Indiana Jones--another Loser Movie

After watching myself on the CBS Evening News last night, I decided to sneak out to a movie to see if I would be noticed in public and, of course, to catch up on the latest antics of Professor Jones. No one noticed me, to my great relief, and the movie, to put it mildly, was more of a distraction than good, solid two-hour entertainment. It almost doesn't warrant a review, but I will add my voice here to what I perceive is a growing chorus of disapproving critics.

The movie suffers from a number of things, the worst of which is an unclear premise. When that premise is supplemented by allegedly historical conflicts and explorations that have lost all potency in our day, we have, from the outset, a film that has to rely simply on the "name" of its lead actor and the quality of the special effects. Here the problems compound yet more. We can tell that Harrison Ford, now in his mid-60s, is a bit too old to be cavorting around on the back of swiftly moving vehicles--thus a younger guy engages in most of the scenes requiring physical dexterity. And, we can also see that the special effects without any conceptual or idea base behind them become like steroids to an athlete; they enhance performance but, without real skill in the first place, they just wreck your life and get you into trouble. Of course the movie is nothing but fantasy, but here the fantasy is so attenuated and irrelevant (we talked about the Commies in the 1950s; collected "Martian cards" in the early 1960s; ravished the landscape of Nevada with nuclear testing in the 1940s and 1950s) that one is left with a curious sense that nothing here fits with anything. Thus, we have a collage of randomly-collected images (such as a chase scene through the Yale University campus) that, ultimately, leads nowhere.

It would be tedious to list all the things that don't make much sense in the movie, but let's list a few of them. First, what is the crystal skull and what is its power? It seems that it was something discovered by a 16th century Spanish conquistador in Peru, deposited by martians (here is one of the first indications we are in a sort of "la-la" land), and that the rediscovery of it will give the possessor some kind of secret powers. Cate Blanchett, playing a "Natasha-type" KGB agent, seems to want it in order to gain new psychic powers into human thought control (an idea not well presented or developed). In so wanting it she and her flunkies have captured a distinguished American archaeologist, whose mind seems to have shriveled up like many of the mummies they eventually discover, and he can only babble apparently meaningless syllables until the end of the movie. The martians are brought in because only they could have constructed certain designs on the ground, for the viewing pleasure of the gods, that point to the location of the crystal skull.

But, second, even if you suspend credulity on the overall theme of the movie because you just want a good evening of action entertainment, you are left shaking your head when you see the action. Lucas and Spielberg are known for pits of snakes and other creeping, crawling insects or reptiles, and here we have the same thing, only with a slightly different iteration. We have large scorpions here, which don't kill, and small marching ants, that do. We have Blanchett, who will look into the eyes of the crystal skull when it becomes affixed back on the brain stem of its rightful owner, and we simply know that somehow her eyes will incinerate and she will disappear screaming. And, we aren't disappointed. That scene comes near the very end of the movie. Then, we have loads of small, dark-skinned "natives" who always try to foil the plans of the intrepid Jones and his explorers, but who clearly are no match for Jones' (or the KGB's) guns or dexterity.

Conclusion

Thus, by the end of the movie I was left wondering more how the special effects were produced and how many "takes" it must have taken to do some of the trickier scenes. In a word, I was not even entertained, but my critical mind was re-engaged in a way that probably didn't match the expectations of the director.

But, I so wanted to be whisked away into a never-never land of fantasy. Indeed, I recall whispering to my friend, who accompanied me to the movie, that Indiana Jones' life as a professor and adventurer was precisely the way that I lived my professorial life. I gave bumbling lectures during the day, meeting occasionally with confused students, but then by night I would change myself into a different person, using the classic texts that I studied so diligently and academically during the day, as my traveling companion to a new world. I would enter into the Gnostic worlds of Egypt or Syria, keeping live connection with those folk, while at the same time trying to get such a cell of Gnostics going in Oregon or Kansas or wherever I was teaching. I lived my evening life in ritual, invoking Yaldabaoth and trying to internalize and re-experience the "Hypostasis of the Archons." I prayed to the high gods, who made Yahweh, God of Israel, look like a low one indeed. And, of course, I had all kinds of 3rd and 4th century Coptic texts, which I said were written in some kind of "Copto-Ethiopic" language known only to about 30 people in the 3rd century but which had been secretly passed down to me 17 centuries later. There was intrigue in my life, I told my friend. I had to fight with Ethiopic-speaking priests in Jerusalem, find strange shadows cast by the sun over the pyramids in Egypt, pointing, of couse, to deep buried treasure which no one else could find. I communed with the spirits of the dead in long-defunct languages. This was all, of course, in the evening and weekend while trying to raise a one year-old and make headway in the academic world of the mid-1980s.

But even my attempts to fantasize came crashing down as the movie developed. I just couldn't fake it any longer. My critical self returned, and I knew the evening was over. Too bad; now I will just have to go back to my Gnostic conventicle for comfort...

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