In Defense of Indiana Jones

There are some ideas which, if left unchallenged, will fester and metastasize until they become a part of the zeitgeist and eventually begin to corrode our understanding of objective reality.

While it may not be as corrosive to the body politic as, say, the conspiracy theory that JFK was assasinated by an incredibly complex, though as yet miraculously unrevealed conspiracy involving the US Intelligence services, the FBI, the Secret Service, Anti-Castro Revolutionaries, The New Orleans Mob, The Dallas Mob, a C-grade strip club owner, a schizophrenic transvestite from the New Orleans Civil Air Patrol, and possibly also Vice President of the United States Lyndon Baines Johnson… there is one idea so egregiously wrong that it must be met on the battlefield of ideas and defeated before it does real damage, not only to one of our most beloved heroes, but to the greatest adventure movie of all time.

The conspiracy I’m talking about is the one which suggests that Indiana Jones had no role in the outcome of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK… that the result, Nazis melted to death by the wrath of God, would have unfolded exactly the exact same way even if Jones were not in the movie at all.

For one thing, this theory misses the entire point of the story… and for another, it just ain’t so.

I’m not sure where this idea originated, but it was popularized by one of the characters on BIG BANG THEORY, a show populated mostly by nerds on the spectrum, the type of folks who substitute math for genuine human emotion, who say romantic things like “the illusion of true love creates the same chemical reaction in your brain as eating chocolate”… or who manage to miss the point of a movie entirely by trying to boil it down to its component parts.

So, contra the nerds, let’s start with some of the reasons why this theory misses the point. Because that gets to the heart of the matter, as Don Henley once said, in a way that arguing over plot points does not.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK is not about what happens to the Ark of the Covenant anymore than TOP GUN is about that one time a bunch of American pilots shot down five Russian MiGs over the Indian Ocean. Rather, TOP GUN is about that moment when, with his friends screaming into his radio for help, Maverick whispers “talk to me Goose”, wrenches the yoke, goes to full afterburner and re-engages in the dog fight. Without that moment, and all that comes before it, audiences would not cheer the final victory of Maverick, Ice Man, and Hollywood… it would just be another thing that happened… devoid of any context or meaning.

Because movies aren’t about “things”… they aren’t about Arks or jury verdicts, or Russian MiGs or Maltese Falcons… those things are simply “McGuffins.”

“McGuffin” is a derisive industry term for whatever thing the hero in a movie is trying to get. Its generic-sounding name is meant to convey the idea that the “McGuffin” doesn’t actually matter at all… that movies are not about McGuffins, they are about characters. Storytellers like Steven Spielberg understand something critical, way down in their bones… that audiences don’t root for McGuffins.

TOP GUN is about Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, THE MALTESE FALCON is about Sam Spade, THE VERDICT is about Frank Galvin, and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK is about Indiana Jones. It is these characters for whom we root as we sit in the dark and watch their adventures unfold, not the McGuffins that they seek.

The films of Spielberg’s career, especially those in that undefeated first half, contain many autobiographical elements. For example… CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and E.T. are both about Aliens, which is to say Aliens are the “McGuffin.” But the theme of those two movies, what they are really about for Spielberg the man, is a kid coming to terms with his distant, unavailable father.

In the case of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, the story unfolds like the dream of a disenchanted child trying to invent a reason for his father’s absence, something like a heroic mission to make first contact with Aliens, for instance. In the case of E.T., Eliot is the classic afterthought of a middle kid, desperately searching for a relationship that can take the place of the one he doesn’t have with his absentee father.

In a similar way, the Indiana Jones Trilogy echoes another theme we see throughout Spielberg’s career, and life, the awesome power of faith and his struggles to come to terms with it.

When we first meet Indiana Jones, he is a man of no faith, one who can’t imagine that he could ever run up against a foe whom he couldn’t just shoot in the face. When Marcus Brody returns from a meeting where he has secured permission for Indy to go after the Ark of the Covenant, they have this conversation…

Brody: Marion’s the least of your worries right now, belileve me, Indy.

