ACT I (0:00-27:00) We see Jim in his environment, among the wealthy, transplanted Britons and their strange, insulated lifestyle. We know that their days are numbered, and if we don’t, Spielberg lets us know by sending Jim to a Christmas costume party where one grownup comes as Marie Antoinette and another comes as Death.

Jim, we see, like Donna Stratton in 1941, has a fetish for warplanes — he admires their power. We will come to find that Jim admires power for its own sake — part of Jim’s story how he learns to survive, like the ancient Italian whoremonger in Catch-22, by surrendering to whoever seems to be in power at any given time. Aircraft, for Jim, are always a symbol of a greater power — this he shares, of course, with Roy Neary in Close Encounters.

At the close of Act I, in Spielberg’s most sophisticated crowd-mayhem setpiece yet, Shanghai is invaded by the Japanese and Jim is separated from his parents and his lifestyle.

ACT II (27:00-1:02:00) This multi-part, complicated act involves Jim’s journey from wealthy British expat to prisoner of war. Separated from his parents, he returns home, assuming they will meet him there. Instead of finding his parents, he finds his servants looting the place. When he challenges them he receives a slap in the face. He stays in his house until he runs out of food, then ventures into the city as the Japanese occupation takes hold. He tries to surrender to the Japanese army, who laugh at him. He is chased through the streets by a teenage orphan boy, who is unnamed but who isexactly the right age to be a grown-up Short Round from Temple of Doom.

(Most of the direction in Empire of the Sun is fresh, daring and a new page for Spielberg, although he does occasionally overstate a beat or rely on his fluent shooting skills to turn an action beat into a visual gag. In Act I, Jim doesn’t just have one or two plane hanging from his bedroom ceiling, his room is festooned with model planes, and they all move in the breeze. In the brilliant Shanghai sequences, when Jim is chased by Short Round, Spielberg cannot resist an off-tone do-si-do on a crowded street of rickshaws. And when Jim walks past the local movie theater, they are, of course, showing Gone With The Wind.)

Jim tries to find other Brits, is refused by the Japanese and is threatened by the locals. He is eventually found by Frank and Basie, a couple of American black-marketeers. He is, at first, seen as valuable for sale or trade, and Jim embraces his status as commodity in this new reality as eagerly as he embraced his status as rich-kid. Jim, in his desperate search for authority, has an unerring eye for figuring out who is in charge. If heartless capitalism is in charge, well then, he’ll be a happy commodity and strive to be a worthy commodity.

The locals don’t want to buy Jim as a slave, and Basie is about to cut Jim loose when Jim, facing another loss of an authority figure, quickly sells out his birthright, advising Basie to loot his home in the suburbs. His home, in his absence, has been taken over by the Japanese and he, Basie and Frank are taken prisoner.

Jim is relocated to an internment camp, where he meets the Brits he knew in the suburbs now reduced to refugees. They are shattered, but Jim, taking his cues from wily capitalist Basie, learns how to live in this environment. When it comes time to be transferred to a larger camp, Basie is ready to give up Jim in a flat second, and Jim has to figure out a new way to scam a ride.

And somewhere in this part of the movie I jotted down in my notes “fiercely committed performance from Christian Bale.” Indeed, you watch Bale’s performance in this movie and you have no trouble imagining the man who will eventually go on to do American Psycho, The Machinist and Batman Begins.

ACT III (1:07:00-1:37:00) At the Soochow Internment Camp, adjoining a Japanese airfield, we see Jim mastering the system, playing every conceivable angle to ensure his survival. He steals, trades, gambles and gets by on pluck and charisma. This, in his mind, makes him an American. The Brits we focus on, a doctor and Mr. and Mrs. Victor, the despairing couple with whom Jim shares a room, are too wrapped up in their cultural identity to bend much with their new circumstances. They refuse to bow to their Japanese captors and wilt under the humiliation of their reduced lives. The Americans, meanwhile, are full of energy and vigor, brimming with optimism and plans.

