The Raider of the Lost (Critical) Heart

It never fails to interest me to see which films make a permanent impression on the collective human race and which immediately fade from the collective memory. Mention an everlasting film to a person on the street and they are likely to start a personal narrative that discusses their first time viewing that movie. “Oh, I remember when I first watched Titanic, I was fourteen and…” For varying reasons, different movies continue to have the same feeling of a “first-time screening” in the memories of the people who cherish them the most. One person will prefer an astounding action sequence over a love tragedy. Another will remember an unusual plotline over jaw-dropping scenery.

The Indiana Jones series are such that they live on, forever invoking memories of their “first-time screenings.” I dare someone to against their immortality! Who tends to forget all about the runaway mine car scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom? Who is apt to forget the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark which we first The Man in the Fedora, Indiana Jones, as he pursues an Incan idol and is chased by that enormous boulder? Who will forget the first time Sean Connery appears in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? Who will drop the memory of Indy’s romantic flames?

The IJ series are charming, comedic in (most) of the right places, romantic, drowning in action, simmering in crazy plot-wise twists and turns and incredibly fun. You could regard them as “eye-candy,” but since when has “eye-candy” lasted nearly 30 years? No, there is more under the surface than sweet stunts and a sexy man wearing a very recognizable hat.

Raiders is regarded as the best of the four films in the series, and rightfully so. Lawrence Kasdan and Steven Spielberg did not allow much breathing space between phenomenal action scenes, but they permitted enough that the characters of Indy, Marion and Belloq are built past simple two-dimensional characters.

Indy wants to find his relics and will go to any length to get them, but he does not resort to what might be regarded as unethical to get them. He is sensitive at times and hard in others. He loves or at least likes people who are perfectly unlikeable / unlovable (coughWilliecoughElsacough) and he occasionally places his trust in the wrong people – Walter Donovan in The Last Crusade, for one. And yet he does not overreact when he discovers that the children of a small village have been stolen to serve the goals of the Thuggee cult in Temple of Doom – in fact, his reaction is fairly minimal. By no means is he fully separating himself from the moment, but for such horrifying news, he’s taking it quite calmly.

Marion is somewhat bulldozer-ish in nature and yet she is terribly vulnerable. Raiders doesn’t give any details as to what happened in her romantic past with Indy, but whatever happened, Indy apparently ran her heart over with a tractor (keep in mind that this is the focalizing lens to the past that her character presents – more or fewer meaningful events could have happened). But she also manages to be quite evasive. In the scene where Belloq and Marion share a bottle of unidentified hard liquor, Marion blatantly lies about the state of her relationship with Indy: “I have no loyalty to Jones! He’s brought me nothing but trouble.” Here, Belloq has gotten himself slobbering drunk and Marion, while she is certainly inebriated, has the upper hand at the moment – she’s got Belloq exactly where she needs him.

Indy and Marion together: they have a wild love-hate relationship. Marion is not above giving her lover a good physical pounding and Indy is not above sticking some sharp verbal jabs into her. And yet when Indy realizes (mistakenly, as revealed later) that Marion is dead, he drinks himself senseless. He even behaves in a mildly suicidal manner towards the end of his conversation in the tavern with Belloq, saying, “You want to go talk to God? Let’s go see Him together, I’ve got nothing better to do…”

Even later, Marion and Indy have sex (completely off-screen) – yet another side to their love-hate relationship. Think of the psychological implications of their sexual activities – after all, they haven’t officially gotten back together yet: They could be doing it because they are happy to be alive. They could be doing just because they are “loose” people. They could be doing it to try to walk down “memory lane,” as they were in a relationship long before the story Raiders shows. They could be doing it because they feel they “owe it to one another,” or one feels that he/she owes sex to the other. Or they could be doing it just because they feel “itchy“ and both are the closest person available to use. However, I would like to doubt that last option.

Belloq is a villain that has been fleshed out to the point of still carrying the label of “villain,” and yet not even remotely acting the part of a stereotypical villain. I regard his greatest moment in Raiders the scene in which he and Indy are sitting in the tavern. My words cannot possibly be anywhere close to true justice for this scene. It should certainly be placed in a top 20 list of greatest scenes between “heroes” and “villains.” Go fetch your copy of Raiders and watch this scene – it will be worth it, I promise.

