Written by Michael Small, the title song to Pumping Iron demonstrates the normative claims that the film makes on life and health. The song dismisses religion as the way to eternal life, and instead suggests that “pumping iron” is the key. Further, the song plays on different meanings of longevity. Not only is the singer interested in “living forever,” but he also “wants to be remembered.” By being the biggest, the narrator hopes to become a mythical figure. Above all, the song frames pumping iron as a way to maximize life. By pumping iron, one becomes “strong and healthy,” “rich and wealthy.” The lyrics not only claim that “everybody wanna live forever,” but that by pumping iron, “everybody’s gonna live much longer.” This theme plays at both the beginning and end of the film. First, it plays over black and white footage of early 20th century strongmen, then over images of the Pumping Iron characters. The film establishes a sense of longevity through this repetition.

These lyrics reflect a concern with life in line with biopolitics, the mode of governmentality that considers the life of the population as a political problem. With the shift away from the focus on death as the means of expressing power, the state began exercising power over life, as well. This power over life is termed “biopower.” Haraway describes biopower as “the practices of administration, therapeutics, and surveillance of bodies that discursively constitute, increase, and manage the forces of living organisms” (66). Biopower is exercised on the population as a whole. Now, no longer is the state focused on disciplining the body of the individual, it also begins to regulate the body politic. Biopolitics uses administrative practices and institutions to create knowledge of the population that the state can use to intervene in the biological life of the species. Although statistics may be random or meaningless at the individual level, public health interventions can control outcomes at the mass level. In comparison to earlier forms of “atomizing” disciplinary power, this new regularizing power is “massifying.” It creates the life of the population as an object of interest.

In the biopolitical regime, the norm takes over from the law to regulate life. Foucault writes, “[a] normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life” (2008, 48). By regularizing the population, biopolitics creates an equilibrium that protects the population from existential dangers, which are figured as sickness or contamination. Biopolitics ensures the population’s health by minimizing the randomness of life, thus minimizing the potential for contamination. To this end, the entirety of public health is the domain of biopolitics.

Bodybuilding is connected with biopolitics as a technique of the body. Bodywork functions as a technology of the self, allowing the bodybuilder to actualize his self image. It also functions as a technology of biopower, as Liokaftos writes, “The promotion of physical culture methods up until World War II often discursively constructed them as integral to nation building in the sense of producing both healthy, thus productive, citizens and efficient soldiers” (2017, 23). Besides disciplining the individual, promotion of physical culture creates a reserve of biopower for the state. In this paradigm, the health of the nation rests on the health of its citizens.