Join the Ebert Center for a free screening of the 1977 classic documentary Pumping Iron, which catches a pre-fame Arnold Schwarzenegger and original Incredible Hulk Lou Ferrigno and many other colorful characters competing to be Mr. Universe 1975. If you like Love Lies Bleeding (Glass, 2024), sports documentaries, 1980s action movies, and Conan the Barbarian vs. the Hulk, Pumping Iron is for you.
Free popcorn! Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
Introduction by Casey Ryan Kelly, Professor of Rhetoric & Public Culture, University of Nebraska. Attendees may also be interested in our Communication Colloquium the following day: Necrofeminism and Television’s Take Charge Woman.
About the Topic
Pumping Iron (1977), a documentary about the 1975 Mr. Olympia and Mr. Universe competitions, cemented Arnold Schwarzenegger as a household name and popularized the subcultural sport of bodybuilding. But, more recently, bodybuilding and extreme fitness have become central preoccupations for the contemporary digital far-right who valorize the golden-age bodybuilder aesthetic, diet, and lifestyle as the masculine embodiment of white nationalism. How was a quirky sporting subculture appropriated into far-right politics? Why does the far-right view bodies as indexes of national health and morality? Although neither bodybuilding nor the documentary share an inherent relationship with far-right politics, the 1977 film offers some clues as to how the superlatively capacitated male body lends itself to what Walter Benjamin called the “aestheticization of politics,” wherein democratic governance and civil society are supplanted by mythologizing visual spectacles of violence.
About the Presenter
Casey Ryan Kelly is Professor of Rhetoric & Public Culture in the Department of Communication Studies. He is also Editor-Elect of the Quarterly Journal of Speech. He researches the political and cultural rhetoric of the U.S. far right, primarily through the lens of psychoanalytical theory. He has also published work on the rhetoric of white masculinity in film, television, and far right digital culture. He is author of five books including Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood (OSU Press, 2020), Caught on Tape: White Masculinity and Obscene Enjoyment (Oxford UP, 2023), and Manifesting Violence: White Terrorism, Digital Culture, and the Rhetoric of Replacement (coauthored with William Sipe, University of Alabama Press, 2025). He is current completing a book manuscript entitled Habeas Musculi: Muscularity, Fitness, and the Body Rhetorics of the Far Right which examines relationship between rhetorics of physical fitness, masculinity, and white nationalism.