Apropos of nothing
Came across this photo yesterday. It is a picture of my mother when she was a little girl, her father, and Robert Wadlow, who is generally considered the tallest man who ever lived. And who apparently also lived near my mother when she was a little girl.
My mother is on the right. Wadlow is in glasses.
Spielberg: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade part 2
Stills swiped from here.
Yesterday we left Indy and his father midway through Act II, at the crossroads of their relationship, and the crossroads of the narrative. Indy’s got his father, but he still hasn’t achieved his goal — communication with his father. The chase to the crossroads, while light by Indiana Jones standards, has some lovely character beats as Indy grins about the bad guy’s he’s foiled and his father looks bored and winds his watch. (Indy “jousts” with one of the bad guys, underscoring the “Indy as modern-day knight” metaphor that will become important later.) And honestly, if you can’t engage with your sons during a motorcycle chase with a gaggle of Nazi stooges, it’s probably never going to happen. They argue at the crossroads, with Indy’s father going so far as to slap him for “blasphemy” when he uses the lord’s name in vain.
Indy and his father manage to get aboard a zeppelin out of Germany, headed I suppose for Hatay, where the grail is apparently hidden. They are pursued by third villain Vogel but Indy disposes of him without too much trouble.
Indy and his father, safe for a moment, have a moment to talk. Indy is now within striking distance of his goal, but finds, once the opportunity presents itself, he cannot speak. First he’s too angry, then he’s too intimidated — communication seems to be beyond him and he says he can’t think of anything to talk about. Dad, relieved to have the onus of communication lifted, cheerfully invites Indy to “get down to work” with him on recovering the grail.
And it’s not a very deep insight, but here in this scene is the core of the movie — Indy wants to communicate with his father, and his father, through his disinterest in communication, hits on a simple truth. Men, not just fathers and sons, communicate best through shared action. Longtime reader of this journal “The Editor” wondered yesterday if Spielberg’s fan-base is largely male because of Spielberg’s Oedipal issues, and while there is certainly truth to that, I think it’s more that Spielberg understands that men tend to show their affection most purely through action, not through words. When a father wants to show he loves his son, he plays catch with him, or builds a model with him, or goes camping with him. When men want to show they love each other, they play basketball or watch the game — or make a movie. Indy doesn’t know it at the moment, but his father’s avoidance of communication and insistence upon action will lead to a deeper, more profound communication than a simple conversation would.
Anyway, the zeppelin turns around, Indy and his father escape via handy biplane (don’t try this at home) and beat the bad guys in a comic aerial shootout, which deposits them, apparently, in the country of Hatay (which I just found out is a real place — live and learn).
ACT III (1:22:00-2:05:00)
Donovan, having collected Vogel, Elsa and Marcus, arrives in Hatay and bribes the local Grand Poobah into providing soldiers and military hardware for the journey to the Canyon of the Crescent Moon. I wonder what they have told the Grand Poobah — “hey, there is a completely uninteresting thing we’d like to go and fetch out of one of your local ancient wonders — is that okay with you?” Apparently the locals either don’t know about the Canyon of the Crescent Moon (funny that the Holy Grail would be secreted in a location with an obviously Islam-inspired name) or they don’t care to venture there — what with the decapitating-machines and whatnot inside.
Donovan ventures out into the desert with his team, and, in an inversion of a similar beat in Raiders, is besieged in a canyon by Frank Zappa and his team of grail-protecting zealots. No sooner is this shootout over than Indy swoops down with his team to get Marcus, setting into motion the biggest action set-piece of Last Crusade, the typically fluid, typically rousing, typically expert tank battle. This tank battle is wonderful stuff: inventive, witty, exhaustive in its exploration of possibilities. It’s as though Spielberg and his team of thinkers sat down and made a list of every possible physical gag that could occur in, on and around a moving tank — and then figured out a way to include them all, in order of escalating thrills, ending with a Duel-like plunge off a cliff, which kills Vogel.
