Been A Long Time

Following The Bliss - Indiana Jones 4

So... they made this little film about a grave robber some years back and ever so often they add new installments to the story. When they announced they were making this latest episode, I thought, "What? Now? Why?"

After all Harrison Ford is over 60, the last episode was 19 years ago, and nobody made a case for that film as being a film classic. The DVD box set has come and 'gone' (read 'Bought-by-the-Truckloads'), and there seemed like there was nothing new to add. Then again, I had no idea where they were going with this one. Set in 1957, this episode has a totally different nostalgia to it that actually takes you by surprise. It's actually a delight to see Indiana Jones in the context of latter events in history.

What's Good About It

Let's face it, there's nothing like an old leather jacket that fits you well. It's like that. Just like that it's Harrison Ford on the big screen doing what he does best - whatever it is, it's not something they teach in acting school. While the hair is gray and his face is lined with deep lines, it's not like he's lost any charisma in the intervening years. The hat, the whip, they wry smile and it's game on.

I didn't realise how much I missed having Harrison Ford throw his knuckledusters and haymakers against movie villains. It's pathetic but true; it's just pure joy to see him doing Indy again. It's like seeing your favourite band from a long gone era reform, and then seeing them play live in front of your eyes. The performance just punches through the cobwebs of nostalgia.

Then there's Spielberg's direction. He too has been spending a lot of time making movies that have won him Oscars, but bottom line, this is the kind of movie he makes best. Really, I wish he'd just make these. It feels like it's been a long time in between drinks, but the things about his directing style that I loved are all back with a hellacious energy and fury. I forgot just how good Spielberg could be, and his handiwork is astounding in this movie.

What's Bad About It

I don't want to nitpick but it's just as nonsensical as the first film. I'm not expecting taut dialogue and tightly structured logic like we see in say, 'A Few Good Men', but the writing is just a touch on the fanciful side. Not that that should be held against this fanciful franchise. If you don't like fanciful, you shouldn't be in the cinema watching it - but even then there have been moments where you go "Hang a minute guys..." over the years.

Then there are all the interesting thing that get set up and never get paid off. It's as if we're supposed to ignore them as a hundred MacGuffins, cast aside into the dust heap of cinema history as Indiana Jones goes looking for ... aliens! Yes, those stalwart Spielberg aliens with bubble heads make a big appearance in this film too.

But wait just one moment. It's an Indiana Jones movie. It's supposed to be preposterous, so take my complaints with a pinch of salt. There's a lot more to discuss than what's good or bad. If anything, it's a bit Nietzschean in that it's beyond good or bad.

Stumbling Out of Boxes, Back From The Dead

The first we see of Indy in this film, is when he is dragged out of a Car boot. We see him stumble out of a refrigerator and a number of other claustrophobic spaces. It is as if the Indiana Jones persona is coming out of deep freeze, which indeed, he is. As the film echoes the first film where we do not see Indiana's face until some ways in, we do not see Indy until he puts his hat back on. When we do see just how gray Harrison Ford has become in that revealing moment, we sort of gasp at how old we have become. At least, I did.

I can't remember the last time I felt the mass of 19 years in a cinema, ever. Yet, in that moment, I reflected on my own 19 years since the last time I sat in a dark cinema watching Harrison Ford put on his fedora. And just as I adjusted, I felt this might even be one of the last few times I would see Harrison Ford on the big screen in a new film. I certainly hadn't done it in a long while. Maybe the last time I bothered was when he did 'Sabrina', just to see what it looked like. I think it put me off seeing his movies for some time.
So there it was, a sense of time and mortality.

Then there are the missing players. Denholm Elliot is dead. His absence is particularly keenly felt in the obligatory University sequences. He's been replaced by the guy who plays Bridget Jones' dad, which must be some kind of in-joke, perhaps. There's no sign of Sallah, played by John Rhys Davies either. Sean Connery's character, Henry Jones Snr. is dead and gone, and that's depressing too, because the original James Bond has retired from acting altogether so I imagine he's simply waiting to die somewhere out there in 'wealthy retired stars land'.

The most striking feature of this film is the deep sense of mortality that runs through it. If the third film was about dealing with the mortality of our parents, then this film is in some ways a film about dealing with our own. Indiana Jones can still do his thing, but he is so out of place in his 1957. In fact he is accused of perhaps being a communist, which is so absurd when you consider how fundamentally capitalistic and mercenary his character has been before.

The Mushroom Cloud In History
The nuclear testing range sequence is perhaps one of the more depressing aspects of the film. Not because it's unlikely that Indy survives a nuclear blast in a lead-lined refrigerator, but because when he emerges and looks up, he sees a blossoming mushroom cloud. All I could think of was John Wayne and Susan Hayward, previous stars of the screen who succumbed to cancer because they acted on the nuclear contaminated sand in Nevada.


Not only is the mushroom cloud haunting because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but because of the history of stars who have been felled by it. To see Harrison Ford's Indy gaze up to it brought me a sense of despair. It's a deeply moving moment filled with dread as all good science fiction films have. I spent the rest of the film thinking, after all this is over, Indy's going to be riddled with cancers. It's depressing, I know, but I was never one to handle mortality well. I never liked 'Star Trek: Generations' because it kills off Captain Kirk - and once you know how he dies, you can't look at any of the episodes or movies in the same way ever again.
Maybe Indy's going to be all right?
Maybe he didn't get irradiated badly at all because of that fridge.
Maybe it's just crap writing where they put him into one-too-many crazy jeopardy that nobody can actually survive.
But most of all, I thought of John Wayne and Susan Hayward who were going to die from that sand created by such nuclear tests. ...Although to be honest, it is possible that six-packs-a-day of cigarettes was the real cause of John Wayne's cancers.

