"70% of all archaeology is done in the library."
Spoilers for all four, as it turns out.
Home from East Coast, I headed immediately off to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Maybe just a small note on an in-joke: responding to the villain's plan description, Indy says, with the weary incredulity he too often foregos in favor of a general crotchetiness, "saucer men from Mars?"
He's making one of the film's overnumerous winky references, this one to a slightly less-known topic than that forced Ark shot. One of the copious unused Indy concepts – of the roughly two decades since the then-last Crusade – was a George Lucas story idea, committed to paper in the mid-90s by Jeb Stuart (see fig. 1, right), who had already well peaked in 1988 with Die Hard (evidence Leviathan, 1989). Lucas and Stuart's script was "Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men From Mars."
Saucer Men was only one of those unused Indy pitches that didn't quite make it, including a Frank Darabont script which Spielberg and Ford loved (Spielberg reportedly calling it the third best script he'd ever read) but Lucas vetoed. As treatments and scripts were pitched, written, and rejected, time marched on, Harrison Ford's age ever-advancing. Lucas had always planned for Ford to play his age, whatever that might be, and while it'd've been an easier sell a decade ago, it's honorable that the plan never wavered. Ford's age eventually became one of the arguable successes of IJATKOTCS, the way the film almost entirely ignores Indy's age, without an I'm-too-old-for-this gag to be found. On the other hand, Indy should be older, wiser and more experienced by now, and if the flick leaves out the age gags, it simultaneously sacrifices any discussion of aging. If you look carefully, you can pick it out in the performance, Ford a little more winded after a sprint, a little slower to bounce back from a body blow, but whether this is a nuanced performance or simply truth in advertising was beyond my ability to distinguish on first viewing.
Indy's move into the position held by his dad in Last Crusade, the idea that the knowledge an archaeologist and adventurer can amass in twenty years is of no insignificant benefit, how he's dealt with losing a step and a little of the pop from his punch – all but ignored. I'm not looking for a meditative drama, but these are all things the earlier films would have found calm moments to address. In Crystal Skull, the age issue is addressed only as a denial, first and foremost in the opening setup designed to show he can still swing. Indy showed more physical vulnerability in Raiders (it's much of why we loved him), at his physical prime, than he does here. One of several opportunities squandered.
Whether the blocking admits it or not, the events of 1938 (The Last Crusade) were nineteen years ago, bringing us to prime Eisenhower tenure and necessitating some degree of in-film acknowledgment.
As such, it's no accident that the movie's opening face-off is in a space referential to the first film (though it reveals that space to be in a more topical Area 51, distinctly not an impression conveyed in 1981). Before long, Indy is rocketed disorientingly out of this space and into a new one he can't immediately identify. The clash of rumpled 1930s Indy with pastel, plastic 1950s test-family is intentionally jarring, and the scene functions effectively at dizzying Indy and dropping him into a new and unfamiliar world.
Too bad it's only another in-joke, one referring to the drawn-out process of getting this movie made. It refers only to what happens when the last incarnation of Indy we saw (the 1938 version) disappears and doesn't show up again for two decades – but there's no natural reason we should see Indy this way. He's not coming out of the carbonite deep-freeze; the movie includes among its uncomfortable expository exchanges a handful of lines about his actions since we've last seen him – a stint in the OSS, the title of Colonel, the medals won. If he's decided to stick with his 1930s look, it's because he has, as we've seen a few times by now, a devotion to the hat and whip he hard-earned as a teen, not because he's unaware of changing trends in the world. It's not that there isn't something of weight to be said in this scene. There's plenty of room for a thoughtful, older Indy to reflect on the social change he's seen since we saw him last. There is – as there always is – much to be read into a mushroom cloud, if you so choose.
