mr_effulgence

  correctly notes, almost every action that we expect from Indy is inverted in this movie, from the source of his employment to his habitual actions. And so the outgoing, daring Indy we know and love from the other movies now becomes the watchful, guiding, worrisome patriarch of the new one. His actions are still active, but they are the actions of a protective father instead of a carefree young (or middle-aged) man.

The “protagonist bonding with his kid” scene happens near the top of Act II of Kingdom, as Indy and Mutt walk through the gorgeous Peruvian Marketplace set on their way to the sanatorium. On the way, they discuss Mutt’s home life and the relative use of education. The first part of this conversation turns out to be important to the plot, the second part is important to the theme. Mutt craves experience, while his mom insists upon his gaining knowledge first. Seeming purely expository on first viewing, the scene picks up emotional gravity second time around.

Indy and Mutt arrive at the sanatorium, where we get a lingering glance at capital-M Madness as Mutt stares, horrified, at a mad Peruvian (a reference to a similar beat in Silence of the Lambs?). That moment, plus the interior of Oxley’s cell clearly indicates that this is, thematically, the Sanatorium For Men Who Know Too Much. (Thank goodness crazy people are graphomaniacs — otherwise, how would we ever know what had driven them crazy?) Oxley has left the extremely subtle thematic clue “RETURN” carved into the walls of his cell from top to bottom, along with several images of deformed skulls — whatever could this elusive message possibly mean?

(A couple of readers have complained that the puzzles in Kingdom are too easy, and that Indy has no problem solving them and is never wrong. I disagree: Indy is wrong several times during Kingdom and here is one instance — he thinks Oxley wants to return the Crystal Skull to its place of origin, when Oxley wants only to return it to the grave of the Conquistador Guy who stole it.)

Indy and Mutt venture out to the graveyard of Conquistador Guy, which is guarded by scary guys in skull masks, one of whom Indy kills (in defense) and one whom he drives off. I feel bad for the scary guys, who don’t seem to be employed by anyone, but are, rather, only trying to protect the cemetery from grave robbers — that is, people like Indiana Jones.

Inside the tomb of Conquistador Guy, Mutt finds skeletons of Mayans with deformed skulls. Indy explains that the natives would alter their skulls to look more like their gods. Mutt protests that “God doesn’t look like that,” and Indy answers “Depends on what your God looks like.” This comment looks ahead to the revelation of who the crystal skull belongs to, but also looks backward to the atom-bomb scene. 20th-century America established its 50-year run of world supremacy on the basis of the atom bomb, and in the process killed the old god and created a new god of Technology. As the narrative of Kingdom will eventually reveal, the ancient Mayans were way ahead of the US in worshiping a technological deity.

I’m not sure now why Indy and Mutt go to the Tomb of Conquistador Guy, except that it meant a lot to Oxley. In any case, they don’t find what they’re looking for — they find, instead, this Crystal Skull geegaw. (One of my companions at the movie complained that the Crystal Skull was a bad prop to build the movie around — too big to carry in a pocket, too small to have a proper amount of gravity, and present onscreen for too long to remain mysterious. Characters have to clutch it like a baby, or grocery bag, leaving them unable to fight or climb or run.) No sooner do they get the skull but they are captured by Irina Spalko and friends,including Indy’s friend/enemy Mac.

Spalko tells Indy the things he didn’t know about the crystal skull, ie that it is the skull of an extraterrestrial (“E.T.!” exclaimed Sam, who only just saw E.T. a few weeks ago), and, much as she earlier forced him to look for the box in Hangar 51, now forces him to gaze into the eyes of the crystal skull. And, just as Indy was conflicted earlier by his desire to know vs. his desire to stay alive, this time around submits to the temptation of the skull — the temptation to know.

(How extensively applied is the theme of “knowledge vs. experience” in Kingdom? That is, how badly does Indy want to know what’s inside the box and what will he do to find out? To hint at the answer, Spalko is wearing a haircut inspired by Louise Brooks, who was the star of a movie titled Pandora’s Box. Kingdom is, I’d say, Spielberg’s most thematically dense movie after Jurassic Park.)

Indy gazes into the crystal skull (an homage to Hamlet?) and it almost fries his brain — obviously, in the opinion of Kingdom, too much knowledge can be a dangerous thing. This is an essentially conservative viewpoint and points to the fundamental change in Indy’s (and, most likely, Spielberg’s) character. The young Indy was all about charging forward, taking chances, stealing fortune and damning consequences, the old Indy is about proceeding with caution, careful planning, replacing what has been taken and protecting those close to him.

He is also presented with Oxley (beforehand or afterward, I can’t remember now), who has gone stark raving mad from gazing into the skull — a preview of things to come. The “kingdom” of the title, it will eventually be made clear, is knowledge itself, and the ruler of the kingdom of knowledge must be careful about gazing too deeply into the skull — knowledge, without experience, can only lead to amorality and death.