Meanwhile, across the street, so to speak, Jim is lured by the lives of the Japanese pilots, who might be flying off to their deaths, but at least they are committed to what they see as greater power, a fate Jim sees as ideal.

Jim also witnesses Mr. and Mrs. Victor making love, an early Spielberg stab at shooting an adult, realistic sex scene.

At the climax of the act, Jim negotiates a supposed minefield to capture a pheasant for Basie. The pheasant goes uncaptured and Jim survives the errand thanks to a fellow plane-crazy adolescent from the Japanese airfield, but Jim’s skill in negotiating minefields is already well established by this point in the narrative. For his survival skills and wiliness, Jim is granted admittance into the American barracks.

ACT IV (1:37:00-1:57:00) No sooner does Jim gain admittance into the American barracks than his father-figure Basie falls from grace. Caught stealing the camp commandant’s soap (that Jim stole for him), Basie is beaten and hospitalized, his possessions stolen by his fellow Americans — a clear argument against the limits of capitalism. When you’re on top, everything is great, but when your employees sense your weakness they will become your competitors and rip you off without a second thought.

Against this, the Kamikazes training next door seem more honorable and enticing than ever to young Jim. His teen pal from the airfield is getting ready to go on a bombing run when the American Air Force shows up, and Jim’s allegiance instantly shifts again to the force with the superior air power. He’s ready to embrace the attacking airplanes even if it means getting blown up. At the height of the American bomb run, the British doctor snaps him out of his delirium and Jim suddenly realizes that he doesn’t remember what his parents look like — his search for an authority has erased from his mind the most basic authority of all.

ACT V (1:57:00-2:25:00) The war over, the again-homeless Jim heads back the British barracks and the sad, tired Victors. His experiences have left him utterly confused about what is important — family, country, ideals, home? (It’s telling that Jim, born in Shanghai, has never seen the Britain everyone tells him is his home.) And it’s to Spielberg’s credit that he doesn’t offer an easy answer — every solution to Jim’s problem comes with its own difficulties.

The camp commandant flees, the teen Kamikaze next door can’t get his plane off the ground, Basie vanishes and the British trudge like sheep toward the city. Jim throws the suitcase that bears his name, and contains all his identity, into the river. None of the authorities Jim has pursued have turned out to be up to the task.

The Brits arrive in an abandoned stadium, where all their precious belongings are being stored like a ruling-class yard sale. Jim finds his family’s limousine and camps out there with the ailing Mrs. Victor. Mrs. Victor dies in the night and Jim awakens to see the flash of the atomic bomb — the ultimate authority in this conflict, which Jim mistakes for Mrs. Victor’s soul ascending into Heaven. In that moment, Mrs. Victor, who symbolizes Britain, Mother and sex object for Jim, is consumed by death, fused in his mind with the unanswerable power of the dawn of the atomic age.

His identity annihilated and with nowhere else to go, Jim heads back to the internment camp where, unexpectedly, supply canisters drop from the sky and Jim finds himself in a world of plenty. In a mirror of Act II, Jim, at home in this place of homelessness, rides his bike around the deserted camp, picking up chocolate bars, cans of milk and cartons of cigarettes. He meets up with his Japanese Kamikaze friend, who is killed by Basie, who has come back to loot the camp and move on. He tries to bring the Kamikaze back to life, assuming, for a moment, the authority that he’s been searching for throughout the movie. Soon the American army shows up and Jim gratefully “surrenders” to them.

Shortly thereafter, Jim is reunited with his parents at an orphanage. They don’t recognize him at first and he doesn’t recognize them at all. What would ordinarily be a crushing Spielberg moment of reunion is undercut, both by Jim’s loss of identity and by his newly-won skepticism. Confronted with his mother, he inspects her, rather like one would inspect a gift horse, touching her lipstick, scrutinizing her hair.

At the end of this, Spielberg’s most complex, most ambitious, most daring, least sentimental movie yet, Jim is restored to “his place,” as the son of a wealthy British family, but in another sense he will never be the same, and the final shot is of his suitcase, still adrift, in the harbor of Shanghai.

