Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

Blythe

Concept Rhyming Essay #2

Professor Zay

Oct. 28, 2007

“This was a whole new race, energy incarnate, charged with supreme energy. Supple bodies, lean and sinewy, striking features…theirs was the keenest assembly of bodies, intelligence, will, and sensation.”

-excerpt from Klaus Theweleit’s “Male Bodies and the ‘White Terror’”

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I would like to look at Pumping Iron II: The Women as it relates to Klaus Theweleit’s article “Male Bodies and the ‘White Terror’”. Even though the film itself is meant to be an infomercial, a glorification of the body and especially the female body, a tribute to the sport of bodybuilding, it has many overlapping qualities with Theweleit’s discourse on the military experience: Body as machine. Woman as machine. Women who use machines to make their bodies bigger. The desiring-machine. Theweleit’s article focuses on male bodies, but I think there are many ‘rhyming’ concepts between this article about the white militaristic male body and this film that is trying to explore and advertise women’s bodybuilding and fitness.

Bodybuilding as a sport came out of the sphere of entertainment, not of military tradition. With its origins in the ‘strong man’ acts of the 19^th century circus, it is surprising that there are so many similarities between this sport and what occurs in military academies; the discipline of a soldier, the crossing of the threshold of pain into the realm of pleasure, the forging of the body into a perfect machine, and the ideological dissecting of the body into individual parts that are then “fused together to form new totalities” (Theweleit 154). Viewing Pumping Iron II: The Women through the lens of Klaus Theweleit’s article and the military experience of the body allows us to extract new meaning from the film itself and perhaps draw parallels between the sport of bodybuilding and the body-as-soldier.

It is well known that any military in the world requires mental and physical discipline. That is, discipline, in the sense of ‘teaching’ or ‘instruction’, the funneling of information through the military hierarchy down to the lowliest cadet, that process of learning that begins the moment a recruit enters the academy and that Salomon intimately describes for us in Theweleit’s article. Also, ‘discipline’ in the sense of ‘orderly conduct’; the linear organization of bodies when marching to war. Lastly, soldiers acquire discipline in the sense of ‘training’: “Muscles like ropes, broad-chested, tough-jointed, wall of bodies born of discipline; this was the front, the frontier…” (155). Lastly (and this is something Theweleit’s article explores in depth), soldiers have discipline in the sense of ‘punishment’ or ‘chastisement’ (of the body). Salomon’s account of having to balance a tray of knickknacks while squatting with a compass between his buttocks could hardly have been pleasant, though it was certainly a strong incentive to avoid any kind of transgression in the academy.

Though Pumping Iron II: The Women has many foci, this notion of discipline (as ‘training’) of the contestants runs throughout, within the many workout and gym scenes. All that we can observe of the product of that discipline, as viewers, is the change in their physical body: the strengthening of muscle tone, the loss of fat, and the gain of muscle mass. We are to take their mental discipline for granted; without it they could not spend so many hours in the gym nor achieve such a physique. The contestants are not required to stand in formation, perform feats with weapons, or undergo physical punishments at the will of their trainers (at least not that we see in this film). So, discipline of the body is central to both texts and both spheres of activity.

The crossing of the threshold of pain into the realm of pleasure is an element explored discursively through visual narrative in the film, and outlined concretely in Theweleit. Pain becomes a repetition, to the point where the sensation itself is transformed into pleasure. It is so for the soldiers in Salomon’s narrative and for Salomon himself:

“And little by little the body accepts these painful interventions along its periphery as responses to its longing for pleasure. It receives them as experiences of satisfaction. The body is estranged from the pleasure principle, drilled and reorganized into a body ruled by the ‘pain principle’: what is nice is what hurts.” (150)

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Theweleit’s article accounts for the ‘pain principle’ extending beyond the sphere of the military. Once a cadet or soldier emerges into civic life, the body has become an iron casing into which all emotion is locked, and, if expressed, is done so via the body. Salomon describes the experience of returning home to his mother; he finds himself completely unable to tolerate any kind of ‘solicitous care’ from his parents (151). With the women in Pumping Iron II, the ‘pain principle’ of the gym does not translate to the world outside of it; emotion still courses freely throughout the body. The ‘pain principle’ is not discussed via dialogue, but is very apparent on the faces of the women exercising in the gym: it is clear that the consistent element of their workout routine is the experience of physical pain. The women are encouraged by their male trainers with phrases like “Fight me! Fight me here! Build it up here!” in growling, commanding tones. The pain of the workout translates into the pleasure of building muscle mass, and that pain has become a ritual to push their bodies to the ultimate limit.