Spalko reveals her evil plan to Indy (your basic “rule the world” scenario, although Spalko, at least, is a patriot who shows no signs of wanting to overthrow or outlive Stalin — more than I can say for Raiders’ Belloc or Crusade‘s Donovan) and then demands that he help them get some sense out of Oxley. Indy refuses and is presented with Marion Ravenwood, the woman he loved and abandoned at least twice that we know of, and who is, we are told, Mutt’s mother. So Indy, at the close of Act II, has acquired an almost-family, and has suddenly taken on the responsibilities of not only a mentor to Mutt but a guilty ex to Marion (and, for that matter, to Oxley). Indy’s character of charging forward and leaving a “trail of human wreckage” (in Marion’s words) comes careering home to him in this moment and forces a change within him — looking out for himself vs. looking out for others.

More later.

(What is Mac doing in the trunk? Is he also an archaeologist? What were they doing in Mexico together? It’s unclear. What is clear is that Mac is a reflection of Indy — Indy searches for artifacts to put them in museums, Mac searches for treasure to enrich himself. Indy is an academic — “a teacher”, as Mutt says, with varying degrees of credulity.)

Indy helps Spalko find the box she’s looking for — partly because she’s forcing him to, partly because he is also curious about what’s in the box. We are told that he participated in the retrieval of the thing in the box from “ten years ago,” and yet he knows little more about it than Spalko does. Spalko seeks the artifact for its power, but Indy simply wants “to know.”

Once he “knows” what’s in the box, his intent becomes “to put it back where it belongs.” This is a marked change for Indiana Jones, who up until now was content to trash temples, grab the idol, and put it in a museum (or hand it over to a gangster, as he does at the beginning of Temple of Doom). “To put it back where it belongs,” which we can shorten to “to set things right” for our purposes, is Indy’s motivation throughout Kingdom.

He seeks knowledge of the thing in the box (which is mummified remains) and soon finds himself confronted with the ultimate product of the 20th-century’s thirst for knowledge — the atomic bomb. (Later in the movie, Spalko quotes Oppenheimer quoting Shiva, but Spielberg surely remembers that Oppenheimer’s [or somebody’s] first words upon seeing the explosion of the atomic bomb was “Science has now known sin.”) This all seems thrilling and chaotic in the context of a first viewing, but the pursuit of knowledge, and the danger of that pursuit, is the theme that ties together all the plot lines of Kingdom. (Hence the emphasis on Indy being a “teacher.”)

After witnessing the terrible destructive power of the atomic bomb, the next thing that happens to Indy is he finds himself being interrogated by a couple of g-men about the thing in the box. (In a rare non-Spielberg reference, the scene directly recalls the interrogation of Richard Kimble in The Fugitive.) Indy, who fought the Nazis not once but twice to keep them from taking over the world, now finds his patriotism being questioned by a couple of Men in Black. The man who is pulled out of a car trunk after a 19-year absence finds himself in a world very different from the one he left at the end of Last Crusade. Things he once knew to be true are now called into question by the reigning authorities. The “intelligence” men, we would say, have acquired too much knowledge — their wealth of knowledge has blinded them to what anyone could plainly see.

(Indy being rescued from his interrogation by “General Ross” hard upon surviving an atomic blast is another question — what is Bruce Banner’s antagonist doing in this movie?)

The “intelligence” men are so far gone in their pursuit of knowledge that they ransack Indy’s office at his university (which I guess is Yale), force him out of his job and even force his boss out of his job. So the “intelligence” men, in their pursuit of knowledge, trash the traditional pinnacle of knowledge, the university. The American intelligence men are aided in their quest by Russian intelligence men, the “good guys” in unintended league with the “bad guys” against our protagonist.

(The corollary to “knowledge” in Kingdom is “experience.” The intelligence men may “know” things, but Indy’s “experience” proves things — General Ross says as much to the g-men. Pure knowledge, the movie suggests, is destructive, while knowledge combined with experience can be a useful tool for achieving things — like solving a puzzle, finding a lost friend or escaping a trap. The atomic bomb is a perfect example of knowledge minus experience.)

Enter Mutt. Mutt has lost his beloved Oxley (which, well, let’s just accept for now that Oxley is important to Mutt — we are told this rather than shown it, but let’s go with it for now). Indy has his own emotional attachment to Oxley (which we will understand later) and agrees to help Mutt — if he can keep them one step ahead of the Russians, who are after Indy for reasons that will eventually become clear.

(The “knowledge vs. experience” theme is underlined during the motorcycle chase scene, where Indy advises a student that a real archaeologist knows that he has to “get out of the library.” This would come as a surprise to the younger Indy, who advised his students the exact opposite.)

