I'm currently writing something that involves a fair quantity of barbarians, and so last night I decided to watch the original Conan with a notebook at hand as part of my research. I'd not actually seen it before, and let me tell you: Conan is a fucking *weird* movie.
So let's get this on the table first of all: Conan is riven through with indefensible sexual politics, which I won't celebrate. It was bloody uncomfortable viewing. But the intensely unpleasant moral landscape they contribute to is part of what makes Conan so fascinatingly odd.
To explain what I found so weird about Conan, I'm gonna take a big swerve and talk about Thylacines for a minute (stick with me). So here's a Thylacine. It was an Australian apex predator also called a marsupial wolf, and it's in black and white because they all died ages ago. 
Skeletally, the Thylacine is famously hard to tell from a wolf, though to find a common ancestor for the two, you have to go a LONG way back. Back, in fact, before mammals evolved placentas: when marsupials - who reared fetuses externally in pouches - were the only game in town.
It's textbook convergent evolution: in Aus/New Guinea, marsupials truck along in allopatric isolation, and produce a sort of growly guy. Meanwhile elsewhere, placental mammals go nuts & develop their own thylacine analogue: wolves. Different programming languages, same output.
And hey, since this is ostensibly a thread about barbarians, BEHOLD THE SKULLS. Thylacines on the left, wolves on the right. Here I am, stuck in the middle with Conan. (photo by Fritz Geller-Grimm)
Speaking of Conan, let's bring this back in. Keeping the Thylacine metaphor in mind, let's examine what a hero is. Unpacking historical ideas on this front is the work of a dozen threads in itself, but suffice to say the iron age conception of heroism was... different to today's.
To put it VERY glibly, the old school model of the hero is about will & prowess; the inclination & ability to take - by force - everything they want. There's more to it than that, but the thing to remember is that being 'good' (as we would understand) doesn't come into it.
That kind of archaic heroism is pretty much extinct in modern cinema. Today's heroes, especially super ones, are defined by ethical qualities, and even antiheroes (again, a big subject in themselves), are a reflection of modern heroes, rather than a true atavistic reversion.
The last film I watched before Conan was Black Panther, which I'd like to think is a contender for being the current apex of the modern hero flick - it's about extremely powerful people trying extremely hard to do the right thing.
But Black Panther - and similar films - are still, if you look at them in abject terms, stories about people with incredible bodies beating the shit out of each other. Although they diverged from 'classic' hero stories a good while back, the anatomy is still similar at a glance.
If you'll allow me to be a bit cute with the Thylacines/Wolves metaphor again:
So, picture me starting Conan. Here I was, thoroughly used to heroes who are defined by their pursuit of decency and the common good, suddenly thrown into a movie which is still a tale of muscular high adventure, but where EVERYONE IS A TOTAL ARSEHOLE.
It was like finding an animal that seemed to be a wolf at first glance, but which turned out to have wildly different reproductive biology involving a fucking embryo in a bag on its chest. A mad throwback to something morally alien, but with the skeleton of a modern action film.
I'm well interested in Freud's idea of the unheimlich, and I've talked about it before (), but Conan really hammered it home for me - it was a movie that *felt* like it was about good vs evil, but with the unsettling detail that _nobody was good_.
And we can't talk about Conan without talking about horrific ideas of manhood. The whole thing is a GRUESOME male power fantasy, and the masculinity is so fucking toxic it's like the gender equivalent of the dreaded Chernobyl 'Elephant's Foot': en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eleph…
I mean, for goodness' sake, Conan is so brokenly hypermasculine he OUTSOURCES HIS FUCKING CRYING TO HIS SIDEKICK (who, let's not forget, is coded as Asian... yeah, there's a pretty deep well of racism in there too.)
There's so much more I'd love to get into - the weird cosmic horror shit, the eerie religious themes, the fucking *colour palettes*, but I'm trying desperately to keep this thread vaguely on trajectory so I can land it.
In conclusion: it was bloody odd to watch a film made in 1982, with surprisingly decent production values and a pretty compelling narrative structure, that managed to adhere to a completely archaic, alien moral universe, transmitted via the source material of 1930s pulp.
Conan is a really interesting cultural 'living fossil', which acts as an accessible reminder of the mindset our hero stories originally evolved from. It's a good watch for examining what has - and hasn't - changed about fantasy cinema, & I reckon I might watch the sequel tonight.
(I'm interested to see if the 2011 version tanked b/c they tried to force a modern concept of heroism into a world that just wasn't built for it. Arguably, Conan only works because it commits to the bit so hard it's like Wile E Coyote failing to notice he's running on thin air.)
Anyway, there's loads more to say but this is already overlong - so thanks for reading! I've got a book in the works that gets p heavily into this stuff, along with orcs, pirates, apocalyptic wastes, hidden magical worlds and more, so look forward to that getting announced soon.
(as a PS, because I'm inevitably drawing some flak... I'm not saying Conan's shite. In many ways I think it's a superb adaptation of the source material, and a great portrait of a different model of heroism. My point is, it's a model where Heroic =/= remotely pleasant.)
OK, since people were interested in the Conan stuff, I'm gonna watch another early 80s Sword & Sorcery extravaganza tonight and maybe livetweet it. Can I get your opinion as to which I should tackle first?
(This thread now ends with a poll as to what I should watch next, but I borked the threading so I'm manually jamming it in here)
