We went to see
the new Indiana Jones movie Friday night. Owain was very excited, and had a great time. It's fun to watch him doing archaeology on our pop culture.
The movie had some good things, like lovely special effects, and some delightful chase and fight scenes (really the whole point). I was bemused by the Yale chase scene. The anthology-like rifling of history amused from time to time (it's a 50s juvie scene! now a 70s UFO movie! now it's the colonial 1890s!).
But as Owain laughed or hid in my arms, I couldn't stop criticizing, especially given my longstanding hate for Spielberg. So spoilers, spoilers, spoilers for these brief notes:
Once again, we get the funny fat man. The ugly, greedy, unreliable, unsexual, ultimately self-destructive fat man. Last seen in
Jurassic Park. Always good for a laugh, right?
It's the natives which get special disdain, of the kind dating back to 19th-century racism, a la
Temple of Doom. The locals are nifty objects, bound to niches, simply alien. None of their dialogue is translated. None of them are actually named characters. They have no real culture. Their actions lack any rationale, beyond simple defend-against-invader. They hide in walls (?) just to leap out at people.
And they're like insects. They flee before the skull, just like the army ants. They swarm. They aren't very bright, individually. I was reminded of the bug-locals in Andre Malraux's
Royal Way (
1930), not to mention a raft of military sf.
Moreover, the film adds another insult to the local cultures by arguing that those people could not have produced advanced artifacts.
As this anthropologist points out, it's a classic, progressively debunked trope.
Intelligence comes in for special scorn in this movie. The saddest moment is the doom of the Soviet scientist. Spalko does some horrible things in the film, but none of those are the mechanism nor theme for her death. It is solely her desire to learn more, which is punished clearly and at some length.
It's typical Spielborg, who has never been interested in intelligence of any kind. He's an emotionally focused director, hoping to cut out our thinking whenever possible. This plays out in constructing audience response, where we rarely get materials or time to puzzle out anything. It also occurs as deliberate argument. For the latter, Spielberg's movie is like the old, conservative misreading of
Frankenstein, that there are some things man (or Soviet woman) Were Not Meant To Know (and We should know). We've seen this before in Spielberg, as when the government hides the Raiders' Ark, or when the military lies about aliens (Close Encounters), and it's a good thing for us. Stop thinking, you; it's for your own good.
The movie also returns to the heteronormative pair-bond parenting=good, sex=bad theme, which burbles along throughout Spielberg's films. A crucial component of this theme is construing sex as either bad or invisible.
Crystal Skull hews to the latter mode, where we get a child, a het couple, and a marriage, all without the nasty messiness of sex (like
Jurassic Park or the staggeringly awful
A.I.). How appropriate that this is a 1950s period film (kind of).
Related to that nuclear family-sans sex theme is Mutt's grim Oedipal failure. He loses his mother to his father. He already lost the father he thought he had, and suffers a second loss by learning the dead man wasn't in fact his part. And Mutt doesn't get anything out of any of this - his treasured bike disappears, and loses his chance at Indy's hat. In contrast Indy plays the virile man, even getting to show off a bigger, longer, and prettier knife than Mutt's (I'm not making this up). Indy wins the Oedipal game on all fronts, safely putting the son to one side, getting the girl, having one (biological) father dead (Sean Connery) and another one (symbolic, "Ox") being harmless throughout.
I feel like rereading some 19th-century pulp fiction, while awaiting Spalko slash fiction.
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