Absentee Fathers

One of the more cheesey story developments in this film is the appearance of Mutt Williams played by Shia Labeouf. His first shot is a straight lift off Marlon Brando in 'The Wild One' , complete with the bike, lather jacket and white cap - but no trophy. Yeah, I'm pretty sure George 'American Graffiti' Lucas taught him how to do the greaser schtick, but it still looks hammy.

Worse still is the notion that this Mutt is Indy's long lost son out of *gasp* Marion Ravenwood/Williams played by Karen Allen. It's daft. The story logic is that Indy and Marion never really got it on, but Marion was pregnant with Indy's child when she married some English guy called Colin. Isn't it every absentee father's dream that his son turns up at his front door? This is what I mean about fanciful - and much more so than the aliens in Roswell or the KGB agents in America.

What I mean by fanciful is this: if indeed Indiana Jones is a lifetime adventurer coming to the end of his career, the last thing he should get is a blast-from-the-past son. Being the adventurer that he is that we know and love, he should be the ultimate in absentee fathers who never sired a son. It's too nice a gift for a guy who turned his back on domesticity to fight Nazis and evil cults and whatnot. I guess it's my own prejudice that I find this aspect of the story to be more sentimental than I want it to be.

Really, Indiana Jones is the guy we all want to be; a loner, a cynic, an adventurer unfettered by worldly connections, seeker of Truth, punching out at the bad guys, swinging on his whip towards knowledge, running towards enlightenment... Giving him long lost family members is not doing him any favors.

Cults, Occult Cults And UFO Cults

Many of my friends who have seen the picture are shaking their heads at the UFO ending. I actually don't find it perplexing at all. I recently sat through all the previous Indy Jones films on DVD before going in to watch this one, and the one bit of detail that caught my ear was that in the first one, Indy gets approached by the US Army because he is also an expert in the occult. That's right. Not only is Indiana Jones an archaeology scholar, he's a student of the occult.

What does this mean? To my ears, it's the big nexus of mumbo-jumbo that brought up things like Madam Blavatzky and her Theosophists, Rudolf Steiner and his Anthroposophists, Gurgieff, Aleicester Crowley and the Golden Dawn and whatever else junk philosophy that was doing the rounds at the turn of the 20th Century.

It's actually the exact same kind of dross that fed into the core beliefs of Nazism and so there's an interesting mirroring there, where to beat the Nazis looking for the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail you need the same kind of scholar of nuttiness to figure out where they're going. Thus, in the makeup of the original Indiana Jones is a big chunk of mumbo-jumbo and junk philosophy. And where did these kinds of people all go? By 1957, they were into UFOs.

Hence it does not surprises me in the least bit that the 50s installment of Indiana Jones is about the Roswell crash and the drawings in Nasca and Pre-Columbian American Civilisation being linked to Aliens. It's exactly the right claptrap that Indy should be navigating. To be honest, I like it for that.

If there was one thing I really found hard to stomach in the Indiana Jones movies, it was the heavy duty Judeo-Christian mythology getting such validation through special (specious?) effects. A Universe where the Ark of the Covenant AND the Holy Grail exist and work as some kind of artefact is ipso-facto a Universe of the Judeo-Christian God. Even if 'Temple of Doom' side-tracks out to Hindu mysticism and Thugees, the tenor of these film has been a massive validation of the Bible. You'd almost think that Indiana Jones *would* discover Noah's Ark on top of Mount Ararat (and thank goodness they haven't done that story).

So in evolving/devolving to finding out that the Nasca Gods were trans-dimensional space aliens and that somehow their technology is linked to the Ark of the Covenant, then it seems to me, the logical answer is that the text is telling us that ancient Jews did not have a 'God' experience, but rather a 'Transdimensional Space Alien' experience instead. Suddenly the Judeo-Christian subtext is completely blown out of the entire series - and I have to say it pleases me greatly.

I've spoken to a few Christians about their responses to this film and yup, they're universally disappointed by the alien. They tell me that the ending destroys meaning for them, not just in this film but in the four films. Well of course they would be upset about it, but thanks to the banality of the aliens, I'm finding I can stomach the metaphysical content of the whole four films a lot better. Yay for the aliens!

A Word Of Advice To Mr. Spielberg

Dear sir,
As the adage goes, I liked your old stuff better than your new stuff.

The only exceptions I would make would be 'Schindler's List', 'Minority Report' and bits of 'A.I.'.
I actually thought you had 'lost' it. That you had somehow lost the quality in your directing that drew me to your films many years ago as a youngster. Dare I say, you were one of about 3-4 film makers that inspired me to want to become a film maker myself, so I do not say this lightly - I thought you had just let that talent fade away.

This film shows to me that this is not so. While you make a decent line in 'serious' films, I would contend you make an excellent line in entertainment films. This film is no exception. I understand you found it to be a little bit of a chore to go back to the style of director you were 20-odd years ago, but to be honest, this style kicks ass. Every angle, every move, every edit oozes with the style that once made us all feel 'wow'.

Pleasing crowds is not a mortal sin, and you sir are a fantastic director when it comes to that quality. I myself have very little of that quality in my temperament so I am envious of your fine instincts. Thus I would say to you, that if you want to keep making important movies, then that you should go back to making truly excellent entertainment, and not the merely good serious films. Therefore Mr. Spielberg, please go back to your roots, follow your bliss and don't try to be who you are not - in other words, please be this kind of director more often.

Kindest Regards,
Art Neuro