Why did movie stars become so fit?

December 5, 2014 8:04 PM

I was watching the original 1979 Alien today and it struck me how the actors are all of a fairly average fitness level. In the opening shot, as everyone is coming out of stasis on the Nostromo, the men are mostly shirtless, but none of them have the requisite six-pack abs and bulging chest that I feel certain would be there if this movie was made today. Why?

I've noticed this before with older films. Frank Poole is played by an average-looking shirtless Gary Lockwood in 2001. Shirtless Charlton Heston is fairly fit by most standards but not on the same order of today's Chris Hemsworth. I think the general trend is: post-[some year], dudes in sci-fi or action movies must be ripped no matter how relevant physical strength is to their character's job or role in the movie. (The same is probably true for women's appearance too, but that's a whole 'nother bag of worms, and I'm mostly interested in the male film-musclification effect.)

Why did this happen? When did every film begin to cast this way? It seems like an odd trend considering that the average fitness level for the American moving-going audience has undoubtedly declined during the same time span. Are there any turning points in film history that lead to this? How did we get here?

posted by deathpanels to Society & Culture (35 answers total)

We seem to like our heroes to be more and more comic book pose ready. Character actors will always carry the show though. Casting directors are being asked for certain types likely to sell seats, gotta have a bankable cast I suppose.
posted by Freedomboy at 8:09 PM on December 5, 2014

Rambo was the turning point.
posted by fshgrl at 8:11 PM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

If you looked at the physique of athletes in the 70s and athletes today, you would notice a difference in physique, too. I would argue that this is both about a greater awareness of physique and better methods for achieving these super bodies. I found this chart by the New York Times fascinating in how it shows the way humans can continually improve at something. I think it's probably the same for looking hot, and the more you have people looking hot, the more it becomes required. Just a theory.
posted by AppleTurnover at 8:17 PM on December 5, 2014 [3 favorites]

It's the same with musicians. Looks at bands from the 70s - filled with unattractive dudes making great music. Now you have to be pixie-perfect like an Ariana Grande to get any notice.
posted by FlyByDay at 8:21 PM on December 5, 2014 [4 favorites]

Sexism. In the 70s the people that produced the movies didn't care / weren't considering that men could be beautiful in the same way women are.
posted by dilaudid at 8:24 PM on December 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

You might also ask why American men from photographs taken in the 1970's look so "skinny" compared to "fit" men nowadays. I would guess the 1980's fitness craze had something do with it. Pumping Iron came out in 1977, and the first Ahnold movies came out in the early 1980's. The "steroid era" in baseball and other sports was in full swing by the mid 1990's. All of this has gradually contributed to American ideas of what male bodies should look like.
posted by pravit at 8:24 PM on December 5, 2014 [12 favorites]

Rambo was the turning point.

I can remember my parents talking about this in the early 1980s, so after First Blood but before Part Two where he goes back to Vietnam, by which point it was already a phenomenon.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:32 PM on December 5, 2014

I think fshgrl has the right actor who kicked off the trend, but I'd argue it came earlier than Rambo. Stallone had incredibly low body fat and big muscles in Rocky III (big for his frame anyway, I read he weighed about 165 lbs in Rocky III). To my thinking that is the prototype of that physique/trend in mainstream blockbuster movies.

Arnold Schwarzenegger may have been more ripped prior, but he didn't really have mainstream/blockbuster status until a couple years after Rocky III. Prior to that he was regarded generally as a bodybuilder who occasionally did movies, not as an actor who acquired a bodybuilder physique.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 8:33 PM on December 5, 2014

Best answer: This is the kind of thing Baudrillard called out in 1981 and remained concerned with throughout his career. Representations first bore some relationship to what they represented (humans, ordinary fitness, etc.), then went beyond the norms (Rambo, Schwarzenegger, etc.), and eventually they're more self-referential than representational (Last Action Hero, Expendables, etc., but in some sense many more films too in an evolving system of signs). Concomitantly, expectations for ordinary realities changed too. In very simple terms, that's his standard argument, relevant at least in popular media to everything from human bodies to architecture to warfare.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 8:33 PM on December 5, 2014 [23 favorites]