The filmmakers don't particularly so choose. As much as I'd like it to indicate Indiana at odds with the current state of affairs, it's not, in the scheme of things, much more than set dressing, a dramatic visual climax to the introductory segment. Lucas & co.'s interest in that mushroom cloud is only a sign of the times, one item from a collection of 1950s clip-art to set our scene. I'd have loved more on this, but I didn't find it, and a mushroom cloud and an American Graffiti minisequence don't carry the series into the 50s in a developmental way, only in a filmic way. Yes, there were hot rods and Elvis songs and malt shops, but leave the sock hop out of it or use it to tell us something. That's unfair; my gripe isn't with the malt shop. Let me go on.
The film's setting around the century's midpoint meant to Lucas that the 1930s serial inspiration for the series had to change. I get it, but I can't help thinking it a bit arbitrary. Lucas was born in 1944 and Spielberg in 1946, so while they've surely gone back and watched the 1930s stock, it was 50s adventure serials (in a 1980s interview, Spielberg refers to "those great Republic serials of the early 1950s") that comprise their childhood influences.
But that was their call. While adventure comics and TV shows were plentiful in the 50s, the last major serial wrapped in 1956, and our story starts in 1957. The new Indy flick would have to fit into the next batch of cultural road signs, and to Lucas this meant the 1950s science fiction boom. As you might imagine, this (along with a few more practical gripes about implausible content) led to widespread consternation among the fans, who didn't cotton to the thematic change from Zorro's Fighting Legion to Tom Corbett, Space Cadet – or in simpler terms, from treasure-hunting to following up new-age history-revision theories.
Lucas had become fascinated with crystal skulls after he learned about them from a Young Indiana Jones TV script in the early 1990s; within a couple years he had cemented it in his mind as the only acceptable artifact for Indy 4. Both Ford and Spielberg disliked the skulls and the attached aliens, and it took years of disagreement for them to relent, probably when it became clear Lucas wouldn't give it up. Indy doesn't get made without all three agreeing, so with the choice being skulls or no movie, Lucas got his way in the form of the Saucer Men script.
More germane to discussion is that several parts of that script made it into the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: the refrigerator, the ants, the rocket sled, the saucers, the saucer men. Rather than discarding Saucer Men as an over-the-top presentation done to please Lucas, we gotta admit that a good portion of Crystal Skull is Saucer Men. It's hard to pin down the exact development of the script, but it looks like Lucas took his favorite elements from the Saucer Men script, a bit from the Darabont script (he'd revived Marion), and his own fervent insistences, and had a draft done by Jeff Nathanson (Speed 2, Rush Hour 3), then tweaked it himself and handed it over to David Koepp to finish up. All of this seems to indicate that Lucas carefully guided the progressing script so as to maintain his obsessions for the movie: crystal skulls and ancient extraterrestrials. If 1950s serials were influential to Lucas and Spielberg as children, perhaps Erich Von Däniken's influential crackpot exposé Chariots of the Gods – 1968, when both were burgeoning filmmakers – was a lingering influence as well. My opposition isn't necessarily to the alien content inherently, and a lot of the folks decrying it I'd expect to be more convinced by (or at least interested in for argument's sake) alienism than religious revelation. So why are people so upset?
Spacey it may be, but it's not far from the Indy formula. Let's hold it up against the standard: Indy is called upon to seek/investigate an artifact. By 'investigate' we mean not to chart on a treasure map or break out the shovels, but to gauge plausibility, starting from a point falling on the spectrum somewhere between dubiousness and skepticism, a path parallel to the one taken by the viewer.
"I don't believe in magic, a lot of superstitious hocus-pocus," he says of the Ark. "Fortune and glory, kid, fortune and glory," he says of the Sivalinga Stone. "I understand its power now," he says, a hundred minutes later, of the Sivalinga Stone, and I don't need to mention his stance on the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail by the time the credits roll. So the formula's not changed in IJATKOTCS. Indy goes after something despite disbelief. It's rooted, however loosely, in legit mythology*, and he goes out as an archaeologist, a professional researcher and searcher. [Disappointingly, if he sometimes seems less than passionate in Crystal Skull, it's because he never gets to indulge much archaeological interest. Stuck for new ideas, the writers crammed together the motivations from the first three: like Raiders, he must keep it from the hands of evil, like Temple of Doom, it must get back to where it belongs, like Last Crusade, he must go after a loved one. For the second half of the film, he's motivated because the skull told him what to do, which short-circuits the crucial steps of coming to an understanding of the object's power through natural means. It's simply forced upon him.]