ACT I (0:00-28:30): This act could be called “Celie’s Family Torn Asunder.” Celie’s child is taken from her (and we hear of an earlier child who was similarly taken), she is traded by her father to a local farmer, who beats her mercilessly and treats her like dirt. Her sister Nettie runs away from home, away from her and Celie’s father, to be with her. The farmer, “Mister,” sets his eyes on Nettie, but when he attacks her she retaliates, and he drives her from the house. She leaves, reluctantly, promising that nothing but death can keep her and Celie apart.

ACT II (28:30-45:30): Many years pass. Celie grows from girl to woman. Mister’s son Harpo brings home a woman named Sophia. Sophia stands in contrast to both Celie and Nettie. She’s bossy, proud, short-tempered and unbendable. Celie, seeing an opportunity to get back at her tormentors, sparks a conflict between Sophia and Harpo. Her plan backfires and Sophia leaves Mister’s farm.

ACT III (45:30-1:24:00) Shug Avery, a colorful blues singer and an old flame of Mister’s, comes to stay on Mister’s farm. Shug, like Sophia, also stands in contrast to Celie. She is both weaker, in that she is drawn to men’s power, but also stronger, as she seems to move independently of them and has learned to use them to her advantage. Both Mister and Celie are obsessed with Shug. Shug initially calls Celie ugly and laughs in her face, but as she gets better (it’s not explained why she’s ill, but some sort of substance abuse seems likely) and gets back into singing (at Harpo’s backwoods juke-joint) she warms to Celie, writes and sings a song for her and even makes love to her. Shug then tries to enter the local church, but is rebuffed by the minister. She leaves Mister’s farm. Celie tries to go with her but loses her nerve. This is Celie’s low-point.

ACT IV (1:24:00-2:07:00) Sophiamouths off to the wrong person and ends up pistol-whipped, jailed and turned into a servant to a white man’s idiot wife, Miss Millie. Shug returns, now married to a grinning showboater, Grady. Mister and Grady bond over their mutual lust for Shug while Shug goes to the mailbox and discovers a letter to Celie from her long-lost sister Nettie. While Mister is off drinking, Shug and Celie discover a whole cache of letters from Nettie, where she outlines her life as a missionary in Africa and tells Celie that her children are alive and well and living as Africans. Now that Celie knows that she has a family elsewhere, she leaves Mister and goes with Shug to Memphis. Sophia leaves Miss Millie and returns to her home.

ACT V (2:07:00-2:30:00) An act of forgiveness and reconciliation. In Celie’s absence, Mister’s farm devolves into chaos as he staggers around in an alcohol-induced haze. Celie’s father dies, whereupon she learns that her father was actually her step-father and her real father has left her the family house. Now an empowered, independent landowner, Celie opens a pants-making business and prospers. Shug returns and takes up singing at Harpo’s again, but then repents and leads a crowd of sinners to the local church, where we learn that the minister is also Shug’s father. Meanwhile, Mister, having bottomed out, turns over a new leaf and secretly helps Nettie return to the US. Celie is reunited with her sister and her children.

NOTES: Spielberg, obviously chafing at the limitations of genre, steps way outside his comfort zone with this, his most complex narrative yet. The Color Purple has a protagonist who is frustrated in her desires and incapable of action until well past the two-hour mark. When her want is rewarded it is without her direct action. There is something Dickensian about the narrative, a life-spanning story of the poor and helpless suffering at the hands of brutal oppressors. But there is also something Capra-esque about it; Celie reminds me a lot of George Bailey, who longs to get out of his small town but is tied there by family obligations. George wants to get away in spite of his family, Celie wants to get away to find her family, both are stuck, both are incapable of action, and both are rewarded in the end in spite of their inability to leave town.

