The trouble with Arnie’s new Netflix doc? The muscle man himself...

Arnold Schwarzenegger led an atonishing life, writes Louis Chilton – but it’s not the white-washed one presented in this three-part docuseries

Schwarzenegger in his new three-part docuseries ‘Arnold’ (Netflix)

Arnold Schwarzenegger knows a thing or two about image. The bodybuilding champion turned actor turned two-term governor of California built his career on this. He is a self-made man in every sense of the word: reputationally, financially, and, perhaps more than anything, bodily. Look at footage of Schwarzenegger in the early 1960s, preening atop an athletic podium, and you will see a man who ballooned himself into the form of a steroidic adonis through discipline, sheer determination, oh, and performance-enhancing chemicals. It’s a body that seems to transcend the laws of nature and good health. You can see plenty of footage of this young, bulbous weightlifter during the first episode of Arnold, a new three-part Netflix series focusing on Schwarzenegger’s life and career. Now, of course, his bodybuilding days are behind him. But his iron grip on his own image remains as tight as ever.

The triptych breaks down his life into three discrete eras: “Athlete”, “Actor” and “American”. Viewers will likely know the bullet points by rote: Schwarzenegger’s move to Hollywood; his success as a tanklike leading man in films such as Conan the Barbarian; his inimitable menacing turn as the robotic fulcrum of the Terminator franchise; his goofy family comedies, such as Twins and Jingle All the Way; the incongruous political career that followed.

Schwarzenegger himself contributes generously to the programme by way of talking head interviews, as do a raft of former collaborators, including James Cameron, Jamie Lee Curtis and Sylvester Stallone. The miniseries is directed by Lesley Chilcott, the filmmaker behind the 2020 Charles Manson docuseries Helter Skelter. Over three hour-long instalments, Arnold has ample opportunity for forensic character profiling. Despite this considerable access to Schwarzenegger – or, more likely, because of it – the series only scratches the surface of the man himself. If there were actually a metallic endoskeleton hidden beneath his cheeks, I’m not sure we’d ever know.

Even within the documentary’s defanged purview, it's clear that Schwarzenegger is a complicated bloke. His early life in Austria saw him live in the shadow of an abusive father, who was himself reeling from PTSD after the Second World War. Schwarzenegger and his older brother were placed in fierce competition with one another; the 75-year-old actor is described early in the documentary as a “competitive maniac”. His brother died young, in a drink-driving accident. Schwarzenegger, who had by then moved to the US in pursuit of stardom, frames both his obsessive drive and his brother’s self-destruction as two reactions to the same childhood trauma. Late on in the documentary, he addresses the darker highlights of his biography: the child he conceived during an extramarital affair with his family’s housekeeper; allegations of groping from six different women (a number that later rose to 15), which emerged in 2003. Arnold allows him space for contrition, but fails to situate this side of Schwarzenegger into the broader portrait of his life and personality.

A softball celebrity biodoc is hardly an uncommon thing, and Arnold is by no means the worst offender in the history of this frothy subgenre. (It’s a trend that’s particularly rife in music documentaries: Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana and Katy Perry’s Part of Me are among the big releases to draw criticism for puff-piecery.) But what makes it harder to excuse is the needlessly indulgent scale of it. The three episodes of Arnold boast a combined runtime of around three hours and 10 minutes. That’s 20 minutes longer than the seminal 1994 college basketball documentary Hoop Dreams. More than double the length of Bing Liu’s heart-wrenching slice-of-life 2018 doc Minding the Gap. Almost three times as long as Jennie Livingston’s 1990 queer classic Paris Is Burning. These are all documentaries that managed to explore whole swathes of society with depth and nuance; Arnold is too in awe of its subject to even work as an insightful character study of one man – whose story most viewers will more or less know before going in.

The practice of stretching limited subject matter into a full-length miniseries is practically an epidemic on Netflix at this point – not just with documentaries, but dramas too. Making the whole endeavour that much more dubious is the fact that Arnold comes just a week after Netflix launched Fubar, the first scripted live-action TV drama to feature Schwarzenegger in a leading role. It obviously helps the show’s profile to have a glossy, nonconfrontational documentary sitting alongside it. But it makes the documentary’s very raison d’etre – this corporately imposed Season of Schwarzenegger – seem rather manufactured.

There’s something undeniably intriguing about Schwarzenegger’s psyche: his fastidious exercising; his in-born love of the US; the way in which he, an oversized immigrant who seemed barely able to get his tongue around the English language, was able to dominate the film industry like few others have. Arnold knows he’s a compelling figure. It just never quite manages to articulate why. Ironically, for a series about a man with biceps the size of cantaloupes, Arnold seems afraid to do any heavy lifting.

‘Arnold’ is available to stream on Netflix now