Jones: What do you mean?

Brody: Well, I mean that for nearly three thousand years, man has been searching for the Lost Ark. It’s not something to be taken lightly. No one knows its secrets. It’s like nothing you’ve ever gone after before.

Jones: (Laughing) Oh, Marcus… what’re you trying to do, scare me? You sound like my Mother. We’ve known each other a long time. I don’t believe in magic, a lot of superstitious hocus pocus. I’m going after a find of incredible historical significance, you’re talking about the boogey man. Besides… you know what a cautious fellow I am… (throws his gun into his suitcase)

Indiana Jones is a hard-headed skeptic. That is his cinematic archetype. He laughs off Brody’s concerns because he does not believe in that which he cannot see or touch, even though, as it will turn out, he would’ve done well to throw his bible into his suitcase right alongside that revolver.

Later on in the movie, he will have a very similar conversation with his old friend, the mysterious, charismatic and more spiritual Salah….

“Indy, there is something that troubles me… The Ark, if it is there at Tanis, then it is something that man was not meant to disturb. Death has always surrounded it. It is not of this Earth.”

Indy doesn’t respond at all this time, and he certainly doesn’t laugh in Salah’s face the way he did with Brody. And we are left to wonder if Jones is beginning to have second thoughts about his skepticism… if he is starting to believe.

And again, he will have another very similar exchange with Beloq late in the third act, after he ambushes the Nazis’ Ark procession with a bazooka and threatens to blow it up.

“OK Jones, you win… blow it up. Yes, blow it up! Blow it back, to God. All your life has been spent in pursuit of archelogical relics. Inside the Ark are treasures beyond your wildest aspirations. You want to see it opened as well as I. Indiana… we are simply passing through history. This… this is history. Do as you will…”

Jones does not blow up the Ark. It turns out that he does want to see it opened as much as Beloq does. Certainly, you could argue that he simply doesn’t want to accidentally kill Marion with an explosive projectile, or that his desire to see it opened is based on nothing more than professional curiosity, but after all that’s happened… you have to wonder if Indy’s budding spiritual curiosity hasn’t gotten the better of him.

In story terms, what is happening to Jones as he moves through the story is called “character progression”, and it is critical to getting an audience to identify with, and root for the hero.

All of this “progression” leads us, inexorably, to that final showdown on the stone altar of some unamed island in the Mediterranean, north of Crete, where the Nazis will have their final face melting showdown with the power of God.

“But George”, I can hear you saying, “even you must admit that Indy has no part to play in that final sequence. He is literally tied up the entire time. He doesn’t actually do anything.” And while it’s true that the Nazis would have been destroyed by the Ark whether Indy were there on that island or not, that does not mean Jones had no part to play in the finale.

To see how, let’s take a moment to look again at Spielberg’s resume… as a storyteller, he is as good, if not better, than anyone else who has ever done it. He always, certainly in the Raiders era, seemed to know exactly what he was doing. It seems to me that you can approach the finale of Raiders in one of two ways. You can assume that Steven Speilberg, maybe the best director to ever do it, made a mistake and accidentally gave his hero no part to play in the finale of his greatest cinematic work...

Or… you can ask youself what else Spielberg might have been doing when he crafted that final scene.

I would submit to you that what Spielberg was really doing in that finale, was putting a nice little bow on Indiana Jones’ character arc… an arc that is straight out of the most influential work ever done on western storytelling, work that has had an outsized effect on the way movies have been developed and produced for seventy years, Joseph Campbell’s analysis of The Monomyth, otherwise known as THE HERO’S JOURNEY.

At the end of his own hero’s journey, Indy realizes that he has only one move left as he stands there on that rocky outcropping tied to a post (and also to the woman who will turn out to be the love of his life). His only remaining option for survival is to put his life in the hands of exactly the kind of superstitious hocus pocus in which, two hours ago, he professed not to believe.

The skeptic, the non-believer, has finally come around to something like faith.

