Learning Day: Raw Deal's Fake Death

Raw Deal never gets mentioned among the greatest Arnold Schwarzenegger films, because in many ways it isn’t, although in many other ways, it extremely is. I believe those ways are much more significant, because they are the ones that have been haunting me since the first time I saw the movie.

Raw Deal is a movie that bullies you into liking it. But it bullies you with the stumbling, chaotic precision of Arnold Schwarzenegger piloting a helicopter, a thing he doesn’t know how to do, into the side of a Planet Hollywood, a thing he doesn’t know how to do. And with the reptilian calm of Arnold Schwarzenegger exploding his police car with a 26,000-gallon industrial fuel tank to fake his own death. Which is a thing that very much happens in Raw Deal and is the most explicit root of my obsession with it. It’s my unfinished business. When I die, my ghost will linger in this realm until I have told enough people about this scene. How many is enough? I cannot know. In the spirit world, you wear the chain you forge in life, and this is my forge.

First, some background for those of you who may not have seen Raw Deal, which is probably most of you. It might even be all of you. I don’t know your life. But I do know you deserve to see Raw Deal, so even though I am about to summarize the events of the film, this should by no means discourage you from watching it, or in any way trick you into believing that you don’t need to witness it for yourself. Because you absolutely do.

In Raw Deal, Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as a small town sheriff named fucking something but really, he’s just Arnold Schwarzenegger, so I’m not even going to bother. Arnold is a former FBI agent who got run out of the bureau because the pussy-ass Bill of Rights says you’re not allowed to savagely beat a suspect in custody, no matter how cartoonishly evil he may have been.

Action films of the 1980s were obsessed with this idea. According to a typical ‘80s action hero, due process was invented by bleeding heart liberals to give crooks more rights than cops. If a grizzled yet stoic hero cop wants to atomize a drug dealer’s teeth with a claw hammer, goddammit who are we to stand in their way? They’re keeping the streets safe for radiant white children to walk to school without risking abduction at the hands of dangerous addicts. If you’re nodding as you read this, maybe clenching your fists and pacing around the room or hitting a punching bag with the Bill of Rights taped to its face, I have incredible news – Raw Deal, like the majority of films I grew up watching, was made for you.

So, Arnold got in trouble with the pearl-clutching liberal elite for crippling a grotesque child-molesting serial killer who probably also shot Abraham Lincoln and regularly boos the Harlem Globetrotters at charity events. As punishment, he’s forced to run the police department in a quiet hamlet in North Carolina where he is a well-respected member of the community and not much crime happens, even though we are introduced to Arnold as he engages a police impostor in a thrilling motorcycle chase through an active lumberyard. He apprehends this man by exploding a portion of the road with a can of gasoline. This is an important character trait of his that will shortly become nothing less than vital.

Raw Deal would like us to believe that this pleasant, gentle life is a fate worse than death for a dyed-in-the-wool lawman like Arnold, who wants nothing more than to get out of this tiny pond and back into the ocean where he can start nailing the big fish again. Big fish like the drug dealing villains who have begun murdering their way through the FBI’s protected witnesses. Arnold’s former mentor Darren McGavin, AKA the dad from A Christmas Story, AKA the dad from Billy Madison, comes to him in the FBI’s moment of crisis and says the words that every hero cop dreams of hearing after being forced into an early retirement for too many constitutional violations – “We need you, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Now more than ever.”

Darren McGavin wants to send Arnold into deep cover behind enemy lines to take the bad guys down from within. But that means forging a new identity as a criminal. Which apparently means Arnold must fake his death. The movie is never clear on why he has to do this. It’s not like the bad guys are going to recognize the sheriff of Frisky Twig, North Carolina on sight.

If Arnold pulls this off, it might just be his big ticket back into the Bureau. This potentiality should make every private citizen extremely nervous. Because as I have mentioned, Special Agent Arnold Schwarzenegger thinks the Bill of Rights is as grotesquely useless as truck nuts on a book report.

Arnold’s wife hates the shit out of him. Just absolutely cannot stand the sight of him. Arnold comes home from a hard day of chasing crooks through lumber yards to find her drunk as hell and screaming at him for being a job-losing piece of shit. She thinks he’s an absolute scumbag for getting kicked out of the FBI. And listen, she’s not wrong. He did shatter the bones of a suspect in custody. She’s on the verge of collapsing just from the sheer weight of alcohol in her body, let alone its effect, and has made a chocolate cake for dinner decorated with the word “Shit.” The cake looks delicious, and like it probably contains several ounces of stray cigarette ash. Nobody gets to try a piece, though, because she throws it at his head.

It’s an extremely depressing vaudeville routine. It’s like watching clowns go through a divorce. Arnold’s only comment is that the two of them will get fat if they eat nothing but cake for dinner, and that she shouldn’t “drink……………………………………. and bake.” That’s not an editorial pause. He pauses for several million seconds in the film, either for dramatic effect, or because he forgot the line, or because he briefly forgot what words mean. The pause also suggests that Arnold is fine with either activity, so long as she never combines them.

