ABSTRACT

At the beginning of the first COVID-19 lock-down in the U.S., Arnold Schwarzenegger posted a video to Twitter, featuring his miniature horse and donkey, informing the public to stay at home. This was the first of a number of uploads throughout the COVID-19 pandemic in which Schwarzenegger employed the cuteness of his animals, the authenticity of ruralism and nature, and the iconicity of his past cinematic roles to disseminate his form of viral video politics. This short article aims to provide an insight into these Twitter videos and analyze how the selective deployment of cuteness, ruralism, and cinema-inflected rhetoric they contain both shield him from the critique a number of his wealthy contemporaries faced and position him as a public-health focused elder statesman in opposition to Donald Trump. His viral video denouncing the Capitol Riots as fascistic builds on the residual positives of his previous videos and is an attempt to create an authentic, “straight-talking,” non-partisan Republicanism in opposition to Trump, while also conveying his worthiness for the position of national patriarch.

摘要

在美国第一次 COVID-19 封锁之初，阿诺德施瓦辛格在推特上发布了一段视频，其中展示了他的微型马和驴，通知公众呆在家里。这是整个 COVID-19 大流行期间多次上传的第一次，其中施瓦辛格利用他的动物的可爱、乡村主义和自然的真实性以及他过去电影角色的标志性来传播他的病毒式视频政治形式。这篇短文旨在深入了解这些 Twitter 视频，并分析它们所包含的可爱、乡村主义和受电影影响的修辞的选择性部署如何使他免受许多同时代富有的人所面临的批评，并将他定位为公众——反对唐纳德特朗普的专注于健康的老政治家。