Crystal Skull ends parallel to the others with the discovery and unharnessability of that real power, and if Spielberg has already used a close variation on the mechanics of its ending at least three times in his alien-overloaded oeuvre, maybe that's the audience's problem, because it's certainly not out of character for Indy (or the series) to travel from college to the field and find he was wrong, or at least a little closed-minded. Thus the "get out of the library" gag – more than just a play on Indy's alternate life as whip-wielder, it claims that eventually if you get out of the figurative library you'll find out you were wrong, and that sometimes challenging your perception is the only way to move forward. Indy 4 is telling us to get out of the library.
So like I say, in theory, I'm not opposed to it, but it's a weak choice, designed to wow, instead of a subtler choice. Combining surprisingly shabby workmanship, the sappy "Did ancient astronauts build this? Read the book" angle, and a presentation that tries too hard to impress, it doesn't add up.
With the Ugha's aliens, whether you find it an intriguing Indy premise or not, Lucas misses the interesting part of the 1950s angle, and even the interesting part of the sci-fi angle. While some of the rejected scripts brought back Indy's longtime foes (in particular, Darabont's scrapped script reportedly dealt with postwar Nazi holdouts), Spielberg's said that post-Schindler's List and post-Saving Private Ryan, he doesn't want to do cartoon Nazis.
Which works out better anyway: 1957 is obviously prime Cold War, and the Red Menace is the only way to go. Jim Broadbent, doing his best to cover for the loss of Denholm Elliott in the standard a-drink-before-Indy-leaves scene, addresses creeping communist panic and McCarthyism in roughly three of his ten lines, but this falls by the wayside in prompt order, and both he and Indy are reinstated and/or promoted by film's end without further detailed Fed involvement. Those Feds show up in a context that fails to be much more than expository and obligatory, but at least they represent a growing American distrust of its own, which the film could have utilized to great effect. As it is, they don't go much further than recalling the nervous G-men of the first movie, pointlessly suspicious of Abner Ravenwood for prominent mention in a Nazi communiqué. They remain useful in one sense: revealing their equivalent trepidation of alien and Communist influence.
I'm off by one year, but if I can suggest 1956's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, what IJATKOTCS needed wasn't the alien trappings, but the implications. The problem is that the makers squander a glorious opportunity that's so, so close, glimpsed solely in a moment when Cate Blanchett's Col. Dr. Irina Spalko hints at the specter of alien-abetted, psychically-based communist subversion.
If Spalko had any psychic powers. Her solitary attempt lasts about ten seconds and is an immediate, unqualified failure. It's not the secret powers amassed by the Soviets we're ready to fear, but the foreboding, the promise that they've got hidden tactics up their sleeves. Of course, the only other reference to Spalko's supposed abilities is her admission that the skull refused to talk to her, another failure. She never psychics again. Her "I know things...I know them before anyone else" is a more effective warning of superior military intelligence than of any remotely credible clairvoyance. The real jeopardy's got nothing to do with what she knows. As we find out quickly, for all her claims and drive, she doesn't actually have much in the way of useful information. The best weapon is the intimidation of what we don't yet know she doesn’t know, and that's where the threat of the Cold War, the Red Menace, should lie.
(Plus, it would have been a good opportunity for George Lucas to distance him from Marxist writer-philosopher György Lukács.)
Lucas and Spielberg have a lot of interesting seeds, but they're too busy constantly rushing off to the next setup to address any of them. They're plenty smart enough to understand the meanings behind the 1950s science fiction boom, and for them to waste so many potential ways to look at it is disheartening. They can be forgiven for wanting nothing more than to hark back to pay tribute to a time they loved, but to pay tribute, you need to honor the meaning, the purpose of your honoree, not just the trappings. I'm not saying we needed an Indiana Jones movie about McCarthyism and Senate hearings – I seem to recall Lucas catching some heat for what was considered excessive onscreen filibustering right about 1993's Star Wars: The Phantom Menace – but the complications of Indy's move into the fifties can be about more than Lucas' nostalgia for the movies he liked back then. Forgive me if I'm speaking out of turn, but the atmospheric apprehension America felt in 1957 wasn't spacemen, it was Sputnik.