There is also something Capra-esque about Spielberg’s direction. As with It’s a Wonderful Life, The Color Purple is a story of extreme sadness and frustrated desire, yet the direction of each emphasizes the warmth and comedy of the narrative instead of the bleakness and despair. The performances in The Color Purple are sometimes startlingly broad — some of the scenes would absolutely not look out of place in 1941. Spielberg’s typically fluid, seamless direction doesn’t feel like it matches the material and leads to hyperbole and cartoonishness. Everything is overdone — Harpo isn’t just a poor carpenter, he’s a bumbling oaf who repeatedly falls through rooftops. His juke-joint doesn’t merely leak in the rain, it becomes a veritable indoor shower. Miss Millie isn’t merely a poor driver, she’s a caricature of a hysterical, swerving madwoman. Mister’s farm doesn’t just fall into ruin, he ends up with goats in the kitchen and shutters falling off the windows on cue. Shug doesn’t merely refuse a poorly-cooked breakfast, she hurls it across the hallway so that it leaves primary-colored splatters on the wall.

When the scenes don’t move as broad comedy they move as suspense — there are several sequences that would fit comfortably into Hitchcock. What the scenes do not work as is moments of genuine human interaction, which feels like a loss to me — the action feels like it’s all choreographed for the camera instead of the camera happening to witness moments of spontaneous behavior. Which is to say, I feel like Spielberg took a bold step forward by choosing this very non-genre narrative to shoot, but then shot it as though it were a genre piece anyway, relying on his sense of rhythm and his ability to manufacture suspense and emotional involvement to propel his largely plotless story forward.

Spielberg softens the brutality of the narrative in other ways as well. The antagonists of The Color Purple are all foolish, stumbling blowhards. Mister is a threat to Celie, but we never feel like he’s a threat to us — we can see he’s a petty tyrant easily bested. Likewise, Mister’s father is a muttering old codger and Miss Millie is a squealing, bug-eyed idiot. This helps us forgive them and aids Act V’s motions of reconciliation (which are not in the book), but it robs the story of drama. How effective an antagonist would Mr. Potter be in It’s a Wonderful Life if, at the end of the movie, it turned out that he was the one who brought Harry Bailey home and donated the money to get George out of debt?

The more I think of it, I’m not at all sure what to make of Act V of The Color Purple. Mister redeems himself, but does not announce it. Celie finds out that the man who raped her as a child was not her father but her stepfather, and Shug Avery begs for forgiveness from her own estranged father. After two hours of telling us about the horrors visited upon women by men, it’s like the story, in the end, pulls its punch — Mister isn’t so bad after all, Celie’s father is not only innocent but a benefactor, and Shug is all too desperate for the approval not only of her father but of the patriarchal church he represents. None of this is motivated by plot — it just sort of happens out of the blue. Celie even seems baffled herself: she accepts her father’s house but tells the previous owner she still doesn’t understand how she got it. The previous owner’s explanation doesn’t help very much.

It’s well known that The Color Purple is the only Spielberg movie that is not scored by John Williams, and yet I’d be hard-pressed to tell you how what Quincy Jones does here is very different from what Williams would have done. There is a lot of musical heartstring-tugging, and a good deal of Mickey-Mousing as well. Which is a shame, because there is a little shadow-movie within The Color Purple that is related to O Brother, Where Art Thou, a movie about the history of southern black American music that could have been fascinating. (The Color Purple is now, of course, a musical, so I suppose it’s not too late.)

ACT III (1:00:00-1:27:30)

Chapter 1 (1:00:00-1:10:00) This gripping little reel involves Indy and his family stumbling upon an obscene, terrifying blood-cult ceremony. I myself have never stumbled across an obscene, terrifying blood-cult ceremony so I don’t honestly know if the one depicted here is accurate or not, but I’m going to go ahead and say that for members of blood cults I’m guessing that this sequence is probably pretty cheesy. I mean, lava? Who has lava at their blood-cult ceremony? That’s just stupid.