Ironically, Spielberg would go on to put Jones in this exact same scenario in the climax of the third and final movie of the trilogy, THE LAST CRUSADE… the difference is that when Spielberg made RAIDERS, he still trusted his audience enough that he didn’t feel the need to call the “close your eyes, Marion” moment a “leap of faith.”

But if you want to take the “Leap of Faith” analogy even one step further, if you’re the kind of person who likes a little subtext with their context, ask yourself this… what is Faith, but belief without evidence?

Because the thing is… Jones has his eyes closed throughout the entire final sequence.

Indiana Jones does not actually witness the destruction of the Nazis at God’s hand. All he knows is that, from his perspective, when he closed his eyes there was an entire regiment of Nazis standing around the altar, along with Beloq, Dietrich, and Toth… but when he opened them again, the Nazis were gone and his restaints had been mysteriously burned away without any injury to himself or Marion.

Oh sure, he saw some electrical overloads, he saw a few lightbulbs explode, and he saw some mist come out of the Ark… all easily explained away by the science of the skeptic. But he did not look into the face of the Angel of Death. He did not see Beloq become a glowing weapon, did not see the bolts of lightning or the melting faces. Nor did he see the tornado of fire that swept the landscape clean. He felt some of it, certainly… he may even have heard things he could not explain, screaming perhaps. But the legendary skeptic, who once assured us he did not believe in superstitious hocus pocus, never actually got to witness any of the real magic, when it did finally arrive.

He’s pretty sure he knows what happened, in the end, but he doesn’t really know, does he? He has no choice but to take it all on Faith.

And that is what RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK is really about. The skeptic becoming a believer. The entire film is about getting Indiana Jones onto that rocky outcropping, so that he can say to Marion, “don’t look at it. Shut your eyes, Marion. Don’t look at it, no matter what happens.” That is the completion of Jones’ character arc. Once that arc is complete, it doesn’t really matter anymore what becomes of the Ark of the Covenant, because Indiana Jones’ evolution as a character has come full circle.

The Ark could even wind up in an anonymous crate in a massive military storehouse, lost and forgotten forever, and still it wouldn’t matter.

Because the movie is not about the Ark.

But of course, this answer won’t satisfy the BIG BANG THEORY nerds, who would still like to remind you that a pencil is not really a powerful tool for changing the world with ideas, but rather, it is simply a piece of wood with some graphite jammed up its ass.

And so now we must move on to the more prosaic part of this argument, that the theory of Indiana Jones’ irrelevance to the outcome of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK just ain’t true.

The only way you can believe the BIG BANG THEORY’s... well… theory is if you assume that opening the Ark on the altar of that strange little island was part of the Nazis’ plan all along.

Except that it wasn’t.

The Nazis plan was to fly the Ark out of the desert directly to Germany. It’s a plan that Indiana Jones foils not once, but twice. The first occurs when he blows up the Flying Wing at the dig site, and the second occurs when he hijacks the truck containing the Ark after Deitrich orders his men to “put it on a truck, we will fly it out of Cairo.”

The trip to the island, and the Ark ceremony that occurs there, is an audible called by someone (probably Beloq) after they are forced to intercept Captain Katanga’s ship at sea, via U-boat. A mission that would not have been necessary but for Jones’ interventions. Once aboard Katanaga’s ship, the Nazis reacquire the ark and then set sail, not for Germany which has no southern port, but to a Naval base in the Mediterranean… a small island North of Crete… one with plenty of rocky cliffs and tight narrow canyons, but with no airfield.

The ceremony on the stone altar was a happy accident, a target of opportunity, one perhaps siezed upon by Beloq during the long steam to and from Katanga’s ship. It was never meant to happen. It only did happen because of Indiana Jones. And once the Nazis were dead, the Ark remained conveniently in place on the island, there for Jones to finally claim for the good guys… none of which could have happened, by the way, without Jones’ last second foxhole conversion, a brilliantly planned and executed final character evolution by Steven Spielberg, the master storyteller.

Or… perhaps the nerds are right, and it was nothing but one big mistake, after all…