Mutt has a coded note from Oxley which Indy decodes after a furrowing of his brow and the two of them head off to Peru in search of Oxley.

Now then: who is Mutt? Mutt is, of course, another reflection of Indy. We could say that he has neither Indy’s knowledge nor his experience, but he does have his determination, his recklessness, his will. (There’s a nice moment during the motorcycle chase where Mutt grins about some stunt he’s just pulled and Indy frowns disapprovingly, an exact echo of a similar moment between Indy and his father in Last Crusade. This is how we know Mutt is Indy’s son before Indy does.) Mutt feels things too much, does things on impulse, in general lacks direction — lacks a father, one could say. It would seem that Oxley is a sort of father figure to Mutt, and nothing excites Spielberg’s emotions more than a child separated from his father.

(Now that Spielberg is a father himself many times over, his movies, which were once full of father’s abandoning their families, are now full of older, wiser fathers returning to their families, and Kingdom, we shall see, is not only a worthy addition to this new tradition, but a specific repudiation of Spielberg Past — but don’t let me get ahead of myself.)

Mr. Publick finds a lack of “genuine emotion” in the movie, but I find the opposite — Indy gets put through more emotional changes more quickly than in any of the other movies. First he’s tired and pissed at the Russians, then he’s angry at Mac for betraying him, then he’s terrified and awed by the atomic blast, then he’s suspicious and angry at the g-men, then he’s quickly hurt and then forgiving to his boss at the university, then he’s concerned about Oxley, all in the first act. Maybe that’s the problem — if the movie doesn’t stop and underline the changes, the sheer number of them starts to feel like glibness or superficiality.

Anyway, unless I’m mistaken, everything from Hangar 51 to Indy’s departure for Peru with Mutt constitutes the first of four acts, which makes this a good place to stop for now. We could say that Act I is: Indy, thrust into a world he cannot recognize, where the use of knowledge has been perverted to cast doubt on experience, is given an opportunity to find another lost academic and seizes it.

I admit I was a little hesitant to see it twice in 12 hours, especially as I haven’t slept in about a week due to traveling, but the sound and projection at the Century City AMC is astounding and I enjoyed the movie easily twice as much on the second go-around, with my seven-year-old son on one side, marveling at the ravenous ants and cheering the atomic bomb, and my five-year-old daughter on the other side, cowering in fear of the mummies and whispering to me that Cate Blanchett looks really good, both with her sunglasses and without them, both ways looks really good.

(Dad, by the way, agrees. And in fact I’ll go one better — Irina Spalko is my favorite Indy bad guy — sexy, tough, resourceful, human, smart and funny. She has a good plan and her prosecution of it is logical and consistent. She’s everything a bad guy needs to be.)

(When she meets her doom, Kit was a little confused and a little horrified. The following conversation occurred:

KIT: Dad, what just happened to her?
DAD: [gives an explanation of what happened to her]
KIT: Oh. That’s okay, we hated her anyway.)

I will need to watch the movie again with a timer and a pause button to properly analyze the screenplay, but I will say that upon two viewings the script holds together as well as any of the Indiana Jones adventures do and better in some areas than ever. It is thematically rich and consistent, and the action is as fluid as we would expect from the director of Raiders and as complex as we would expect from the director of War of the Worlds.

The first time around, sure, there were some things that stuck out weird to me, but that effect came largely from my own expectations, not from what’s actually in the movie. The second time around, with my Indy-loving kids by my side, none of that stuff seemed to matter anymore — it was a much more purely enjoyable experience, visceral and effective, inventive, sly and affectionate.

I read about people saying that the first 25 minutes is great but then the movie loses its energy. That’s not the movie I watched, it seemed to keep going just fine, keeping pace not only on its own terms but on the terms of its predecessors.

First time around, it was a little weird to see Indy have to drag four or five other people around for the last hour of the movie. Second time around I barely even noticed it.

Anyway, it’s getting late and I still haven’t slept yet so I’ll stop here. It’s a real movie, it’s a real Spielberg movie, and yes, it’s a real Indiana Jones movie. Which is not to say there was not some confusion in my corner of the theater, leading to these two comments:

1. SAM: I think it’s set in 1957 because the actor playing Indiana Jones is just that much older. That’s why he looks so old. They made it happen later because he’s old now.

2. KIT: (pointing) Is that Indiana Jones?
DAD: Yes.
KIT: Why isn’t his hair brown?

Within moments of returning home, Sam found his brown fedora, a life-size plastic skull and a pillow case and was seen romping around the house pretending to be Indiana Jones in his latest adventure.

There are, of course, Spielberg references tucked into almost every scene — too many to recount here, some of them very oblique and almost subliminal.

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.