HENRY JONES SR.
Home from East Coast, I headed immediately off to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Maybe just a small note on an in-joke: responding to the villain's plan description, Indy says, with the weary incredulity he too often foregos in favor of a general crotchetiness, "saucer men from Mars?"He's making one of the film's overnumerous winky references, this one to a slightly less-known topic than that forced Ark shot. One of the copious unused Indy concepts – of the roughly two decades since the then-last Crusade – was a George Lucas story idea, committed to paper in the mid-90s by Jeb Stuart (see fig. 1, right), who had already well peaked in 1988 with Die Hard (evidence Leviathan, 1989). Lucas and Stuart's script was "Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men From Mars."
Saucer Men was only one of those unused Indy pitches that didn't quite make it, including a Frank Darabont script which Spielberg and Ford loved (Spielberg reportedly calling it the third best script he'd ever read) but Lucas vetoed. As treatments and scripts were pitched, written, and rejected, time marched on, Harrison Ford's age ever-advancing. Lucas had always planned for Ford to play his age, whatever that might be, and while it'd've been an easier sell a decade ago, it's honorable that the plan never wavered. Ford's age eventually became one of the arguable successes of IJATKOTCS, the way the film almost entirely ignores Indy's age, without an I'm-too-old-for-this gag to be found. On the other hand, Indy should be older, wiser and more experienced by now, and if the flick leaves out the age gags, it simultaneously sacrifices any discussion of aging. If you look carefully, you can pick it out in the performance, Ford a little more winded after a sprint, a little slower to bounce back from a body blow, but whether this is a nuanced performance or simply truth in advertising was beyond my ability to distinguish on first viewing.Indy's move into the position held by his dad in Last Crusade, the idea that the knowledge an archaeologist and adventurer can amass in twenty years is of no insignificant benefit, how he's dealt with losing a step and a little of the pop from his punch – all but ignored. I'm not looking for a meditative drama, but these are all things the earlier films would have found calm moments to address. In Crystal Skull, the age issue is addressed only as a denial, first and foremost in the opening setup designed to show he can still swing. Indy showed more physical vulnerability in Raiders (it's much of why we loved him), at his physical prime, than he does here. One of several opportunities squandered.
Whether the blocking admits it or not, the events of 1938 (The Last Crusade) were nineteen years ago, bringing us to prime Eisenhower tenure and necessitating some degree of in-film acknowledgment.
As such, it's no accident that the movie's opening face-off is in a space referential to the first film (though it reveals that space to be in a more topical Area 51, distinctly not an impression conveyed in 1981). Before long, Indy is rocketed disorientingly out of this space and into a new one he can't immediately identify. The clash of rumpled 1930s Indy with pastel, plastic 1950s test-family is intentionally jarring, and the scene functions effectively at dizzying Indy and dropping him into a new and unfamiliar world.
Too bad it's only another in-joke, one referring to the drawn-out process of getting this movie made. It refers only to what happens when the last incarnation of Indy we saw (the 1938 version) disappears and doesn't show up again for two decades – but there's no natural reason we should see Indy this way. He's not coming out of the carbonite deep-freeze; the movie includes among its uncomfortable expository exchanges a handful of lines about his actions since we've last seen him – a stint in the OSS, the title of Colonel, the medals won. If he's decided to stick with his 1930s look, it's because he has, as we've seen a few times by now, a devotion to the hat and whip he hard-earned as a teen, not because he's unaware of changing trends in the world. It's not that there isn't something of weight to be said in this scene. There's plenty of room for a thoughtful, older Indy to reflect on the social change he's seen since we saw him last. There is – as there always is – much to be read into a mushroom cloud, if you so choose.
