile, the princess is leaning against Doom on his throne in a very Leia/Jabba fashion, while Doom himself slooowly transforms into a giant snake and then slithers off into a hole in the wall. I’m not sure why, beyond that it kinda looks cool? I mean, his options are a) transform into a giant snake or b) watch the world’s most boring orgy, so really, is it any surprise he goes snake?

Our trio set fire to the throne-room, grab the princess and vamoose, but Doom reappears as our heroes are making their escape and, the Tap boys at his side, turns a snake into an arrow and shoots Valeria. Do we think Doom had this particular snake power before he started a snake cult, or did he learn it once he decided to pivot to demagoguery?Valeria dies, but not before rasping out some very High Fantasy Cool Girl Dialogue: ‘Hold me. Kiss me. Let me breathe my last breath into you. I’m so cold.’ Arnold doesn’t quite manage to express Conan’s sorrow in such a way that we feel his pain, but he does do some time-honoured cinematic howling. He may even drop to his knees while howling; I can't remember and can't be bothered to go check. Then he and Subotai set a bunch of booby-traps in the Mounds and fight Doom’s warriors. The Tap boys meet messy ends. Valeria, wearing the sparkling armour and winged helmet of a valkyrie, shows up and blinds Tap Mustache at a critical moment with her shiny armour, allowing Conan to kill him. It’s a cool battle, and there’s a whole ‘let’s make ten men feel like a hundred’ speech (actually a prayer, which Conan delivers to Crom, his god) and in this day and age of endless climactic battle scenes, it feels surprisingly brief. Also the princess spends it half-naked and chained to a rock, because is it really a fantasy film if some girl isn’t half-naked and chained to something?Speaking of the princess, Doom tries to kill her with one of his snake-arrows, which leaves her feeling understandably betrayed. The other stuff - the violence perpetuated on innocents, or the cannibalism, or the deeply boring orgies – none of that was an issue for her. But one attempted assassination and the bloom’s off the rose. Doom rides away and Conan finds the broken sword of his father, forged at the beginning of the film, which he holds up to the sky in praise to Crom. Time to go solve the riddle of steel with some ultraviolence!It’s now night, and Doom is standing at the top of the stairs at the Mountain of Power as his followers chant ‘dooooom’ by the light of a thousand flickering torches. Conan and the princess, to whom I'm granting the tiniest bit of agency and backstory by assuming that she has terrible daddy issues to explain her easy transfer of loyalties to whichever man is closest, sneak up on Doom. Doom gives Conan a last lecture about how Doom made Conan, and Conan can’t really exist without Doom, (this speech is always a welcome moment in a revenge film) to which Conan responds by straight-up beheading the shit out of Doom with his father’s broken sword. He tosses Doom’s head down the steps and with that all the cultists throw their torches into a pond and wander off. Which is just as well, given that Doom was in the middle of exhorting them to go kill a lot of people. The sword is mightier than the cult. Theme landed.Conan then burns down the Mountain of Power and film ends on a shot of Conan, older and wearing a crown and looking frankly pretty miserable. Yep, eventually he becomes king, the Wizard/narrator tells us, but that’s a story for another day. The End!

