Metaphor in the Indiana Jones Movies: Chapter 3 Part 7 of
THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
The Indiana Jones Movies
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In the spectral ferocity that follows [the opening of the Ark, including the destruction of the Nazi’s camera], the only bystanders not destroyed are the hero and the heroine, who close their eyes to the whole ravage and leave the sacred sights unseen. We in the audience, on the other hand, are privileged to see these miraculous sights without penance or pain, and this through the medium of Spielberg’s own exonerated camera, surviving and valorizing the spectacle where the camera within the plot cannot.” —Garret Stewart, “The ‘Videology’ of Science Fiction” |
Disliking such conflation, the semanticist Alfred Korzybski coined the slogan, “The map is not the territory.” This distinction does not always hold for psychology, where changing a mental map may alter the mind itself. Siding with religion and psychology, these movies defy the slogan pointedly. When Jones travels long distances, the screen superimposes shots of plane or touring car with a moving line on a map. The two are one. As teacher, Dr. Jones presumes that a map is not its territory. Near the beginning of The Last Crusade (1989), he tells his students, “and X never marks the spot.” Nonetheless, a few scenes later he finds a large X on the floor above his goal, as if it were a map. Comparably, he tells his students, “You cannot afford to take myths at face value....” By the end of the movie he has embraced his father’s belief in what he first considered a “bedtime story” about the Holy Grail. In religious faith, one does not entirely discriminate between the expresser, the expression, and the expressed. Distinguishing is skepticism—conscious logic where unconscious identification is needed (as in hypnotherapy where words control the body). In Biblical Hebrew, dabar means both word and thing as if there were no difference between the two. According to John 14:6, Jesus does not merely speak truthfully; he is “the Truth.” A central theme of Judeo-Christian worship is to evoke this unifying mood in which metaphorically God = word = thing (e.g., 2 Sam. 22:2, “the Lord is my rock”), but without turning it into the proposition that literally God = thing—confusing an unconscious power with the conscious version of reality. Such blasphemy is “idolatry,” the Biblical word for fetishism, Jones’s disorder, not as teacher but as grave robber, where he mistakes things for their spiritual meaning. Fetishism produces frozen states. The cusp, then, involves choosing between a healthy faith that can grow and a frozen faith, moored in objects.
With the usual forgetfulness of series, beginning each movie as a skeptical academic, Indiana finds himself at climax believing in magic—a different magic each time. In the first and third movies, Jones’ older colleague Marcus Brody, supposedly a Christian, actually preaches idolatry. In Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), for instance, he says, “An army which carries the Ark before it is invincible”—as if the power rested in an object, rather than God. In the Bible, however, when Israel trusts in the ark rather than in Yahweh: “Israel was smitten, and they fled every man into his tent: and there was a very great slaughter; for there fell of Israel thirty thousand footmen. And the Ark of God was taken” (1 Samuel 4:10-11).
At the film’s climax, Jones tells his companion Marion not to look
at it, so that their being spared seems to come from his knowing the magical rules
of the Ark’s operation better than Belloq. In contrast, the orthodox assumption is
that the Ark was a nexus of divine energies, but God made the decisions. He could
choose to aid or destroy those who held the Ark. After all, considering the biblically
specified purification rites required for those who approach the Ark, Jones’s and
Marion’s closing their eyes is utterly inadequate. Instead of being saved by heeding
a taboo (stage 2), or obeying a Law (stage 4), they save themselves by shutting out
the fetish and accepting the flow of events.
The Temple of Lost Souls
Not even ostensibly about the Bible, the next movie concerns Shiva and Kali. Although
their worship has no more to do with fetishism than most faiths, Lucas chooses it
as background for the darkest aspects of Jones’s religious/psychological condition.
In Primitive Culture, a classic of Comparative Religions, Edward Burnett Tylor
defines a “fetish” as either a “god-house” (e.g., the first movie’s Ark of the Covenant)
or a charmed object bestowed by a spirit or god, e.g., the second movie’s lingam,
one of five given by Shiva to the mythological hero Shankara (Tylor 143). Already
in Raiders, the chief fetish, the Ark, is almost sinister. In Egypt, it gathers
thousands of snakes around it. On shipboard, rats scurry wildly near it while it
scorches its box. Finally, it unleashes strange beings, whose faces turn to skeletons
as they melt the flesh of the living. By biblical logic, these visitants ought to
be angels, but storyboards for the movie describe the vapors as “ghost[s]” (Kasdan
107-09).
Apparently, the moviemakers thought of the Ark as containing the spirits of the dead—following another common notion about fetishes, that they derive their power by containing a soul or souls, like a geni in a bottle. In the Congo, for instance, the nkisi, a predecessor of the Voodoo doll, allegedly kills by slowly drawing the victim’s soul into the image. The second movie invokes something like this idea as a young prince begins murdering Jones with a little statue of the latter.