On the other hand, the tank battle is very well done, but it’s nothing compared to, say, the last half-hour of Temple of Doom, with its triple-play fist-fight, minecar-chase, suspension-bridge climax, or Raiders‘ relentless Well-of-Souls, fight-at-the-airstrip, truck-chase roundelay. The action beats in Last Crusade, while not exactly perfunctory, are easier, breezier and less momentous than those of the other movies. Obviously a decision was made, early on in production, to make Last Crusade more of a comedy, a buddy comedy even. A buddy comedy being, of course, a variation on a romantic comedy. And so we see that Last Crusade has an almost-classic romantic comedy plot: boy finds father, boy loses father, boy gets father back. And vice versa — father also loses and finds boy — the tank battle ends with Dad thinking Indy dead and regretting not talking to him. At which point Indy is revealed to not be dead after all, at which point Dad forgets all about talking and insists on pressing on — “We’re so near the end!” he beams.
And so all the principles gather in the Canyon of the Crescent Moon (which is, of course, Petra, a place cool enough in its own right) to go after the grail. And the screenwriter says “but I thought the protagonist wants to talk to his father, not go after the grail, how is the protagonist supposed to care about getting the object that he’s spent the whole movie saying he’s not interested in?” At which point Donovan obligingly shoots Dad, pressing the issue rather expertly I thought.
And so Donovan’s action (shooting Dad) becomes more powerful than any words of threat, and Dad’s lifelong quest for the grail becomes the son’s quest, as it is the only way for Indy to achieve his larger goal of communication with his father. To accentuate this, Indy and his father, through the action of fulfilling the “tests” inside the tomb, communicate on an almost Elliott-and-E.T. level of awareness. Father and son might spend their whole lives gabbing about this or that archaeological anecdote, but through action they find their real communion. Dad has what he is good at (academic details and stern discipline), son has what he is good at (problem-solving and improvisation) and, between the two of them, they get to the Maguffin (actually the second Maguffin, the diary is the first) and, through it, achieve the protagonist’s goal. Whew! That’s a lot to load onto the last set-piece of a movie, and one of the high marks in Last Crusade‘s favor is how it wears all this lightly and with easy grace.
After all the dust has settled, Indy has what he wants — communication with his father. One could even say that Indy hasfound communion with his father by literally following in his footsteps — including bedding the same woman. In any case, in the end, his father has given up his quest for the grail (“Indy — let it go”) and found his son. “Illumination” is what he says he has found, which echoes a line from the prelude, where the father is heard asking for “illumination” from the bible to help him find the grail. The illumination he finds, I suppose, comes from the realization that the grail is nice, providing eternal life and all, but his son is the true light of his life. Which is too corny to say that way, which is why the screenwriter shortens and encodes it in the single word.
Of course, what neither Indy, nor his father, nor Marcus, nor Elsa, nor Donovan, nor Hitler knows is that the Holy Grail isn’t “the cup of Christ,” it’s Audrey Tatou. And, if you really want to press me on it, I don’t find the grail mythology as presented in Last Crusade especially compelling or even interesting — the knights and the secret tomb and the multiple magical properties and the multiple-choice grail challenge. But that’s okay — the movie isn’t really about the Holy Grail, which is as it should be — it’s a bad idea to make a movie about an object or an idea, no matter how fascinating the object or idea might be. That goes for sharks, flying saucers, dinosaurs, Nazis, airplanes, invaders from Mars, ghosts, psychic powers, robots or the invasion of Normandy. Stories are about people — if the “personal” story isn’t there, no one’s going to care about all the “cool stuff” you present — although Spielberg knows how to present cool stuff better than just about anybody. That, in the end, is, I think, why the Indiana Jones movies just seem better than other action-adventure movies — the warmth of the character, even if he never actually “learns” anything, presents a human story each time, not just a series of set-pieces.