CHAPTER 1

OF BARBARIANS, WARRIORS AND CRITICAL PEDAGOGY

OF BARBARIANS, WARRIORS AND CRITICAL PEDAGOGY There is a scene towards the end of director Robert Milius’ (82) Conan the Barbarian in which the sword-wielding titular hero must bid farewell to his love and send her atop a burning pyre to meet the gods. Valeria, played by the actress Sandahl Bergman, has been felled by an arrow fashioned from a straightened snake by the evil warlord Thulsa Doom (a wonderful James Earl Jones). After she dies in his arms, Conan carries Valeria to the Mounds, a burial site of kings from the time of the Titans; a haunted place of tombs and hungry spirits; a sepulcher of great winds where no flame should burn. A place where no flame should burn, yes, yet Conan carries the torch to Valeria’s body and sets it alight, returning to his companions, the archer Subotai and the unnamed wizard (played by the actors Gerry Lopez and Mako, respectively). Conan settles down, ostensibly mulling the business of killing—the riders of Doom will be coming, looking to finish what they started with Valeria. Subotai openly weeps, leading the wizard to ask him why he cries, to which Subotai replies, “He is Conan, Cimmerian, he won’t cry, so I cry for him.” Conan mourns without tears, reminding me, years later, of Mike Tyson in the James Toback documentary (08) Tyson; Iron Mike sobs remembering his friend and mentor, Cus D’Amato, but he sheds no visible tears. Conan taps into his sorrow, channeling it into a rage. A rage against those who took from him what he most cherished. He spends the next day methodically sharpening punji stakes and setting ingenious traps, welcoming the coming onslaught with cool calculated reason. Together with Subotai—and some help from Mako’s wizard—Conan stands against the Vanir raiders of Thulsa Doom. As the riders in their dozens appear on the horizon and Conan waits, concealed behind a tomb, he talks to his god, Crom. Conan’s people, the Cimmerians, were slaughtered by Thulsa Doom when Conan was a child. His father fell before his eyes to the Vanir dogs and his mother, gripping his hand, was bespelled and beheaded by Doom himself. Later in his life, captured by Doom’s minions and tortured, Conan confronts Doom with the genocide of the Cimmerians. Indignity of indignities, Thulsa does not recollect destroying this boy’s people or life. Doom has carried out so many atrocities against so many different peoples he cannot recall particular massacres. Conan was carted off as a child and educated on the Wheel of Pain (a human- powered mill); as a gladiator in the fighting pits; and in philosophy and sword play by the masters of the Far East. Doom allowed the boy Conan to be enslaved and he allows the adult Conan to be hauled off a second time, to his crucifixion. It is nailed to the Tree of Woe, delirious from the heat, blood loss and mounting attacks

1 CHAPTER 1 by circling buzzards, that Valeria and Subotai find the last of the Cimmerians and rescue him from certain death. Hordes of riders bearing down on himself and the archer at the Mounds, Conan speaks to Crom, god of the mountain, deity of the Cimmerians. “Crom, I have never prayed to you before,” he says, sounding similar to a lapsed Catholic. “I have no tongue for it…” Conan points out that he and Subotai were almost certainly sure to meet their ends here at the Mounds and that history would forget them; but what matters, Conan reminds his god, is that two stood against many. “Valor pleases you, Crom,” he tells the god, “so grant me one request. Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, then to hell with you!” What room is there for a god who merely watches and does not intervene in human affairs? I renounce you, Conan tells his god, if you fail to offer your succor in the coming battle. In the end it will be two comrades, men whose friendship has been forged in high adventure and battle, two men who will stand together against greater numbers. The education—at the wheel, in the pits, under the tutelage of the sword masters—that forged his body into the ultimate fighting machine; the sorrow and rage that suffuses his being as he awaits the first of the riders of Doom; the clear, calculating mind that coordinates what he himself must conceive on some level as his last battle; a faith in his god but a greater faith in himself; all these buttress Conan’s stand at the Mounds. The movie Conan the Barbarian was based on the character created in a series of books by Robert E. Howard. The movie helped make Arnold Schwarzenegger— more so than the documentary Pumping Iron—and set him on his path to being a household name and later, governor of California. My father took my brother and I to see this movie in theaters when I was ten and Jason was seven. Some people— I would think especially today, but given the desensitization to violence and sex and the intersection of the two in contemporary pop culture perhaps I’m wrong— some people would wonder why my dad took us to an R-rated movie. Conan the Barbarian promised “high adventure” and delivered. As a ten-year-old boy in America, I was being raised in a militarized gun-culture. Ronald Reagan was in the White House. G.I. Joe was my favorite toy. We still played cowboys and Indians. My mom cut our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches into individual soldiers. I was unaware of the evolution of who and what were considered boyhood heroes. “Manly men” had evolved from the stoic and taciturn John Wayne to guys like Paul Newman and Robert Redford, characters who were more human, more in touch with their feelings, more vulnerable. But even the Redfords and Newmans were anachronisms of manhood in the early 80s. The golden age of the action movie genre was upon us, with muscle-bound actors like Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Van Damme. These guys (nearly all were male) weren’t above being carried away by their emotions—the operative emotion being rage—to feats of in- human strength and violence. Looking back it is easy to track this evolution; as a ten- year-old sitting in the theater with composer Basil Poledouris’ soundtrack thundering out of the speakers, I was enveloped in the swords and sorcery, the special effects, a glimpse of Valencia’s breasts. I remember going home feeling bad for Conan. Here was a man whose family and girlfriend had been robbed from him. Here was a hero whose heroism was

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