To add on to pravit's point, I would argue that the six-pack is because of bodybuilding's emphasis on definition rather than on anyone's idea of fitness. This Slate article goes into how it's impossible to look like that all the time, even if it's your job and you have trainers and dietitians and doctors who are paid to get you to look like that.
posted by Etrigan at 8:34 PM on December 5, 2014 [3 favorites]

For movies and rock music both, I think part of it must have to do with the fact that there is a ton more money involved in these industries nowadays, and an "if you can't change the product, change the packaging" emphasis on image as an evolutionary mechanism.
posted by rhizome at 8:52 PM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Not all of those bodies are real
posted by mecran01 at 9:01 PM on December 5, 2014 [27 favorites]

A lot of this, in the past few years -- especially for men -- is down to the trend in superhero movies. Superman, Batman, Wolverine, Captain America, Thor, etc. are meant to be ripped. Even in the 80s with people like Stallone, you had action heroes who looked like that (see also Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damm, etc), and then you had more traditional actors who looked more normal.

I also think the current aesthetic for men who are into fitness culture and modifying their bodies is to be really bulky, which probably informs male beauty standards in the media. I'm sure the pendulum will eventually swing back and we'll be back to slimmer ideal body types for men again. In the 90s for example you had Tom Cruise and Richard Gere (was it the era of the Short Male Sex Symbol?). A decade ago you had Ryan Gosling and Jude Law (the era of the Pretty Male Sex Symbol?). So right now you've got your Hemsworths and suchlike.
posted by Sara C. at 9:10 PM on December 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

It's not that they are more fit, it's just a different kind of fit. People can be very strong and aerobically fit without having chiseled well defined muscles. But the ripped look requires an unusual combination of diet, targeted exercise and genetics which, like most movie star traits, are somehow beyond most of us.

What really strikes me about Americans today (as someone born in the 70s) is not so much the difference in movie star physiques but those of regular people. Until the mid 90s "overweight" was a completely different level of fat
posted by banishedimmortal at 9:24 PM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

You may find this FPP interesting reading.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:53 PM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

I think it happened during the 1980s action-movie era, which a lot of people will tell you was built on steroids, and never really went away. I'm not sure if Rambo in particular was the turning point, but it was certainly right around there. Rambo, The Terminator, Conan, Krull... they all came out right around the same time in the early 80s and established conventions in their respective genres.

It was certainly in place by 1986, when Aliens came out, because if you look at the stills from that movie next to the original from '79, the cast bulks up substantially. Not like clearly-on-gear substantially, but there's a noticeable difference.

Mens Journal did an article about this a while ago, called "Building a Bigger Action Hero". I disagree with some parts of that article (it says the change was between the 90s and the 2000s, which I think is pretty clearly not the case, but I guess you could argue that it went from being an action-movie cliche to a mainstream-cinema thing for leading men somewhere later than the 80s).
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:02 PM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

Hypothesis : part of the death throes of a strongly biologically enforced gender binary is a strange media impulse to reinforce that binary system with ever stronger imagery, while it's getting ever weaker in people's day to day actions. It wasn't necessary to show it before, because it was taken for granted and burned into everyone's brains.

Now though, nobody will remember that men and women are different unless we sexualise everybody to highlight gender differences.

This too will die.
posted by emilyw at 11:53 PM on December 5, 2014 [19 favorites]

Kind of a sidebar, but the fact that the people in Alien look (comparatively) squishy and human makes them seem so much more vulnerable to a modern audience, I actually thought it was hugely if unintentionally effective.
posted by you're a kitty! at 11:59 PM on December 5, 2014 [5 favorites]

The ultra-defined look is much more recent. There is this comparison that's been doing the rounds between Wolverine 2000 and Wolverine 2014.
posted by kandinski at 3:20 AM on December 6, 2014 [14 favorites]

I know that in the case of 300, the desire was to replicate the feel of the art in the original graphic novel.
posted by HuronBob at 3:56 AM on December 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

If you want to see something weird check out the movie Perfect.

It's weird because everyone was so skinny in the seventies. I attribute that to cocaine. I'm serious as death eating crackers on that one. Looking at the women from the original cast of SNL. Lorraine Newman is so small that she has to be careful not to fall into sewer grates.

Then Jane Fonda came out with her workout and the idea of women being strong in addition to being thin changed the ideal body type.

