Indiana Jones and the Methods of Rationality

This essay was commissioned by Ashley Watts, who obviously hates my fucking guts. Apologies for the title. It seemed funny to me when I started writing this.

We may as well start with Disney, as they're the new curator of the Indiana Jones films. It looks like in the near future we're going to see another goddamn one of these things, whenever the squabble over who's writing the script ends. There's absolutely no need for another one of these movies. Harrison Ford does the world a service every time he appears in public, but he's done plenty of that in four whole Indiana Jones movies already. Whatever we're going to see in Indiana Jones and the Citadel of the Fecal Nugget, it's unlikely to be more than a nostalgia trip.

So what will the nostalgia of Indiana Jones and the Nag Hammadi Ram's Testicles be predicated on? Lucasfilm is an enterprise of nostalgia for adventure serials of the Forties and Fifties,  just as Disney is an eternal paean to money and whatever the fuck Varg Vikernes masturbates over.  Star Wars and Indiana Jones offer repackaged visions of the glory of early 20th century adventure stories, which in turn waxed nostalgic for Victorian conquest stories. While Star Wars has done a solid job of diversifying its cast and interrogating itself recently (mostly in The Last Jedi), with its entire galaxy of characters to choose from, Indiana Jones revolves entirely around its titular character. This is always going to be a film franchise about a straight white man who goes to subaltern civilizations and steals their stuff. It's what an archaeologist adventurer does in this genre (although I can imagine Warren Ellis doing a fun rehabilitation of Jonesy). There's are routes of escape from speculative fiction's colonialist origins, but it's going to be difficult to do Indiana Jones in the 2020s without being as tasteless as the rest of the series.

With that said, we should acknowledge two of the Indy movies are quite good. Raiders of the Lost Ark is rightfully considered a classic blockbuster, and The Last Crusade is as fun as Raiders while also deploying some genuinely smart characterization. What makes them work is just how meticulous they are in their reworking of adventure serials. Lucas and Spielberg's "cliffhanger every five minutes" isn't a new formula by any stretch of the imagination, but it's one that works. Raiders and Crusade pace themselves well, punctuating scenes with memorable lines and stunts in the way well-made action movies do. Harrison Ford is delightful enough to make almost any scene work, and he's usually surrounded by exceptional talent (Karen Allen doesn't get nearly enough credit for making Marion, a bastion of misogynistic screenwriting, into a highlight of the franchise). Whatever political problems the movies have, they mostly make easy viewing.

At the same time, there's a queasiness to the movies which makes Indiana Jones tough to watch at times. Raiders is a deeply orientalist movie, using "the East" as a mysterious place where ancient spirits run around, waiting to be uncovered by the entrepreneurial  white men. Arabs are all nameless cannon fodder, brown people with swords existing only to be hilariously murdered by the lethargic Dr. Henry Jones. The Last Crusade at least has Kazim, but even he's a Mysterious POC who wounds up with a bullet in his chest by the end of the film.

The truth about Indiana Jones is that even at its best, it is deeply exploitative. Everyone in the team, whether they be white hero, white villain, white woman, or brown cannon fodder is there to cosplay an imperialist wet dream. Landscapes populated by subaltern peoples (which is to say everywhere except North America and Western Europe) are just playgrounds for petty anthropologists. There's nary an Orientalist trope in the canon which doesn't surface at length in Indiana Jones. Even the classic gun gag in Raiders where Indy shoots the swordsman is just a slapstick version of the "haha, white man with gun beat brown man with sword" tradition of humor. 

Dr. Henry Hindianason Jones' reactionary politics aren't limited to its POC either. Women as a whole are relegated to the role of femme fatale, damsel, or victim of predatory lead role (think about how old Marion was when she was originally involved with Indy). Karen Allen gets not nearly enough credit for the performance she gives - she's every bit as charismatic as Ford while having none of the script's backing. Women are far from integral to the Jones narrative (although Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is... surprisingly not too offensive in the gender department). It's White MAN's Burden, not Female Stan's Burden. Adam and Thieve, not Adam and Eve.

By far the worst offender in the series is the divisive Temple of Doom. The great tragedy of the movie - apart from its travestying of Indian culture and Hindu worship - is that it's divisive at all. There are two ways to approach Temple of Doom: as a critical viewer, and as a goddamn psychopath. In addition to being the nastiest, worst assembled, and most gruesome piece of torture porn ever produced for eight-year-olds, it's a viciously racist piece of cinema with a blatant ideological vendetta against people of color. From its Yellow Peril intro to the anti-Indian content of the rest of the movie, it's outright unwatchable and a moral blight on everyone involved with it short of Ke Huy Quan (it's hard to blame the child involved, especially the Vietnamese-American one).

It's almost unfathomable to me that there are people who get angrier at the utterly forgettable Kingdom of the Crystal Skull than Temple of Doom, but then again there are people who get more offended by trans women calling The Talons of Weng-Chiang racist than by Talons' racism. Nerds will value nostalgia more than progressive altruism any day. And when it comes down to it, there's very little room for progressivism in Indiana Jones. Even the good movies are painfully racist. Maybe the pointless The Indiana Jones Falls will attempt to deal with the fraught legacy of the original movies in the same way The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi grapple with the failures of their predecessors. But it's more likely Indiana Jones vs Crystal Skull: Dawn of Fanwank will spend its time ignoring Crystal Skull than critically engaging with the mess that is its own history. I just hope when I inevitably fork over more than my hourly wage for it that I'm not wasting my time. Maybe a miracle will happen and it won't make me spit nails. But it's more likely we'll see Marcus sit down for a respectful conversation about academic racism with Short Round.