How Arnold Won the West

How Arnold Won the West is a shortish feature length documentary about how Arnold Schwarzenegger got elected to the governorship of California over the dull corpse of Democrat incumbent grey Davis, courtesy of a recall campaign run by the head of a car alarm company (who thought he might like the job of Governor himself but reckoned without the Arnie bandwagon, and ends up sobbing a little in the show. Hasta la vista cry baby).

Made by a British outsider, Alex Cooke, the show presents American politics in California as a kind of outsourced version of a Hollywood dream machine nightmare, with goodies and baddies, an indifferent public, and a belief that good will triumph (no matter than Arnie promises to balance the books, cut spending, improve education and health, improve services, get rid of taxes, reduce spending, fix up services, etc etc).

Cooke spends a lot of time on the sidelines  with eccentric candidates participating in a game show – including short actor Gary Coleman and stripper Mary Carey.

Because of the nature of the recall election, any one could stand, and sure enough, being California, anyone did. 

So they organised a game show to highlight the candidates, with questions like how to spellArnie's name. Tough one

Over a hundred of them. So what else to do but organise a game show on television, and run a kind of political idol, asking them questions like how to spell Arnie's name. Tough call.

The result has all the dignity of a used car sales room auction, or maybe a strippers’ convention, and it gives life to the goings on. This is just as well because the hapless Gray Davis and his wife (who pitches him as a dullard) don’t inject much color at any point in the proceedings as he stumbles towards defeat, and there’s no contact with Arnie one on one in the show, because that’s how his team of minders wanted to play it.

Instead we see Arnie in crowd scenes, tossing out T shirts and posters, and hammering over and over again from his song sheet about cutting taxes and cutting spending, a simple enough tune which has since seen his popularity tumble because he promoted a platform that was undeliverable. Cooke spends some amusing time with journalists trying to get access to Arnie (and failing) or simply marvelling at the enormity and cleverness of the Republican theft of the governorship based on showbiz hype.

Still, beware of what you wish for might be the sub-text of this documentary, which sees Arnie in charge in Sacremento and Mary Carey as winner of the game show amongst the also ran candidates. As a bonus extra, you get to see her giantess boobs, which surely must be surgically enhanced. But hey why not, this is America, and we all need our fifteen minutes of fame.

Along the way someone makes the point that this kind of carnival, or political circus, is hardly what America should be pitching as democracy, or as something the citizens of Iraq should be grateful for having had thrust upon them. But hey why not, this is America. Send in the clowns … and you could well end up with this kind of Californication.

While the election is now long gone, and much water has passed under Arnie’s bridge, the show still performs like a good doc should – moments of madness and silliness observed, so that people can ponder on why it should be so. Worth a rental, but not a purchase, especially as the only extra is Mary Carey’s willingness to expose herself …

 

 

 

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