It's funny because while thin has always been in, bodies for women have shifted from age to age. The flat flappers of the twenties, the sylphs of the thirties, the healthy forms of ladies during WWII, the bombshells of the fifties, Twiggy in the sixties, the sunken cheeked unhealthy looks of the seventies, the amazons with fake boobs of the eighties, heroin chic in the nineties...someone gets an idea in his head and suddenly we go from hour-glass to emaciated, and various ranges in between.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 5:30 AM on December 6, 2014 [4 favorites]

Regarding Alien specifically [and parroting you're a kitty! above] I think it was a matter of choices made by the director and perhaps associates. They could have made the crew of the Nostromo look more like they had just come from the gym but that would have defeated the notion that they had been in stasis for some time and then got woken up, sleepy and out of shape, which contributed to their vulnerability. The characters certainly could have been made to look more fit via makeup, lighting and camera angles. I think it was a good choice as it made the outcome less assured.

"It seems like an odd trend considering that the average fitness level for the American moving-going audience has undoubtedly declined during the same time span." I think that is, at least partially, part of the answer. Many moviegoers want to identify with a protagonist that is more fit, or younger or wealthier etc. than themselves.

More generally the image of being fit, for men over the last four decades has followed a fairly consistant trajectory [as opposed to the image of fitness for women which has been less consistant as noted above] to more definition and more muscles and well, generally more. I'm sure this is reflected in magazines as well as movies. My wholly unsupported opinion is that this is because you can sell people things to achieve those six-pack abs and buns of steel.
posted by vapidave at 6:23 AM on December 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

Let's not discount Bruce Lee's "Way of The Dragon" in 1972, which showed off what hard work and diet really did to the body. I think that was an eye opener in the 70s.

That type of physique really wouldn't be seen again for 25 years until Brad Pitts physique in "Fight Club" (which he pushed further for "Troy") decimated the bagel and cream cheese industry.
posted by remlapm at 7:02 AM on December 6, 2014 [6 favorites]

I don't think this was the case in the 70s and 80s, but it certainly is the case in the 2010s: male bodies are often the object of the camera's sexual gaze in a way they weren't often beforehand. The best example I can think of is Chris Evans as Captain America, his back to us, punching a punching bag, swinging those big squatter's glutes back and forth. That would have been shot very differently even a decade ago.

And just as when that gaze is focused on women's bodies, secondary sexual characteristics (muscles!) are emphasized. These hyper-masculine male bodies used to be about male power fantasy and I'm sure they still are somewhat. But I think it's also to do with the fact that male bodies are now legible as aesthetic objects.
posted by erlking at 7:24 AM on December 6, 2014 [8 favorites]

While there might be other reasons (70s vs 80s aesthetics), the crew in Aliens were Marines and badass, as opposed to the more "normal" Nostromo crew. That's also part of the genius of the second movie, taking apart the mindless macho military aesthetic and substituting a Mother-Warrior vs Mother-Warrior struggle.

It does speak to the original question, however -- what we might expect a movie Marine to look like nowadays, vs 1980s or even 1950s.
posted by Celsius1414 at 7:54 AM on December 6, 2014

Alien was a Ridley Scott movie and had a lot of English actors cast in it. So it was probably skinnier than the typical fully american movie even at that time.

It seems like an odd trend considering that the average fitness level for the American moving-going audience has undoubtedly declined during the same time span.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is due to the sheer unobtainableness of a modern Hollywood body. You look at Wolverine's bulging muscles covered in spaghetti veins and know that you couldn't afford the PEDs to get there never mind the twice a day workouts with an individual personal trainer. So you just say fuck it and have a bowl of Ruffles chips with chocolate chips mixed in and watch another Avengers film.
posted by srboisvert at 8:00 AM on December 6, 2014 [1 favorite]

I can't speak to the accuracy of this bizarro Dolph Lundgren fan website but it lends support to the people pointing to Stallone's films as the inflection point for the muscle power up of leading male stars starting in the 80s. One way this happened that propelled it out of the action movie genre was the training regimine Stallone forced on Travolta for Staying Alive.
posted by dis_integration at 8:02 AM on December 6, 2014

HuronBob: I remember seeing a "making of" for 300 that indicated that a lot of the six-packs were body-sprayed on. While the actors were indeed fit, in order to get that "comic book" feel they needed super definition. Seeing the actors under regular lighting made it look very... weird!

