Posted on 09/08/2008 4:56:10 PM PDT by thinkingIsPresuppositional
It's more than you might think.
By Sharon McGovern
The Indian Jones movies are more than they seem; canny explorations of the American presence in the world, the power of (and responsibility to) the sacred, and—in the latest—a thorough denunciation of one of the great evils of the 20th century, communism. While the last isn’t—or shouldn’t be—controversial, it is unusual. And the construction of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull pays homage to its successors in such a way that the set is tied together beautifully. It is more than its reputation would suggest.
The first Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, is all about acquisition. The movie begins with Indiana Jones stealing an idol from a heavily protected chamber, having it stolen by a subordinate, recovering it, then having it stolen again by a rival. That essential scenario is repeated on a vaster scale with the Ark of the Covenant, with the raiders of the title including the Nazi army, American Intelligence agencies, Jones himself, and the rival who outmaneuvers him yet again. In the end, the powerful artifact is rendered harmless only in that the boated and indifferent bureaucracy that inherits it files it into obscurity.
The second entry, actually a prequel, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom has to do with a group of sacred stones in India. Jones tells his protégé that according to legend the stones bring “fortune and glory.” Alas, they have been stolen and their new owners have used them kidnap children and to create a poison that turns Jones himself into a sort of zombie slave of Kali. When the stones are recovered and restored, the countryside blooms and enslaved children return to their families.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade begins with a look into Indy’s teenage years and his attempts to steal an ancient crucifix from a mercenary. “That belongs in a museum!” he cries, announcing a preference of one random, inappropriate locale over whatever the mercenary had in mind. Indy loses the cross on that day, but adopts the mercenary’s hat and mien, and as seen from the previous two films a penchant for pursuing artifacts—though for a relatively good cause. By the end of the film, however, he realizes that some sacred objects should not be moved. When Jones’s father, who spent his life searching for the Holy Grail tells him “Let it go,” he finally can and does.
In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Jones acquires nothin’. The little pottery shards he excavated are smashed by his commie abductors, who also take the mysterious skeleton he locates in a Nevada warehouse. He spends the rest of the movie either refraining from taking artifacts or returning them to their rightful place. The movie is so anti-collectivist that only the villains collect things.
And what villains they are! These are not the cosmopolitan, world weary agents we’ve seen in film for the past forty years or so. These are capital C Communists, true believers, led by “Stalin’s Golden Girl,” Col. Dr. Irina Spalko. Spalko is a psychic devoted to communist doctrine. She intuits the skulls promise the ultimate mind meld, but for some reason they won’t have anything to do with her. She needs Dr. Jones to communicate with them and lead her to their original resting place so she can convert whatever power she finds there to a weapon for Stalin. Unlike Dr. Elsa Schneider from Last Crusade who was a Hitler employee who was shown to have some reservations about Nazism when she wept at a book-burning rally, Spalko has none about communism or anything she might do to promote it. The communists are shown to be as ruthless as Nazis, and as much a freaky cult—again, true but unusual in film history. The movie cleverly matches the date of the Roswell crash to the dawn of the Cold War, and her short bobbed hair and wide, luminous eyes relate Spalko look to that of the distended alien skulls. One set of villains amplifies the other.
The movie itself is a throwback to the science fiction/ horror films of the fifties, many of which had an undertow of anti-communist anxiety. The Soviet Empire was spreading. Thanks to American sympathizers and spies—they had the Bomb; also an articulate and influential Western cohort making a political argument that was opposed to fundamental American beliefs but couched in language that was seductive and humane. For example, in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (recently remade as a liberal fantasia), people who fell asleep were replaced by clones who all thought and behaved in the same way, and all for the benefit of the alien community. In Crystal Skull, educated Westerners who gazed into the empty eye sockets of the eponymous objects were compelled to obey their wishes or driven insane.
Both play upon a gut level dread of collectivism/ communism. But Crystal Skull has a marvelous bravado. When his captors ask Jones if he has any last words, he says, “I like Ike.” The same words are seen scrawled on the atom bomb that destroys the spooky depopulated town/ test site where he finds himself soon after. Invasion of the Body Snatchers ends with an alarum (“They’re here already! You’re next!”). Crystal Skull ends with the destruction of Irina Spalko (who is atomized when she begs the aliens to let her join her mind with theirs) and her followers, and a giant crater remains where the alien temple and communist invaders once were. Spalko’s demise isn’t the only one directly related to collectivist behavior; her lead henchman is devoured by giant ants.