Within Klaus Theweleit’s article “Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror”, the major focus of the exploration is on man as machine, man within the machinery of the military, man with a group identity, man as body without feeling, drive or desire. The major contrast between this text and the film Pumping Iron II: The Women – besides the obvious difference in gender focus - is that the film portrays the contestants as individuals, with unique struggles, backgrounds and goals. However, what is interesting about Pumping Iron II is that the women’s bodies are simultaneously both part of a machine and entirely separate from it. They are part of the machine of the contest, part of the machine of the gym equipmentis competition, so they can never escape from the net of each other. They together form a machine that is produced by other machines that are made by machines. (for without the equipment, what would they be? Are they not seeking to make their bodies a kind of extension of the equipment, are they not seeking to make their muscles equal to the weights they lift?) In the process of bodybuilding, their bodies are comparable only with those of the other bodybuilders; in this sense, they can never stand alone as an individual, but are always bound to others. An integral part of bodybuilding, at least as presented in the film,

Theweleit helps to draw out the sense, from Salomon’s dialogue, that the vision of the army marching off to war is akin to a machine being set in motion, a machine that is both of war and of sexuality (“bodies…in cruel, relentless rhythm”). I think the concept of a machine of war and of sexuality can certainly be carried over to the film Pumping Iron II. Opening with a long, sweeping shot of a woman’s nude body in a tanning booth, the camera angles emphasize these women as sexual beings, to reassure the imagined (male?) uncomfortable viewer that because they can be sexually appealing, this legitimizes their traditionally masculine sport. The deeper problem underlying this visual reassurance is the inseparable association of femininity with sexuality. If their bodies are seen as muscle-building machines, then those machines must also be sexual. The construal of their bodies as ‘machines of war’ is less evident, though the competition itself is both a battle (for first place) and physical (of the body). They are not, however, going to war in the traditional sense, as in Salomon’s narrative: there is no combat. Their bodies, their muscles are not being honed for violence. The body is an end unto itself, its successful presentation the only goal.

“The soldier’s [female bodybuilder’s] limbs are described as if severed from their bodies; they are fused together to form new totalities. The leg of the individual has a closer functional connection to the leg of his neighbor than to his own torso. In the machine then, new body-totalities are formed: bodies no longer identical with the bodies of individual human beings.” (154)

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In the bodybuilding contest itself, the women are asked to present their bodies in the categories of different muscle groups: biceps, quads, calves, thighs, shoulders, back, etc. The judges do ask for a presentation of the body as a whole, and the women perform individual routines to the music of their choice. However, much of the sport of bodybuilding is concentrated on the development of individual muscle groups, the isolation of those muscle groups and the presentation of those muscle groups as segregated from the rest of the body. So, new body-totalities are formed, in that the women are acutely aware of their body as a sum of these individual muscle groups. And it is within the competition that the ‘leg of the individual has a closer functional connection to the leg of [her] neighbor than to [her] own torso’; in the eyes of the judges, the leg of a particular contestant is judged only in relation to the leg next to her: the leg retains value only by the fact of the other legs around it.

The narrative of Pumping Iron II: The Women is served well by the medium of film. Film, as opposed to theatre or other kinds of live performance, yields control entirely to the filmmaker. Our gaze moves where we are told it should move; our eyes are slowly guided up the chiseled calf, rippling thighs, defined abdominals, shapely breasts and smooth neck of the contestant as she lies in the tanning booth. We are intimate with each person, we even enter the shower with them. The element of sexuality is more easily represented through film precisely because our view is controlled by the camera lens. If this narrative were a theatrical performance, our eyes would be free to wander where they pleased. Film also allows us to go back in history in a way other mediums do not, to be an eyewitness to the body fashion of the 1980s, at a particular event, at a particular junction of space/time. The medium of film is easily distributable and easily storable, so that viewers can watch it as many times over as they please, in a very small space of time – a book, although also easily distributable and storable, requires more time to read and is not nearly as visceral. Since the subject of Pumping Iron II: The Women is entirely about a heavily visually stimulating sport, it makes sense that the medium of film is used to tell this story, so that we treat our eyes as well as our minds.