One other weird factor is that people in truly physical disciplines are not always similarly cut. In my day job, I work with a lot of elite Special Forces types. These guys are training all the time -- literally, jumping out of planes every night -- and yet, I'm always amazed at their modest physiques. They are more lean than muscular, and frequently smaller rather than tall or bulked.
posted by scolbath at 8:47 AM on December 6, 2014 [1 favorite]

This may have been mentioned already, but Wil Wheaton talks about how, on Star Trek: The Next Generation, they all wore muscle suits under their uniforms (yes, even Worf).
posted by zippy at 10:12 AM on December 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

"HuronBob: I remember seeing a "making of" for 300 that indicated that a lot of the six-packs were body-sprayed on. While the actors were indeed fit, in order to get that "comic book" feel they needed super definition. Seeing the actors under regular lighting made it look very... weird!"

True that is, there was some makeup/spray used to help highlight the definition, but, those guys were truly ripped. I was on set for a few days, when I first saw the cast I was convinced they were wearing some sort of body suit, but they weren't, they were just in VERY good shape. They worked out for months prior to the start of filming (Gym Jones was in charge of that, they also worked with the cast of the 300 sequel and Man Of Steel)
posted by HuronBob at 11:30 AM on December 6, 2014

You might be interested in the documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster. It's about the rise of anabolic steroid use by athletes, with some fascinating discussions about the evolution of male body image. I especially like the part where they compare G.I. Joe action figures through history.
posted by oxisos at 5:01 PM on December 6, 2014 [1 favorite]

True that is, there was some makeup/spray used to help highlight the definition, but, those guys were truly ripped.

If anything, for a lot of action movies my guess is that the reverse is more common. Contouring with makeup to create more definition is very common. Manly "shapewear" is very common. Doing a bunch of bicep curls or whatever in your trailer right before the big scene is de rigueur. Look at that comparison of Wolverines linked upthread and notice the difference in the lighting and composition of the shot. I think at this point even VFX to enhance muscle definition is on the table.

I'm not saying that male actors are a bunch of schlubs IRL, but to the extent that they're especially fit*, it tends to be more for a specific role than that Hollywood is full of totally ripped dudes.

I work on a TV show with a lot of action sequences, where some of our actors are particularly action-hero looking, and I will tell you that they don't look the same in street clothes as they do on your TV every week.

*With the exception of major action/martial arts stars, of course.
posted by Sara C. at 5:11 PM on December 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

It happens a lot in a lot of places - no ballet dancer in the 19th Century would be expected to have a "banana foot" but now it's a prerequisite -- partly because the number of available jobs has been shrinking and shrinking so it becomes a buyer's market and partly because what is desirable is what is hard to attain. When only a few companies can support full time dancers, they have to be above and beyond just to compete, and when the line moves for what is "normal", everyone has to play catch-up as the standards get stricter and stricter, either through things like fasting and working out right before a shoot or via cosmetic and aesthetic tricks and illusions.
posted by The Whelk at 8:25 PM on December 6, 2014

A friend of mine occasionally laments the fact that actors are, essentially, paid to get in shape. You hear about the training that the cast of, say, 300 went through, or Hugh Jackman did for the most recent Wolverine film, and, well, yeah. Their job, in the lead up to filming, is essentially to train, while those of us in the non acting world have to try to shoehorn some sort of exercise somewhere in between trying to make a living and somehow trying to recover from the exertion expended to make that living.

As a kind of side thought, maybe also there's the advances in nutrition and weight training since the seventies. It's not like back when Stallone was doing this largely on his own trial and error. Gerard Butler, Jackman, and the rest have teams of trained professionals guiding them through their diet and exercise regimen. It's not Deniro eating a pile of spaghetti every hour anymore.
posted by Ghidorah at 8:40 PM on December 6, 2014

There's a lot more casual use of "enhancer" drugs then I think anyone is ready to admit. Lots of "hormone replacement" ads in gay rags and the like anyway.
posted by The Whelk at 9:11 PM on December 6, 2014 [1 favorite]