Age makes even your fondest films subject to bitter pill analysis and changing, some might say hardening, crusting over, perceptions. One thing I've learned, you can link anything to anything profoundly if you crust over far enough. The jaundiced way I see West Side Story (1961) for example, now corresponds to a metaphor about Syria: instead of letting warring tribes settle their differences in an organized rumble, Tony barges in and ends up killing his lover's brother, dooming himself to die in turn, and so forth. If he had just stayed out of it all the differences might have been ironed out in a simple brawl. But Maria wouldn't let him. Bitch!
Similarly Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) used to be about awesome fights and solid thrills. I saw it eight times in the theater! Now, some 30 years later, I see that its innocence and 'matinee spirit' carry a steep price on the social science major market. It's innocence itself is the culprit behind a covertly pro-colonialist--even fascist--message. Spielberg and Lucas apparently woke up to this, too, because the 'where are they now' saga of growing old and passing the legacy and zzzz begun in Last Crusade (1989), which I despised despite the zeppelin, continues in Crystal Skull (2008) with Ford now in the Sean Connery role, i.e. a know-it-all curmudgeon. Traveling the world and brawling with stakes far too high for his age (do we think this is pleasant? No average kid wants to watch his grandfather getting socked in the face!) he wants to grab that skull not for his museum of alien research or curiosity but to return it to its rightful lost city from whence it came. The only reason he goes after it is so the Russians don't turn it into a source of 'limitless power' or was that the Nazis and the Ark. Either way, at least Indy was young and had that fun Han Solo charm.
I'll just touch on the difference in approach here between grabbing the Ark "for the museum" and the skull "for 'the return!'" --this amazing skull with its alien grey oblong headshape and odd powers is clearly alien and yet Indy still scoffs when the only 'awake' character in the whole thing, Russian agent Spalko (Cate Blanchett), mentions its unearthly origins or expresses a personal desire to learn the truth about extraterrestrial experience and intentions. Even if its true, Indy would never believe it coming from, you know, a girl. And even if early after Roswell, (why the Roswell alien is already in deep storage by the late 50s is a mystery, and in what universe America would just shelve all its coolest stuff and never tinker with it?) people didn't used to mock witnesses of aliens as much in the fifties: that came later with the closing of Operation Blue Book, when the Air Force began to aggressively encourage ridicule as a means of silencing witnesses, which America has bought into hook line and sinker, even, apparently Indiana Jones.
The first film is set in 1936, with the Ark found and fought over in Egypt four years before the Italians invaded; five before the Americans were officially at war. It's convenient that the Ark and other buried treasures don't seem to be considered the inherent property of Egypt, a lawless land (in the film) where might makes right and big brawls can go down in markets without a cop in sight. The Ark belongs to whomever can grab it first, provided they white; it becomes a hot potato mcguffin fought over by Indy and his allies and the Nazis and theirs, but never Egyptians or Jews as a culture or country. The early scenes in 1936 Peru with the Hovitos and the golden head is another example: the natives aren't brave enough to enter the mystery cave, even though they defend it. Whomever brings the gold godhead out is apparently their new king, but it helps to speak Hovito, which Dr. Jones doesn't deign to learn, so he loses out to the crafty Belloq, who merely follows Jones from a safe distance and lets him do all the dangerous stunts, then grabs the prize.
Consider for example the way De Gaulle went and took credit for the liberation of Paris while the American and British troops continued to push the Germans back to the Rhine in 1945! Or the way we forcefully took France's colonies back for them, from partisans who had been fighting the Japanese, like Ho Chi Minh, while they sat around and gesticulated in their little cafes! Mon dieu!
I think one can also stretch this idea of crafty Frenchman stealing our thunder back even further to link the Carter administration to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), with its own Belloq, i.e. a short French director (Francois Truffaut) conducting an arcane metaphysical ceremony to communicate with the ancient ones, . There's no Harrison Ford role in CEOT3K per se, just a Goldie Hawn if she got away with her baby at the end of Sugarland Express (1974).
I should mention that in the 90s used to work for a short, good-looking French Jewish art dealer who got into steep debt playing futures markets and wound up on the run in Brazil, leaving me holding the phones and various lawyers and feds and Mossad agents to sort out a morass of who-owns-what and owes whoms, and so forth, giving me a good insight into the workings of ownership, provenance, and extradition within international law. So naturally I can't see the presence of these characters running through the Spielberg mythos as any accident! Mon dieu!
Richard Dreyful though was no Indy/Han older brother archetype, that was maybe the hole at the center of Close Encounters, the way the whole in Star Wars never really closed up for us kids until that Cantina bar and Han Solo. Of course the aliens in CEOTTK were interesting looking, but a little too friendly perhaps, and Spielberg's films since then have led the way in presenting two alien agendas--being cuddly and angelic or being ruthless corporate raiders--ruining us for any future alien visitations that might be more complex, with secret agendas that eventually traumatize the few men who hold this dark secret from our innocent hearts, you know, like real things are. Our innocence depends on this dichotomy staying firm.