The filmmakers don't particularly so choose. As much as I'd like it to indicate Indiana at odds with the current state of affairs, it's not, in the scheme of things, much more than set dressing, a dramatic visual climax to the introductory segment. Lucas & co.'s interest in that mushroom cloud is only a sign of the times, one item from a collection of 1950s clip-art to set our scene. I'd have loved more on this, but I didn't find it, and a mushroom cloud and an American Graffiti minisequence don't carry the series into the 50s in a developmental way, only in a filmic way. Yes, there were hot rods and Elvis songs and malt shops, but leave the sock hop out of it or use it to tell us something. That's unfair; my gripe isn't with the malt shop. Let me go on.The film's setting around the century's midpoint meant to Lucas that the 1930s serial inspiration for the series had to change. I get it, but I can't help thinking it a bit arbitrary. Lucas was born in 1944 and Spielberg in 1946, so while they've surely gone back and watched the 1930s stock, it was 50s adventure serials (in a 1980s interview, Spielberg refers to "those great Republic serials of the early 1950s") that comprise their childhood influences.
But that was their call. While adventure comics and TV shows were plentiful in the 50s, the last major serial wrapped in 1956, and our story starts in 1957. The new Indy flick would have to fit into the next batch of cultural road signs, and to Lucas this meant the 1950s science fiction boom. As you might imagine, this (along with a few more practical gripes about implausible content) led to widespread consternation among the fans, who didn't cotton to the thematic change from Zorro's Fighting Legion to Tom Corbett, Space Cadet – or in simpler terms, from treasure-hunting to following up new-age history-revision theories.
Lucas had become fascinated with crystal skulls after he learned about them from a Young Indiana Jones TV script in the early 1990s; within a couple years he had cemented it in his mind as the only acceptable artifact for Indy 4. Both Ford and Spielberg disliked the skulls and the attached aliens, and it took years of disagreement for them to relent, probably when it became clear Lucas wouldn't give it up. Indy doesn't get made without all three agreeing, so with the choice being skulls or no movie, Lucas got his way in the form of the Saucer Men script.
More germane to discussion is that several parts of that script made it into the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: the refrigerator, the ants, the rocket sled, the saucers, the saucer men. Rather than discarding Saucer Men as an over-the-top presentation done to please Lucas, we gotta admit that a good portion of Crystal Skull is Saucer Men. It's hard to pin down the exact development of the script, but it looks like Lucas took his favorite elements from the Saucer Men script, a bit from the Darabont script (he'd revived Marion), and his own fervent insistences, and had a draft done by Jeff Nathanson (Speed 2, Rush Hour 3), then tweaked it himself and handed it over to David Koepp to finish up. All of this seems to indicate that Lucas carefully guided the progressing script so as to maintain his obsessions for the movie: crystal skulls and ancient extraterrestrials. If 1950s serials were influential to Lucas and Spielberg as children, perhaps Erich Von Däniken's influential crackpot exposé Chariots of the Gods – 1968, when both were burgeoning filmmakers – was a lingering influence as well. My opposition isn't necessarily to the alien content inherently, and a lot of the folks decrying it I'd expect to be more convinced by (or at least interested in for argument's sake) alienism than religious revelation. So why are people so upset?Spacey it may be, but it's not far from the Indy formula. Let's hold it up against the standard: Indy is called upon to seek/investigate an artifact. By 'investigate' we mean not to chart on a treasure map or break out the shovels, but to gauge plausibility, starting from a point falling on the spectrum somewhere between dubiousness and skepticism, a path parallel to the one taken by the viewer.
INTERLUDE: A BRIEF WORD on the MacGuffin (or McGuffin, depending on ancestry). Lucas, Spielberg, and Ford all refer to the skull (and the ark/stone/grail) as such in interviews, in the liner notes of the soundtrack, on Letterman, and now every review and internet mention calls the skull a MacGuffin. I may be too much of a purist, but MacGuffin isn't a catchall term for any plot device in portable form. Popularized by Hitchcock, a MacGuffin is an object in a film, usually a physical object, which is accepted as being of importance to the characters and is used to drive the plot. The MacGuffin is essentially irrelevant and probably unknowable; the set of "government secrets" in North By Northwest is usually cited as the epitome. George Lucas, as he is wont to do, has tried to redefine the MacGuffin, calling R2-D2 the MacGuffin of the Star Wars films and opining that the MacGuffin should be cared about deeply by the audience.
