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.
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.
Nicely parsed, Bryan, but I don't think it's quite fair. I think the movie tries to be a tribute to the wacky movies of our youth, and if the first couple were the Saturday serials, this one, based in the Fifties due to Ford's age, has to be a drive in movie.
And they all were Reds under the bed/saucer men allegories. Unless there were giant chickens in them.
So, that said, there are elements of the film that are icky and that I believe are meant to be...the Russians kill the natives who are indeed buglike. The Russian scientist isn't killed because she wants to know more, she is killed because she greedily wants to know ALL. It's a very anti-communist flavoured element.
The part that troubled me was the "you don't need to go to school unless you're MY kid" meme. There was a hail fellow well met element to the fixing motorcycles is fine as long as that's what you want to do, that was wiped out entirely in the aftermath.
Posted by: Janice | May 25, 2008 at 21:35
Thanks for this, Bryan. It's good to know that I'm not alone in my opinion of Spielberg. I've not seen (and probably won't see) the latest Indy movie. The last Spielberg film I watched voluntarily was Jurassic Park.
I think it's trivial (but fun!) to pick apart the scientific errors and racism in Spielberg's films. After all, there are plenty of scientifically dubious and morally reprehensible movies I adore. I think my dislike of Spielberg goes more to his use of emotional manipulation and anti-intellectualism. Of course, he wouldn't be able to pull any of that off if he weren't a virtuousic filmmaker. At least when I watch a Jess Franco film, I feel like I'm hanging around getting drunk with an old reprobate. There's no illusions there.
Does it count as a Godwin's Law violation if I say that Spielberg reminds me of Riefenstahl?
Also, thanks for the links. Ethnography.com is going in my RSS feed, and now I want to read The Royal Way.
Posted by: HP | May 25, 2008 at 23:28
Get a grip. It's just a movie for crying out loud. What makes you think that Spielberg or any one else's personal opinions are written into the movie. It's just meant to be entertainment. I never once saw any thing that said the movie was based on fact or any ones belief. I hate people who think they are movie critics because what makes them think they are experts at what is or isn't a good movie. It's just one persons like or dislike for a movie is all it amounts to. I think the box office sales say more about how good the movie is then this jerks opinion. Here's some advice for all you wanna be movie critics. Why don't you start criticizing fact based movies and documentaries instead of fiction movies.
Posted by: Rick | May 26, 2008 at 09:24
Greetings, Janice! Nice comment, for which I have a few thoughts.
I agree that anti-communism is clearly the old theme being rehashed. Reminds me not only of the classic giant bug movies, but also of the George Pal War of the Worlds, with its bizarre Christian finale.
But I'm not so sure the film was that coherent. Remember the opening scenes, which make nuclear weapons scary, rather that worthy of pride. Recall the profs worrying about the Red Scare, not to mention the bad, too-suspicious, even unpatriotic FBI agents. The movie doesn't try to integrate these two different approaches.
Moreover, there's a hefty amount of different sf and pulp to draw on from that period, which doesn't aim for the same racist and/or colonialist and/or reactionarily anticommunist tropes. The Day the Earth Stood Still, for example, or some of the great EC and other horror and crime comics.
The bit about Mutt and school was definitely bad. A clearly class-based bias - something about which Spielberg is typically clueless.
Posted by: Bryan Alexander | May 26, 2008 at 10:35
I'm glad to know we share a dislike of Spielborg's emotional tyranny, HP.
And let me know what you think of that Malraux. I taught a few pages from it, once, during a Vietnam war class.
Rick, I'm curious: if it's just a movie, why do you take time to read my post about it, then write up a 134-word reply?
Posted by: Bryan Alexander | May 26, 2008 at 10:41
Let's not forget the woman who spared Indiana the tedium of raising his child and then happily marries him when all the work is done.
An entire generation of women's relationships were shaped by the archetype of the handsome rogue as being more desirable than the "dull" stay at home nerd. And now we discover that we need only wait till he's in his sixties to develop enough maturity to marry the girl and be responsible for his own kid.
And before someone jumps all over me about how Miriam didn't mention her pregnancy to Indy, remember that the backstory is he left her two days before the wedding and didn't write for a year. This was pre-birth control, remember? In Britain, there were still lawsuites over this kind of thing. Woman has sex with intended before wedding. Man decides to flee before wedding. This was called "Breach of Promise"
So poor Miriam is stuck with illegitmate child and some other man agrees to marry her. Perhaps because he likes her. Perhaps he merely feels sorry for her--or perhaps Miriam slept with him quick and told him *he* knocked her up. He gets killed in the war so at least Miriam is a war widow rather than the mother of a bastard
Mutt would be well within his rights to beat the hell out of his absentee father and lock his mom up in her room till she comes to her senses.
Posted by: Ceredwyn | May 26, 2008 at 12:29
I was looking for Mark Seven bag originally used in WW2 by Britians. This is same of its kind used in all Indiana Jones Movies. Finally I ordered from http://indianajonesbag.com but not sure of strap included it, it is too short. Have someone idea to find some larger size? Any suggestion will be great help.
Posted by: Juan Carlos | August 02, 2008 at 08:39
Quite nicely written actually, i like it. :)
Posted by: dekora | August 11, 2008 at 18:32
Indiana jones - the last one (or not?)- was in tune with the rest of them. I thought it was decent.
Posted by: Yaroslave L. | February 18, 2009 at 13:53