The series consists of metaphors of the soul as a constantly changing, learning entity that can be lost to things. In the first movie, Belloq warns that Jones has fallen so far from the “faith” that total abandonment is likely: “Archeology is our religion, yet we have both fallen from the pure faith.... I am a shadowy reflection of you. And it would take only a nudge to make you like me ... to push you out of the light.” By the beginning of the second movie, this doom has occurred. Uniquely within the series, Jones is not taking an artifact to a museum but selling it to a criminal for a diamond—his integrity (soul) lost for a jewel of great price. Significantly, in the midst of the transaction, he finds that he has drunk poison. Throughout world religions, moral and physical pollution are often allied, as in Jewish dietary laws. Conspicuously, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom™ (1984) later introduces the villains at a banquet where they gorge on living, creeping things. Later, Jones becomes totally evil after being forced to drink enchanted blood.
He recovers, but faces a more permanent loss. Mola Ram, the Thuggee
High Priest, has the power to draw from a human chest a still-beating heart, yet
the victim continues to live, magically. The removal is not in itself a form of execution,
but probably stands for soul theft. Not only souls but innocence and innocents are
misplaced. Thuggees kidnap and enslave the children of a whole village. In rescuing
them at the price of losing the diamond-lingam fetish, Jones regains his integrity.
In technologically undeveloped countries, one common notion is that a photograph
steals the soul. It is as if, seeing the living transformed to the artificial, some
people feel diminished. Like Metropolis and Batman (see chapter 5),
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom™ focuses on the place of artificiality
in movies. It begins with a 1930s production of “Everything Goes,” sung mostly in
Chinese. The choreography imitates that of a decade of musicals, the tone of which
was set by Florenz Ziegfeld’s 1930 movie Glorifying the American Girl. Their
stylization is so much a part of American culture that they seem almost natural—unless
they undergo such an alteration as translation into Chinese. Thus defamiliarized,
the number stands as the first of many segments, part parody, part tribute to old
films. All the Kali worship, for instance, imitates a slough of anti-Thuggee scenes,
e.g., in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974), which may have contributed the
image of lowering a victim in a cage as a sacrifice. Even by the 1960s, such films
were so hackneyed that the Beatles’ Help! (1965) zanily travesties them. In
Temple of Doom, the Thuggee adventure teeters precariously between roller
coaster thrills and tongue-in-cheek camp. More than the first film, the second one
manifests ambivalence toward the fetish of cinema itself.
The “Last” but Not the End
With Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade™, Spielberg intended to close the
series. He said to John Williams: “We should have reprised all the theme songs—Mari[o]n’s
song, Short Round’s song—for the credits” (Nancy Griffin 209). This third film is
the one where Indiana comes closest to regaining faith, though there is no reference
to mainstream Christianity.
The Holy Grail never was a part of Christian orthodoxy, but remained on the peripheries, a “fetish” in the original sense of the word. Coming from the Portuguese feitiço or feitiços (meaning charm(s) or artificial), the term first applied to miraculous Christian relics and only thereafter to “primitive” power objects (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1959, s.v.). In its best-known form, the legend of the Grail is of a supernaturally powerful Christian artifact. As before-mentioned, the legend has a vast number of other permutations, including continuing reinterpretations. To take but two from a single year, Graham Hancock’s The Sign and the Seal (1992) connects it to Atlantis as well as the Templars and concludes that it is really the Ark of the Covenant; Norma Lorre Goodrich’s The Holy Grail (1992) links it to an even greater number of mysterious persons, places and things (including, again, the Ark of the Covenant), but ends by deeming it a metaphor for mystical initiation. Unlike Excalibur and Fisher King, Last Crusade does not embark in such a sea of scholarship and speculation, but keeps to the well-known presumption that the Grail is a cup of Christ. Consequently, the movie locates the relic in the Middle East (while the legends concern Britain and France). The film has only the most tenuous connection to them. Lancelot’s sword bridge becomes an invisible one so that Indiana can mutter the Kierkegaardian phrase “leap of faith” as he steps into what looks like void. The other perils are also hypostatized metaphors. To show humility, penitents must kneel before a sword cuts their heads off. To walk in the way of God, questers, with questionable piety, step on His Holy Name, making certain that they choose the right alphabet. The perils have much more in common with trivial puzzle solving than with any true test of faith—though bravery is certainly required. According to Indiana’s friend Brody, “The search for the cup of Christ is the search for the divine in all men.” It turns out to be a device for prolonging life (but not youth) and for healing bullet wounds.
What qualifies one to attain the Grail? Henry Jones, Senior, spends most of his life trying piously, but to no avail. Then he commits fornication, helps his son steal a car, lies to him about a machine-gun accident, and kills a pilot. Despite strong feelings about blasphemy (as in his slapping Indiana for saying “Jesus”), the father finally himself says “O, God” when he believes the son to be dead. Having thus broken free from his staid, conventional morality, Jones, Senior, attains the Grail. It comes not for stage-four rectitude but for a pilgrimage into chaos. After drinking from the Grail, the father describes the experience not as salvation but as “Illumination” (Enlightenment?).