Of course, there is the question as to the nature of Belloq’s religiosity, but we also need to take into consideration that there are elements of his character that vaguely suggest the behavior of a sociopath. Such a villain should not be (stereotypically speaking, of course) religious because faith collides with sociopathy. Religion commands a moral center, particularly the Jewish faith. Sociopathic behavior often commands NO moral center.

Belloq is seen in his last few moments on earth in the dress of an ancient Israelite head priest as written down in the Jewish Torah. In the tavern, he is heard mentioning God – presumptuously the Jewish God. And most obviously, he is chasing after a very important artifact – the Ark of the Covenant – to the Jewish faith. Is Belloq chasing after the Ark just so that he can beat Indy to it? Is Belloq using aspects of the Jewish faith to his own means or is he truly religious (remember the scene in which he personally opens the Ark)? The fact of the matter is, the answers aren’t as clear cut as appears at first glance.

Which is exactly why Raiders of the Lost Ark deserves the respect that it does.

Many people speak of how much more violent Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but in reality, the amount of violence / action is no more than Raiders ever had. What makes Temple so memorable is the content of its violence. The marked physical abuse several children endure in addition to the infamous “heart” scene as well as Indy’s implied demon possession was enough to add a new rating to the rating system: PG- 13. When the Royals of England viewed Temple, Steven Spielberg is said to have told Princess Diana to look away during those scenes.

The furor that Temple caused likely killed any discussion of its more subtle values. To be sure, some of the sillier scenes (i.e. the dinner at the maharajah’s palace, Indy and Short Round playing cards around the campfire while Willie runs around screaming at an assortment of animals) does not help those values, and yet there is something oddly touching about Indy’s and Short Round’s father / son type relationship. There is a feeling of delightful vengeance when Indy arrives to save the captive children of the village from the Thuggee cult. There is a sense of satisfaction of seeing the village restored to its former happiness and also seeing a Sankara Stone returned to those who will care for it and not abuse its power. In fact, restoration is a brief but wonderful theme that Temple carries so well. It is sad but understandable that many parents who brought their kids to the original theatre run were shocked enough to ignore the reclamation that takes place.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is an obvious pull-back from its perceived overly-violent and overly-goofy predecessor, but it puts aside the glitz of action for intellect, history, and the medieval era for Christianity. Last Crusade also adds two layers not seen before in the previous two Indiana films – Indy and his father, and Indy as a teenaged Boy Scout. The section where Boy Scout Indy tries to keep the Cross of Coronado demonstrates Indy’s tenacity, deliberate behavior and defiance.

The story that surrounds Indy and his father, Dr. Henry Jones, is complex and painful for both Indy and Henry. They have years of grudges and anger stacked against each other and complicate things when they both sleep with the same Nazi trickster, Elsa Schneider. They are emotionally reunited by the end of the film, but it takes many fights and two near-deaths for Indy and Henry to come to the point of forgiving one another.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull does not vary much from the plot format of its predecessors, yet many who have seen the film say that it felt intrinsically different from the beginning, and they have a point. For one thing, Indy has aged tremendously. His father is dead, his colleague Marcus Brody is dead, and Indy lives in an era where the world could be blown up by nuclear warheads any day. The Russian KGB – Indy’s new set of enemies – seems to have more power behind them than the Nazis of old had. Americans suspect their neighbors – or anyone, for that matter – of Communist ties if their activities are too strange. Indeed, this suspicion is not often spoken about when speaking of the American 1950’s, but rest assured, it was powerful and haunting.

First of all, what is so much fun about Crystal Skull is seeing Indy on the big screen since Last Crusade. Secondly, Indy is as spry and smart as ever. Thirdly, he finds Marion again after (how many break-ups would this be now?) many years and also discovers he has a son who happens to carry his father’s name and his own name. There is also something different about the ending of this film than there has been with the three previous ones. The endings of Raiders, Temple, and Crusade all carried a feeling that Indy’s current situation was temporary. They all end with him in the company of Marion, Willie and the village he helped to restore, and his companions in finding the Grail. But they gave a sense that the moment wouldn’t last long, he would go back to his school, the girlfriends would march off in a huff some time or anoter, and his Grail companions would die of old age, even his dad. But Crystal Skull changes that trend with Indy’s and Marion’s wedding. This seems to give permanence to Indy’s life that hasn’t been present before.