Need more evidence that this is a movie that really and truly loathes communism? Well, there’s the anti-communist political rally on the campus on the campus quad, complete with “BETTER DEAD THAN RED” banners. There’s a turncoat double agent who confesses he took that path because he couldn’t handle capitalism (that it’s an Englishman making this concession nods to the Philby spy network while robbing it of the patina of idealism). There’s even a slap at those who would re-write history in the “correct” fashion.
Is there some anti-anti-communist business? A bit. In a nod to McCarthyism Dr. Jones loses his job when he can’t adequately explain why he was (an involuntary) part of an intrusion into Area 51 and the test site. But that is recognized as a detestable business and Jones’s record as a patriot and decorated war hero is trotted out in his defense. Furthermore, the incident is resolved by the end of the movie. The alien treasure trove of priceless human artifacts can be related to the bureaucratic wasteland of Area 51, where the Roswell remains are stored and the Ark is glimpsed. So there’s that…and there’s the above.
What is more interesting about the aliens is how they have changed in Steven Spielberg’s movies. When he made Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977, he wanted to rebuff the fifties science fiction movies in which aliens were frightening. A few years later he made ET: The Extra Terrestrial in which the alien was a saintly being who was also a collector, but only of plants and soil. In 2005, he made War of the Worlds in which the alien invaders were aggressive and frightening. WotW has the same screenwriter as Crystal Skull, David Koepp. Koepp gained some notoriety when promoting War when he compared the alien invaders to the American troops in Iraq. Lovely! But there’s the remark and then there’s the film, and in War of the Worlds the American military is shown in a capable, valiant light. The most touching moment of the film is when the adolescent son tells his father he is compelled to join the fight against the aliens and runs headlong into a battle. It’s a noble moment, more so than anything in Saving Private Ryan, or any of his other films. One of Spielberg’s great gifts as a storyteller is his ability to invest his characters with plausible motives; but the pure impulse to serve and fight against something as evil as it is formidable was new.
Spielberg has gone on record saying that were he to remake Close Encounters, the protagonist would never have left his family to travel with the aliens. In truth, the aliens in that movie were high handed kidnappers, collecting human beings and keeping them for decades. That collecting behavior wasn’t seriously considered in Encounters, but was fully sinister in Crystal Skull. Likewise, in Close Encounters the aliens’ mother ship immerges from behind Devil’s Tower; in WotW, the alien crafts burst from below the surface of the earth. The former was a novelty. Spielberg thought it would be beautiful and unexpected to have the enormous craft rise up rather than descend—and it was, but image resonates no further*. But when something similar happens in WotW, it carries the unnerving implication that something menacing and unexpected has been lurking for years, waiting to announce itself with terrible devastation.
The September 11 imagery in WotW is unmistakable and heart rending. When chaos begins, the protagonist’s daughter asks, “Is it terrorists?” It’s not terrorists so Speilberg (and Koepp) don’t have to traffic in burdensome political correctness about The Other. The subterranean trope connects because there was (and is) in the United States and throughout the western world an barely acknowledged threat that one day arose and leveled buildings and murdered innocents. The aliens’ motivation is not worth considering, only their actions are.
In Crystal Skull, the woman who sympathizes with and wants to join the aliens is murdered by them; and the cause that most closely resembles the aliens’ is portrayed as entirely malevolent. Communism, resurgent in Russia and persistent in China and elsewhere (Spielberg was at one point contracted to work on the opening of the Beijing Games but eventually backed out), isn’t precisely the threat it was in the fifties, but Crystal Skull is a timely reminder of how dangerous it was and is.
So Koepp has made asinine comparisons and Spielberg met with Castro, and are no sort of anti-terrorist, anti-communist activists in their private lives, but they created art that stands in magnificent opposition to both. For that, they deserve credit. That they had to make those sentiments felt in genre films rather than in straight dramas is as it always was. Ultimately, that’s for the best. Invasion of the Body Snatchers has been remade three times, most recently in 2007; a movie like Seven Days in May is less flexible, and frankly pretty difficult to watch these days. War of the Worlds and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will be significant and will be watched long after the spate of anti-heroic, terrorist equivocation movies, and those queasy about the morality of the United States have been forgotten.
There’s more to love about Crystal Skull. Its beginning is in the American southwest like that of Last Crusade showing Indy as a teenager, which gives it a nice Jones beginning/ beginning of the end feel. Indiana Jones’s origin in the west is also significant, nestling him in the landscape made iconic through millions of westerns in print and film. Jones is a combination of the characters from westerns played by John Wayne and those more cerebral types played by James Stewart, a warrior-poet refigured as cowboy-scholar. Jones’s movie ancestor is James Bond, and the actor that originated that role played Jones’s father in Last Crusade. But whereas Bond is principally driven by loyalty to his country, Jones comes to feel more international conscientiousness. This isn’t motivated by cringing multi-culturalism, but by the accountability that is appropriate in those with tremendous resources. Or, to steal a line from another American superhero, “With great power comes great responsibility.”
