False Promises and Indiana Jones

Steven Spielberg’s most blockbustery films have always wed big-budget commerciality to some stream of deeper issues running beneath the narrative’s surface—the collapse of childhood in ET, the psychology of fear in Jaws, and most importantly, the danger of cloned dinosaurs running amok on a Costa Rican island in Jurassic Park. But take away either the commerciality (as in Amistad, or A.I.) or the depth (as in 1941) and you’re left with an unsettlingly mediocre experience, and that's just what you get with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Midway through its first act, our eponymous hero, having just been launched a preposterous distance by the force of an atomic blast (in a 50s-era refrigerator—but at least it’s lead-lined, so we know this is all totally plausible), scampers up an embankment to survey the oblivion. Lurching into frame, Indiana is dwarfed completely by the iconic mushroom cloud billowing heavenwards. It’s the first of many hints that Indy has aged into a world beyond him, a world in which the miracle of the split atom is every bit as important as the miracles of the Lost Ark or the Holy Grail. In a literal flash, everything that defined Indiana Jones over the past three decades seemingly disappears: once a fierce detractor of the US government, Jones has become an OSS agent in the intervening years; a lone wolf defined by his transient relationships, Indy somehow picked up a steady sidekick in the War.

It’s a promising proposition: rarely (if ever) is an audience given the perspective of enough time to watch a character—much less a cultural icon—evolve into something completely different, whether by conscious decision making or by fading away into obsolescence. But that potential payoff quickly disappears, as we’re quickly reminded that, while our own reality is suffused with vicissitudes both bitter and sweet, movie heroes suffer no such indignities. At a stroke, Spielberg undermines whatever deeper currents may have been at work for Crystal Skull. “We’re at an age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away,” Indiana opines to an old friend, just after receiving news of his dismissal, but neither he nor Spielberg ever really mean it. Indiana hasn’t lost his breezy self-confidence or his superior physical skills: he’s able to crack wise and crack skulls with the same old aplomb, and all the while careening down a narrow dirt lane in a Brazilian rainforest to boot. And as for that whole life-taketh-away thing? By film’s end, Indiana ends up with a family without even trying.

At the climax, Indiana once again surveys a scene of spectacular destruction, as a spaceship twirls with enough force to destroy an ancient temple and divert the mighty Amazon from its course. It’s the perfect inverse bookend to the mushroom cloud shot earlier on. Indiana is master of this domain. He has engineered these events, and he watches not from below but from above. He is no longer a solitary figure defined against the grandeur in the distance; He is the Almighty observing his creation. He is Zeus on Olympus. He alone knows what it all means, and he alone knows where it’s all going, as the promise of a fallible American hero once again circles the drain.

Maybe next time.