And that is why we aren't ready for alien reality or true racism-free harmony! Spielberg fucked us up with his candy coated heart-ouchiness! We can only do 'good' (E.T., the CEOT3K greys, John Rhys-Davies) or evil (Nazis, War of the Worlds martians, CIA investigators, Tom Cruise). So for Reagan and Raiders we had to bend low and lunge forth at a bull china clip through the Cairo markets of complex realities, trusting if we just keep our eyes closed it would all come magically right in a bath of hand-painted light and wind. It did! And here we are.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) follows this self-imposed blindness as it moves into the atomic age, replete with Jones surviving an atomic bomb test by hiding out in a model home fridge, and getting caught up in a greaser vs. jock fistfight set to Elvis songs, driving around on a vintage motorbike, but scoffing at the idea of a real alien presence on earth, once again avoiding destruction by not looking into Medusa eye of the true unknowable Other, the one who would explode his cute/evil dichotomy.
That's one of the reasons why the whole time I was rooting for Madam Spalko, who at least treats Jones and his doofus family with some compassion without losing her ruthless edge. She's dicked over by him time and again because he can only see this good/evil dichotomy, hence she and the Russians are evil, period. Surely by now Jones should know to just let the enemies have their tchotchke and then merely avert his eyes to avoid being fried by the unleashed power. He's just fighting in case the skull should grant her ESP. She, at least, has an agenda beside being a stubborn academic bitter because being embroiled in red fighting's gotten him fired from university. So what if she's a commie? At least she plays the game with good sportsmanship and is awake to the mystery of the skulls, at least she believes in something! Indy doesn't even fake a sporting interest for the purpose of his job, the way Sam Spade did over the falcon. Say what you will about the Russian, agent Spalko is a woman, sir, who likes talking to a man who likes to talk. But Indy can only be as tiresome and rude as Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner, a show I find distinctly unpleasant as a result. Maybe that's just me, I trust a hero to act pleasant until his time comes to turn the girl over to the cops, not to be a mopey bore.
But the main tell in this version is that the academic deconstructions of Jones as an emblem of bull in a china shop imperialism have taken hold. Now Jones can only take the skull and bring it back to its rightful place at El Dorado; when he tries to take so much as a small sword - a knife from a mummified conquistador (because he needs one) his doofus son makes an 'ahem' voice, like put that back, that's not yours, that belongs to the dead conquistador's family, or... he doesn't have a specific reason, and it suddenly casts all of Jones' past acquisitions for his museum in doubt. 'Grave robbers will be shot,' the sign says going in, which his son points nervously a-towards. "Well, we're not going to do any grave robbing," Indy says, but of course his whole life has been one long grave rob.cConsidering the modern age legal battles over cultural ownership of relics (see here) of late, perhaps Lucasfilm and Spielco have begun to realize that the casual American arrogance underwriting Jones' grave robbing in the first films might be unconscionable but they should realize that this arrogance is what makes it so eloquent as a metaphor for 80s amok capitalism. Jones is a badass because he's so heedless, so obsessed with acquiring whatever ark-shaped jet ski catches his eye. Imagine how great the film might be if Jones was a heroin addict thanks to a dislocated knee? Instead Indy can't even borrow a dead conquistador's knife for his future endeavors, because his son--leather jacket and motorcycle signifying only conformity in rebellious trappings-- clears his throat in a way so pussy proper over 'stolen' antique weaponry it makes me want to punch him in the face and steal his switchblade.
This question of who gets the loot started to flair up for me a few weeks ago while watching another of my first world favorites, the MGM 1934 version of Treasure Island. Whose treasure is it, rightfully? Whomever has the map? Whomever paid for the expedition? Or whomever stole it in the first place? When Jim Hawkins and his mom go to look for the money Flint owes in his chest after he dies, mom plays the moral cuckold, saying first say they will collect only what is owed "and not a penny more!" But the treasure map makes it okay to in fact take Flint's whole savings account. Maybe he stole it from his fellow pirates who all stole it from Spanish lords and ladies from centuries before: Spain, the enemy of England, Jim! Like stealing the Nazi gold from Kelly's Heroes or the black bird from Kemidov; it's hard to say anyone really has a right to it if the current possessor stole it from people who stole it from (and killed) the previous owners, yet try telling that to the Mossad, am I right, Wildenstein?
The status of the treasure as up for grabs offers a very peculiar notion of 'white makes right' in this case white being the clothes and the powdered wigs of a gentleman born and bred sez I. In the MGM production there's no mention of how the treasure will be divided up, presumably in equal parts between Jim, Ben Gunn, the Squire, and Otto Kruger. But does the crew get a share? Presumably the pirate crew would get nothing for their efforts other than some measly pay. Are they really the bad guys for wanting to seize it for themselves? In reality the only ones with any right to it are the relatives of the victims of the pirate crew's piracy, and after that, the pirates themselves. But the right of Jim and his gentleman born to have all of it and the devil take the pirates is the way things seem meant to be.
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| "Three more stout and loyal men you'll never find... in this room, Jim." |
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