At movie’s close, the Grail slips into the earth. An evil archaeologist
keeps reaching for it until she falls into the bottomless depths below. Faced with
the same temptation, Jones also reaches, but heeding his father’s warning, abandons
the Grail. At the end of the first movie, he was screaming that the Ark be returned
to him. At the end of the second, he managed to release the lingam to the village
that owns it. Only in the third movie does he let the fetish slip completely away
into an abyss. The exceptional zeal with which he clutched at things has brought
him to and through anomie to some spiritual self–discipline. With that movie, Spielberg
(for the moment) intended to relinquish a fetish, the magical Indiana Jones
series, able to sell everything from fedoras to video games. Lucas, however, did
not.
Serial Souvenirs
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As a well-known academic, Indy’s father comes in contact with some of the great scholars and leaders—people like Freud, Adler, Jung, Albert Schweitzer..... T. E. Lawrence also discusses with Indy issues that plagued me when I was a child: where do we come from, and what happens when we die? I began to ask those questions when I was 8 or 9 and never got sufficiently satisfying answers. —George Lucas, “Indiana Jones and Me” |
The two boys tour the city visiting a Buddhist shrine, Hindu temple, Episcopalian church, and Islamic Mosque. In terrifying two thieves with a touch and in mysteriously comforting a bereaved mother, Krishnamurti displays powers approaching the miraculous. At particular length, Krishnamurti preaches the Buddhist doctrine that suffering comes from people’s desiring what they cannot have—any enduring object, since all things eventually slip away. In old age, Indy reverences Krishnamurti’s teaching of desirelessness—all the more, perhaps, because intervening years of violence and greed have so long delayed this cure to a fetishism his adventures cannot end without ceasing to be stage-five.
In its preoccupation with multiple religious points of view, the Young Indiana Chronicles come closer to stage six than the feature films. With story by Lucas, writing by Jonathan Hensleigh and direction by Deepa Mehta, this episode required extensive preparations, such as nine-months negotiating with the Indian government in order to use that holy city (Madsen 79). In other episodes, Indy tours a Chinese Buddhist temple, the birthplace of Confucius, and various Christian churches. Standing among Egyptian religious relics, T. E. Laurence explains various notions of the afterlife ranging from mummification to reincarnation. In Africa, Indy discusses pacifism and the sanctity of all life with the philosopher/theologian Albert Schweitzer. In Istanbul, Indy describes the Islamic mysticism of the Mawlawïs (whirling dervishes). To help children understand the more challenging ideas in the series, a magazine published such explanations as the following: “Members of the Pahouin tribe paint their faces and bodies during religious rituals.… During mourning periods, the tribe’s people rub themselves with white chalk, which stands for death and uncleanliness” (Glenn Stone 7). Thus, the series became almost a course in comparative religions, teaching that one should not assume that any single faith has universal values.
Various fetishes or souvenirs form motifs, holding episodes together. Thus, in the first program, a statue of a jackal god is stolen and, at great risk, reclaimed by Indy in the second. A silver locket given him by an Austrian princess many years later saves his life. He carries with him an illustrated record of his travels resembling his father’s grail diary.
The Indiana Jones films have spawned innumerable peripherals. Typically, Indiana Jones and the Keys to Atlantis, first planned as a movie, eventually became an interactive computer game and a four-part comic book series followed by the six part comic Thunder in the Orient about a hunt for the earliest Buddhist scripture (McAvennie 15). Similarly, a line of children’s books is expanding the parameters of the narrative. In Young Indiana Jones™ and the Ghostly Riders, Indy visits Wales, meets “Morgen le [sic] Fay,” and learns a little Welsh despite one of the television episodes, set later in his life, when he does not even recognize the sound of it (McCay, Young Indiana Jones™ and the Ghostly Riders, 95). Young Indiana Jones™ and the Secret City has a direct descendent of the biblical Cain try to sacrifice Indy to Satan (Martin, Young Indiana Jones™ and the Secret City, 83).
Even wilder is yet another series of novels, these for adolescents,
treating Jones in his twenties. In Rob MacGregor’s Indiana Jones™ and the Peril
at Delphi, for instance, Indy, having undergone an American Indian initiation,
is subsequently guided by an eagle familiar. This helps him, when, at Delphi, he
touches the omphalos (a fetish of the Greek god Apollo) and has a vision of
his own future, stressing the plot of the three movies and two of MacGregor’s Indiana
Jones™ novels. (Jones recalls none of this during those movies.) At Stonehenge,
in MacGregor’s Indiana Jones™ and the Dance of the Giants, Indy again encounters
the omphalos coupled with ancient British magic, even though the history of
Stonehenge provided therein contradicts McCay’s Young Indiana Jones™ and the Circle
of Death, one of the children’s books. As the series proliferates, it grows more
convoluted. Some of the television episodes have been issued as A Choose Your Own
Adventure® Book. The plot varies according to the choices made by the readers
(like hypertext). Jones’s adventures have become a vast labyrinth, branching through
time and space, each exploring a different permutation of its underlying metaphor:
finding the traces of some god or God in the chaos of life but at the risk of confusing
those externals with the ever-hidden Reality. That Reality, however, remains largely
smothered under the materialism of stage five, or at most peaking through the relativism
of six, not surveyed from any higher.
Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter
4 Part 1
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