What sets Conan apart from the fantasy films that preceded it – and most which followed it (and there were many) – is the passion, the artistry and the attention to detail that the filmmakers brought to the movie. The costumes are ripped and filthy, the props are battered and well-used, and the sets look both realistic and naturalistic. And perhaps the film’s greatest strength is its screenplay, by director John Milius and Oliver Stone. Like so many barbarian films, Conan the Barbarian glorifies violence. Unlike so many barbarian films, however, Conan is deliberately and unapologetically glorifying violence, asking questions about the nature of power and then answering them in a thematically coherent fashion. Whatever we may think of a film that intentionally glorifies violence to this degree, we must admit that Conan has a point to make... and it makes it well.Pared down to its essence, the film touches on the old Machiavellian question about whether it’s better to be feared or loved; Doom starts off as a murderous brute who depends on fear to get what he wants, then discovers that there’s even greater power to be found in being loved by the masses, who then (theoretically) will carry out his murderous agenda for him. Not surprisingly, however, given that opening Nietzsche quote (and, you know, the fact that it’s a barbarian film), the film answers Machiavelli's question by proposing a third solution: utterly nihilistic individualism. Doom may have the power of suggestion over thousands of followers, but he and his power are rendered moot when confronted by one dude bent on revenge. Conan, meanwhile, doesn’t kill Doom out of a need to return his world to the pre-Doom status quo, or to fulfil a prophecy, or because the king paid him to, or out of an inherent sense of morality. He kills Doom as an act of revenge, and it just so happens that by the time he gets to Doom, Doom is a massively influential cult leader rather than a small-time warlord. Who cares about all this philosophising, the movie says. Do your thing and move on. Solve the Gordian knot by cutting through it. That’s the answer to the riddle of steel.That it questions the nature of violence and comes to a thoughtful – if problematic – conclusion about it does not mean that Conan is without its flaws. Arnold Schwarzenegger may look like a Frank Frazetta cover come to life, but he’s a terrible actor, and Sandahl Bergman’s not much better. While the main cast is diverse, Mako’s wizard is a cringe-inducing example of ethnic scrappy, his costume and his dialogue as likely to be played for laughs as not, and who troublingly refers to Conan in the voice-over as his master. There are hardly any women in the film at all, and every one of them is literally nameless. We may know that Bergman’s character is called Valeria, but her name is never once spoken in the film. And then there’s the scene where Conan beats up a Doom cultist and steals his robes; the character reads as a predatory homosexual trying to take advantage of a naïve young cultist, which Conan knowingly exploits. I assume this little scene was played for laughs in 1982, but I can’t watch it now without feeling incredibly gross.Speaking of the cultists: I know exactly one thing about John Milius: the Coen Brothers based the character of Walter Sobchak on him. On the strength of that fact alone, we can guess that Milius likely isn’t a huuuuuge fan of people wandering around carrying flowers and talking about peace, aka the representation of the Children of Doom. I’ve read some interesting interpretations of the movie that contextualise it firmly within the rise of violent cults in the 60s and 70s, groups such as the Manson family and the Peoples Temple. And there’s certainly something to that argument: Doom is cynically only interested obtaining power however he can, discovers that he's more powerful as a cult leader than as a warrior, and the power he gains over his followers is deadly. But the Children of Doom themselves – particularly the processions Conan meets on his way to the Mountain of Power – also have a great deal in common with the hippies and anti-war protesters of the 60s and 70s. They wear simple clothes (a stark contrast to the armour and furs sported by our heroes), carry flowers and exhort Conan to 'throw down [his] sword and return to the earth'. I'm pretty sure they even bang tambourines. The film holds them up as a contrast to Conan’s power and purpose, and finds them wanting: where he’s resourceful, capable and driven, they’re weak and easily gulled.The conclusions Conan the Barbarian reaches about violence, strength, and individualism in the face of namby-pamby collectivism can make for uncomfortable viewing nearly 40 years on. Similarly, the representation of women, non-cis characters and characters of colour are deeply problematic. But, much the way Star Wars redefined cinematic science fiction, Conan the Barbarian redefined cinematic fantasy. Like Star Wars, Conan the Barbarian didn’t invent the look of cinematic fantasy, nor did it invent the storytelling, the characters, plots and tropes. Rather, Conan the Barbarian took elements that already existed and made them look and feel slick, modern and properly A-list. And much like cinematic science fiction, it took about twenty years of increasingly pale imitations before another film brought the same level of artistry and professionalism – as well as passion – to fantasy film.We’ll look at the next big fantasy game-changer, The Fellowship of the Rings (cinematic edition), next time. The Final CountMonsters: Two giants snakes, one ball of flame/witch, three spirits, one ghost valkyrie.Mullets: Literally everyone in this film has a mullet.Hookers, Victims and Doormats: I wrote about this pretty extensively in the review itself, but Conan the Barbarian does not cover itself in glory in its representation of women. Literally every female character who’s on screen for longer than 15 seconds gets her kit off. No woman ever talks to another female character. We never even learn Valeria’s name. And, despite Valeria’s importance to the film’s plot, she doesn’t exist as a well-rounded character in her own right – she puts Conan’s needs before her own and sacrifices herself to save his life, all the while not boring anyone by talking about things like her feelings.Remake Watch: Conan the Barbarian was meant to be the first of four films; it was followed up later by the infinitely inferior Conan the Destroyer and then the ‘not a sequel, really, wink wink’ Red Sonja. There were three Conan television series in the 1990s, none of which lasted more than two seasons. The entire Conan mythos was rebooted in 2011 with Jason Momoa taking over the title role; that too was clearly intended to kick off a series, a plan that was scuppered by its underperformance at the box office. Director Brian Singer’s long-gestating plan to bring Red Sonja back to the big screen has been shelved indefinitely. We’ll definitely see more Conan in the future, and it’ll be interesting indeed to see how future filmmakers tackle the material.Until we meet in Mordor,Anne

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