"I don't believe in magic, a lot of superstitious hocus-pocus," he says of the Ark. "Fortune and glory, kid, fortune and glory," he says of the Sivalinga Stone. "I understand its power now," he says, a hundred minutes later, of the Sivalinga Stone, and I don't need to mention his stance on the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail by the time the credits roll. So the formula's not changed in IJATKOTCS. Indy goes after something despite disbelief. It's rooted, however loosely, in legit mythology*, and he goes out as an archaeologist, a professional researcher and searcher. [Disappointingly, if he sometimes seems less than passionate in Crystal Skull, it's because he never gets to indulge much archaeological interest. Stuck for new ideas, the writers crammed together the motivations from the first three: like Raiders, he must keep it from the hands of evil, like Temple of Doom, it must get back to where it belongs, like Last Crusade, he must go after a loved one. For the second half of the film, he's motivated because the skull told him what to do, which short-circuits the crucial steps of coming to an understanding of the object's power through natural means. It's simply forced upon him.]
*well, not legit mythology, necessarily, but if the crystal skulls are almost entirely debunked, that should make it that much more dramatic when their power is revealed, right?
Whether it comes naturally in the first films or forcedly here, he does come to find it has real power. Temple of Doom is the best of these 'real power' codas – the supernatural power first to appear in this film is called forth by evil, evidenced by Mola Ram and his cardiac stunt. The stone's positive influence is always vague, and while the village shaman knows Indy will succeed from the sprouting greenery, this happens even before the stone is returned, making Indy's respect of the object more subjective, and on that basis, more valuable. As with the Ark, Indy and the day are saved by the destructive power of the object, unleashed without particular direction, fatal to those in its path (Belloq or Mola Ram) because they fail to respect. It's not Indy's belief that saves him. In fact, he believes just a little less than others: witness Belloq in ceremonial headdress, witness Mola Ram in ceremonial headdress. Obviously he's adopted Spalko's longtime belief in the interdimensionals by the end of Crystal Skull, but he respects them enough to opt out of the final exchange that Spalko indulges. It's merely respect, which has come to him through humility, his studies, and the effort of getting through each film, not through blind faith. This goes for you too, audience of IJATKOTCS: faith alone won't save you; there needs to be respect. Now, this one is for you, screenwriters: you can't just force it on Indy/us, you have to earn it along the trip.Crystal Skull ends parallel to the others with the discovery and unharnessability of that real power, and if Spielberg has already used a close variation on the mechanics of its ending at least three times in his alien-overloaded oeuvre, maybe that's the audience's problem, because it's certainly not out of character for Indy (or the series) to travel from college to the field and find he was wrong, or at least a little closed-minded. Thus the "get out of the library" gag – more than just a play on Indy's alternate life as whip-wielder, it claims that eventually if you get out of the figurative library you'll find out you were wrong, and that sometimes challenging your perception is the only way to move forward. Indy 4 is telling us to get out of the library.
So like I say, in theory, I'm not opposed to it, but it's a weak choice, designed to wow, instead of a subtler choice. Combining surprisingly shabby workmanship, the sappy "Did ancient astronauts build this? Read the book" angle, and a presentation that tries too hard to impress, it doesn't add up.
With the Ugha's aliens, whether you find it an intriguing Indy premise or not, Lucas misses the interesting part of the 1950s angle, and even the interesting part of the sci-fi angle. While some of the rejected scripts brought back Indy's longtime foes (in particular, Darabont's scrapped script reportedly dealt with postwar Nazi holdouts), Spielberg's said that post-Schindler's List and post-Saving Private Ryan, he doesn't want to do cartoon Nazis.