The first three IJ films were made to carry the feel of a 1930’s serial film with high action and adventure. Since Crystal Skull was made so long after Crusade, Indiana showcased with the backdrop of the 50’s makes logical sense. In addition, what was expected “high action and adventure” for films of the 50’s was considerably different than what was expected for those of the 30’s – “cowboys ‘n’ Indians” and “cops ‘n’ robbers” had long since been phased out. Crystal Skull was created with these 50’s film expectations in mind, but it is interesting to listen to and read what the reactions of people were to Crystal Skull. Certainly, there were some silly and far-fetched moments in the movie, but as the Angry Video Game Nerd has pointed out in his review of the film, Crystal Skull is not nearly as goofy as Temple of Doom was. The biggest problem – and here I partly blame the film viewers – is the jaded attitude that they take into the movie. Indiana Jones is built with escapism and fun in mind, and not with any tremendous amount of gravity.

But the real heart of the Indiana Jones series is not the eye-popping action sequences, the enormous sets, or even the general plotlines as much as Indy and his relationships with the people he loves. I make the case that Indy’s character is mostly defined by his relationships and how he maintains those relationships – not as much by his occupation, his pursuits of relics or even his academia. His relationship with Marion before Raiders, during Raiders, before Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and during Crystal Skull is both passionate and turbulent. His relationships with the women of the subsequent two movies are as purposeless as they are brief. Indy’s relationship with Short Round also has a sense of the temporal, but one of the closest and most gentle relationships we have until Indy and his father reunite emotionally.

Indy’s relationship with his father, Henry, is one that shows a bitter side of Indy that we’ve not seen at all until Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Indy has buried a smoldering anger about Henry’s preference to his studies on the Grail over his son, and when Indy meets his father again for the first time in many, many years (Dr. Henry: “It is you, Junior!” – does Henry not remember what his ONLY child looks like?), his anger explodes almost immediately. In this film, Indy ceases to carry the hardened shell that often seems to hide his emotions and openly rages at his father at the point where they must choose going after Dr. Henry’s Grail diary and meeting up with Marcus Brody, Indy’s academic colleague and friend. The rest of the time, Indy screams at, belittles and pushes aside his father, dismissing Henry’s ideas, emotions and warnings. Only after the scene in which Henry pulls a hare-brained stunt that saves his and his son’s lives does Indy’s face seem to register a change of heart. When Indy is threatened with his father’s death after Henry is shot, Indy realizes all he stands to lose and goes to extreme measures to save his father from dying at that point in time. Indeed, Steven Spielberg has said many times that the search for the father was (figuratively) the search for the Holy Grail.

In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the relationship tables are turned on Indy. He was a father figure to Short Round and a son to Dr. Henry Jones – in this film he is an actual father to his and Marion’s love child, Henry (a.k.a. “Mutt”). His relationship with Short Round was a short-term one, however fatherly it might have been. But Indy is makes a commitment to both Mutt and Marion that we didn’t see in the previous three films. The only real commitments we see Indy make are to the discovery and safe delivery of the ancient relics he seeks and the commitment to his father at the end of Crusade. But during Crystal Skull, Indy seems to realize three things: 1) That he isn’t getting any younger, 2) that he might die alone, as we do not hear of any family beyond his dad and long-deceased mother, 3) that he is lucky to have had Marion return with all they have done to each other and 4) having a child to call his own is more precious than he could have imagined.

In the end, the Indiana Jones series needs a long round of applause for their longevity. The majority of films do not last as long at these have, but I believe they owe that longevity to the basic heart that is inside them. A film with much action but no love, no human failing, no human fear is just empty celluloid and Indiana Jones is anything but empty celluloid.

Related posts:

1. Indiana Jones 5? Could be.
2. Review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
3. How many Mummies do we need, really?