I go through all of this with considerable detail because I believe it is important to understand the state of Arnold’s marriage, and the current emotional state of his wife, when he drives his sheriff mobile into a gigantic fuel tank and disappears in an unholy fireball that likely starved the entire county of gasoline for the next several days. Again, for reasons that are never satisfyingly explained, Arnold must fake his death to go undercover as a drug dealer. Giving him a new name and social security number were apparently not sophisticated enough to fool the criminal underworld.

He drives his cruiser up to the Irvine Oil Company’s private lot with a pair of visibly new bolt cutters. He clearly bought those on the same day. Perhaps even on the drive over. Arnold pulls his police cruiser up to the gate, presumably in plain sight of several security cameras. He is wearing nothing but denim and flannel because that was North Carolina state law in 1986. Then he gets on his radio and says, “Investigating a break-in at the petrol-chem storage yard.” This update has in no way prepared his fellow officers for what is about to happen next.

Arnold drives his police cruiser up to one of the tanks and completely opens the valve like he’s draining grease from the vat fryer at Burger King, dousing his car in scrumptious gasoline. With his cruiser sufficiently flammable, Arnold walks around to the back of the tank, where a bitchin’ motorcycle was waiting for him. It’s clear he arranged for the motorcycle to be there, which means one of two things – either he broke into the storage yard earlier that night, parked the motorcycle, then left and put a new padlock on the gate for himself to cut through later; or, he has an inside man at the Irvine Oil Company who left the motorcycle in position for him before clocking out that day. In which case Darren McGavin probably executed that man to preserve the secrecy of the mission, if Arnold didn’t kill the man himself. A lot of people are going to have to die for Arnold to get back into the FBI, is what I’m saying.

Arnold pilots the motorcycle a few dozen yards from the entrance to the storage yard, then pulls a flare gun out of his waistband, turns, and fires it at his car. Which, if you’ll recall, is covered in gasoline. The fuel quickly ignites, and the entire station explodes. Not just the car. The entire station. Explodes.

Arnold rockets away on his hog, suddenly less concerned with looking cool and more concerned with getting his vascular ass the hell away from that explosion. It’s the vehicular body language of The Fonz elbowing a jukebox and waking a nest of spiders. Arnold had meant to look cool for the surrounding security cameras, and he failed totally and immediately. Also, hopefully no one checks those cameras, or Darren McGavin is going to have some more loose ends to tie up.

Now, Arnold’s wife is going to wake up from the collective hangover of 5 years of violent North Carolinian alcoholism to discover that her no-account sheriff husband has just exploded, taking half of the state’s energy grid with him. He single-handedly brought down the fossil fuel industry in the American South. For the next several months, she is going to live her life thinking the last time she spoke to her miserable piece of trash musclebound husband was the night she threw a shit cake at his incredibly square face. And that’s terrific. I want that for her.

But seriously, she’s already not in a great place. She’s drinking like a Guns n’ Roses voodoo doll. She’s drinking like she’s pregnant with Billy Joel’s child. She’s drinking enough for two Billy Joels. Pretending to be dead so you can get your job back is a lot of stress to throw at this woman.

Not to mention what this must have done to the community. Arnold took out an entire oil storage site. That whole company probably collapsed that night. Hundreds of people lost their jobs. Meanwhile, his friends at the police station are on the lookout for a mad bomber who crippled the local economy and murdered the sheriff. They think a pure psychopath is out roaming the streets, like an actual Batman villain is loose among them. They have every reason to believe they’re under attack by terrorists. The President is going to be notified of this event. The FBI is going to get involved. Which might cause some problems when Arnold reveals the whole thing was a hoax designed to get him back into the Bureau.

There are two irreconcilable facts at work in Raw Deal. One, that Arnold needed to fake his death at all. And two, that he faked his death in a manner guaranteed to make national news. All the bad guys have to do is turn on CNN and they’ll see a picture of Arnold the Small Town Sheriff plastered on the screen as the latest victim of international terrorism. Which will make things awkward if Arnold is currently in the room with them, helping to finalize a coke deal under the alias Flex Veinthrob or whatever the hell his crime name is in this movie. (Arnold uses more than one name in Raw Deal and I refuse to remember any of them.)

At the end of the movie, Arnold reveals that he and his wife are doing better and that they’re expecting a baby. Which is the worst news possible. Presumably his wife is going to live the rest of her life knowing that her husband might fake his death again with no notice. If he dies before her, and we have every reason to believe that he will after watching how he decided to fake his death, she’s never going to be fully convinced that he’s really gone. And that, my friends, is the Rawest Deal of all.

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Tom Reimann is the co-founder of the podcast and streaming network Gamefully Unemployed, where he is currently planning to fake his own death using a 1988 Crown Victoria and a nuclear cooling tower.

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