Which works out better anyway: 1957 is obviously prime Cold War, and the Red Menace is the only way to go. Jim Broadbent, doing his best to cover for the loss of Denholm Elliott in the standard a-drink-before-Indy-leaves scene, addresses creeping communist panic and McCarthyism in roughly three of his ten lines, but this falls by the wayside in prompt order, and both he and Indy are reinstated and/or promoted by film's end without further detailed Fed involvement. Those Feds show up in a context that fails to be much more than expository and obligatory, but at least they represent a growing American distrust of its own, which the film could have utilized to great effect. As it is, they don't go much further than recalling the nervous G-men of the first movie, pointlessly suspicious of Abner Ravenwood for prominent mention in a Nazi communiqué. They remain useful in one sense: revealing their equivalent trepidation of alien and Communist influence.
I'm off by one year, but if I can suggest 1956's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, what IJATKOTCS needed wasn't the alien trappings, but the implications. The problem is that the makers squander a glorious opportunity that's so, so close, glimpsed solely in a moment when Cate Blanchett's Col. Dr. Irina Spalko hints at the specter of alien-abetted, psychically-based communist subversion.
Imagine...to peer across the world and know the enemy's secrets. To place our thoughts into the minds of your leaders, make your teachers teach the true version of history, your soldiers attack on our command. We will be everywhere at once, more powerful than a whisper, invading your dreams, thinking your thoughts for you while you sleep. We will change you, Dr. Jones, all of you, from the inside. We will turn you into us – and the best part? You won't even know it's happening.
This is what Spalko hints at: We will turn you into us...you won't even know it's happening. This is the relevant part of 1950s sci-fi that I wanted to see, and for a very promising half a minute, I thought I might get it. She echoes Body Snatchers' claim that you'll remain who you are, conversion requiring merely an unobtrusive flip of a switch in the brain to turn you into a quiet, soulless alien or communist. The menace can be aliens, if that’s Lucas and Spielberg's thing, but that doesn't mean it can't mean something more, and here they offer an inviting form for it to take: undetectable transglobal psychic influence, made possible only through the synthesis of two separate threats: the magnifying influence and power offered by the fulfillment of the alien legend, and the as-yet unrefined psychic powers of Col. Dr. Spalko.
If Spalko had any psychic powers. Her solitary attempt lasts about ten seconds and is an immediate, unqualified failure. It's not the secret powers amassed by the Soviets we're ready to fear, but the foreboding, the promise that they've got hidden tactics up their sleeves. Of course, the only other reference to Spalko's supposed abilities is her admission that the skull refused to talk to her, another failure. She never psychics again. Her "I know things...I know them before anyone else" is a more effective warning of superior military intelligence than of any remotely credible clairvoyance. The real jeopardy's got nothing to do with what she knows. As we find out quickly, for all her claims and drive, she doesn't actually have much in the way of useful information. The best weapon is the intimidation of what we don't yet know she doesn’t know, and that's where the threat of the Cold War, the Red Menace, should lie.(Plus, it would have been a good opportunity for George Lucas to distance him from Marxist writer-philosopher György Lukács.)
Lucas and Spielberg have a lot of interesting seeds, but they're too busy constantly rushing off to the next setup to address any of them. They're plenty smart enough to understand the meanings behind the 1950s science fiction boom, and for them to waste so many potential ways to look at it is disheartening. They can be forgiven for wanting nothing more than to hark back to pay tribute to a time they loved, but to pay tribute, you need to honor the meaning, the purpose of your honoree, not just the trappings. I'm not saying we needed an Indiana Jones movie about McCarthyism and Senate hearings – I seem to recall Lucas catching some heat for what was considered excessive onscreen filibustering right about 1993's Star Wars: The Phantom Menace – but the complications of Indy's move into the fifties can be about more than Lucas' nostalgia for the movies he liked back then. Forgive me if I'm speaking out of turn, but the atmospheric apprehension America felt in 1957 wasn't spacemen, it was Sputnik.
Flying saucers...Doesn't this world hold enough mysteries
that you don't have to go out and make up new ones?
Labels: david koepp, frank darabont, george lucas, indiana jones, steven spielberg