But while Indiana Jones is a more international actor than his father (for example, in Crystal Skull he reveals that as a youth he ran away and rode with Pancho Villa), as he ages he becomes more like his old man. He has become more comfortable in his role as teacher than adventurer, and bores his son with historic detail when he isn’t ordering him to finish his education. When his son, who calls himself “Mutt” like Henry Jones, Jr. named himself “Indiana” after the family dog, looks back at his father for recognition at how he managed their escape by motorcycle, Indy gives him the same glare he got from his own father after a similar feat in Last Crusade. The movie is full of little references to events and characters from the precious films, reminders that time has passed. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a fitting end to the series, and a gift to fans.
*The image is refined with the moon/ balloon craft that collects renegade androids in AI: Artificial Intelligence, but that’s an essay for another day.
Twas an awful movie.
Just awful. Embarrasing and silly.
This new one was for children basically.
A very long way away from Raiders of the Lost Ark that is for sure. Indy was bad ass and in charge in Raiders.
Crystal Skull made Temple of Doom look good.
Indy fan since day one here too.
Lucas really needs to stop.
Welcome to last week!
The latest Indiana Jones film wasn’t Conservative and Anti-Collectivist ... it just sucked. It was horrible. The only thing that got people excited was the crystal skull, and that was because the crack heads in the audience thought you could smoke it ...
I guess people can read whatever they like into, but Skull was a stinker of a movie.
Such people existed in reality -- and still may.
But, let's face it: As refreshing as it was for Hollywood to finally portray the evil Communists as, well, evil........the movie kinda stunk.
“Crystal Skull made Temple of Doom look good.”
Ooooh....that’ll leave a mark!
I think if Spielberg had focused more on “Men's Adventure” magazine pulp imagery, some of the other sequences like the one with the ants would have worked better.
Also, action films do not seem to be Spielberg's strong suit.
But that is neither here nor there when it comes to addressing the points of this article. I'll dive in deeper in a later post but as with The Crucible, Indy is “suspect” of having ties to Communists because he does!
There were witches in The Crucible AND Communists in our government, the questions come down as “do you trust the words of a person on the stand when they out others” and “what's so bad about being a witch/communist”.
So Indy's wartime espionage partner is a double agent and Indy cracked under Soviet pressure in the United States. It doesn't mean he willingly betrayed America but then he was not put on trial or convicted in the movie. Pressure was brought to bear on his institution of higher learning.
And did colleges have “Better dead than Red” rallies? Dissent magazine goes back to the mid-1950s. Communists had been on campuses since the 1930s (and maybe even 1910s). Folkies were proud Communists.
It's a bit misguided of the filmmakers to present Communists as an external threat alone. The atomic bomb secrets were handed over by stateside traitors. Want to know why there was a Cold War of aggression with the Soviets? Because they were given a boost.
I'll dig more into this later.
Uh, but Hollywierd could not resist sticking it to Joe McCarthy, could it?
After Indy loses his job because of FBI bullying and the craven cowardice of the university administration, our hero-- a hard-core anti-communist and supposed bright guy-- states that he is going to teach in Leipzig. Unfortunately, the young idiot writing this part of the screenplay overlooked the fact that Leipzig was in East Germany.
Oh, and why does knowing Mayan help you in Peru?????
The writing in this movie utterly stunk.
I don’t know if it was conservative or liberal—but I know it sucked.
When Indy survived a nuclear explosion in a fridge, I said to myself, “Oooooookay.... so that’s what kind of movie this will be.” I sat back and enjoyed it.
It’s a shame it was so lame.
I liked it. Great movie. Great entertainment.
Because like most people the screenwriter had no concept of Meso-American history?
That was the part of the movie when I was strongly tempted to throw my popcorn bucket at the screen. It was like having the Knights of the Round table eat with chopsticks.
“When Indy survived a nuclear explosion in a fridge, I said to myself, “Oooooookay.... so that’s what kind of movie this will be.” I sat back and enjoyed it.”
“jumped the shark” has been offically replaced with “nuked the fridge”.
It’s not like the Republic Serials the Indy films were emulating had any more ‘respect for reality’. These films are fantasies.
Duel isn’t a “chase film”. It is something darker.
The mineshaft amusement park ride in Temple of Doom doesn’t do it for me and neither does the Soviet industrial machine or the other chases in Glass Skull.
I wonder how much of it is second unit director work.
He should have gotten someone like Tsui Hark who directs better action sequences.
What about when the bicycle flew in E.T.? I mean, really...
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