Namely, while homoeroticism is on full display-its aesthetics, its sustained assessment and idealization of the male form-bodybuilding is routinely presented as the very apex of male heterosexuality: masculinity dialed up to eleven in the hulking, bulging, rock-hard bodies of the professional male bodybuilder. Read in this way, Pumping Iron represents a puzzling contradiction within professional men’s bodybuilding. feel his very presence as a constant rebuke.” Though never explicitly stated, both critics implied a male viewer looking enviously and, accordingly, covetously at the rippling physiques of the film’s stars. Louise Sweet, writing for The Monthly Film Bulletin, commended the film, and Schwarzenegger in particular, for managing to inspire “envy rather than disgust at ostentatious musculature.” In the Washington Post, Gary Arnold wryly noted that Schwarzenegger’s undeniable charm and heroic build were sufficient to make “all of us in rotten shape. Even at a moment in history when American culture was, broadly speaking, profoundly suspicious of homosexuality-and even bodybuilding as a pastime-reviewers lauded the film for encouraging its audience to gaze desirously at the awe-inspiring, seemingly monstrous, bodies of its male subjects. Unlike other, explicitly gay fodder, Pumping Iron enjoyed considerable box office success and critical acclaim upon its U.S. Olympia, a bodybuilding competition hosted by the International Federation of Bodybuilding and Fitness (IFBB). No, it’s a different kind of fare: 1977’s Pumping Iron, a documentary that follows, among others, the professional and strictly heterosexual bodybuilders Franco Columbu and Arnold Schwarzenegger as they prepare to battle for the top spot at the 1975 Mr. As closely as it apes it, the film in question is not gay porn, the men depicted not porn performers-or, at least, the film is not intended to be pornographic. If I fast forward twenty minutes or so, these buxom, oil-slicked men will be caught in medias res, grinning ecstatically as they embrace.
He turns a little, revealing the vast slopes of his smooth, muscled chest to the camera. Viewed from behind, he peels off the top half of his dark blue tracksuit to uncover the sculpted ridges of his back. He gazes at the reclining figure and slowly undresses-the video is getting racy now. At the foot of the bed stands another man. In it, one man-handsome and extremely muscular, with bronzed, hairless skin-lies splayed on a hotel bed.