For the rest of us though, it’s pretty freakin’ dark. The design of the temple, the human skins fluttering in the breeze, the high priest wearing an animal skull on his head, the swaying, groveling celebrants, the sacrificial victim getting his heart ripped out and surviving, it’s all perfectly stupid and utterly intoxicating. Spielberg is a master at taking an assignment and running with it — “Oh, it’s a weird, scary blood-cult ceremony? Well then, let’s make it the weirdest, scariest ever.”

One flaw: we meet our head villain, cult priest Mola Ram, an hour into the movie, and they don’t even tell us he’s the head villain, we just kind of have to figure it out after a while. Plus he’s wearing a weird costume and is hellishly lit — it’s a great entrance, but would have been more effective an hour earlier — you know, like at the point where the head villain of Raiders showed up. Is there some reason Mola Ram couldn’t be one of the guests at the Maharajah’s dinner table? Or for that matter, why couldn’t he be the Prime Minister? The PM is, we eventually learn, one of the cultists, why not make him the head priest?

(I do have one problem with the cult ceremony. The victim has his still-beating heart removed from his body, which is really cool. But then, when Willie is the victim, Mola Ram doesn’t bother ripping out her heart, which is good for Willie, but pulls the villain’s punch. Better, I think, to forgo the cool effect of the first victim’s heart being ripped out than to make it look like the villain is “just kidding” later on in the act. But then, I get the feeling that the architecture of the sacrifice ritual is based on Mola Ram holding the still-beating heart as it bursts into flames. I get the feeling this image came into Spielberg’s head before anything else and he structured the whole ceremony around it.)

Funny thing is, as implausible as the plot of Temple is, Mola Ram is a great villain and his plan, in its weird, twisted way, makes sense. He’s got a solid motive, a decent plan and a logical endgame. This puts him ahead of 80% of Bond villains and even ahead of Belloq, who had huge balls on him to think he could wrest control of the Ark of the Covenant while in the employ of Adolf Hitler, but had no plan for what he was going to do once the Ark was opened.

(That is, Belloq thinks the Ark is a transmitter to God, and that by opening the Ark before handing it over to Hitler will give him the power that Hitler craves. But he doesn’t know what “transmitter to God” actually means, a bit of shortsightedness that turns out to be disastrous. “Hmm, my head is exploding — maybe I should put the lid back on this thing and think this plan through a little more.”)

After the ceremony, the temple immediately empties and Indy goes after the Sankara Stones. Two things: hey, wait, wasn’t this temple just filled with hundreds of zombie celebrants? How did they get out so fast? And doesn’t anybody stay to, you know, clean up? Not a single altar-boy or acolyte to be seen. And, I notice that Indy treats the Temple of Doom with ten times the respect he shows to either the Well of Souls or the Peruvian temple in Raiders — he tiptoes carefully through the rafters, cautious not to upset anything. Well, come to think of it, this isn’t an ancient temple, it’s practically brand new — what’s the point of wrecking it?

In any case, Indy nabs the stones, but as he is heading out of the temple, he discovers the mine, being operated by the kidnapped village children and the movie, in case it wasn’t dark enough yet, takes an even darker turn.

Chapter 2 (1:10:00-1:17:00) Indy might be a fortune hunter, but he can’t just turn his back on a mine full of enslaved children, but before he can do much for them he and his family are nabbed by the bad guys. Indy is tied up, Short Round is whipped, Willie is spirited away somewhere (odd that Spielberg lingers on showing us children being whipped, but shies from showing what might have happened to Willie). Indy is poisoned for the second time in the movie, forced to drink the blood of the whatever. And for some reason the boy Maharajah is on hand with a voodoo doll. What? A voodoo doll? Either Spielberg is just throwing in any creepy thing he can think of at this point, or else the young Maharajah was educated in, um, Haiti? I can imagine a Kali-worshiper watching this scene and finally throwing up his hands and saying “Okay, forget it, I was with this movie up to this point, but voodoo? That’s just insulting.”

In any case, the scene is almost unwatchably brutal and intense, which is great because it is, wouldn’t you know it, another expository scene, where the head villain explains his plot to the protagonist, and we don’t even notice because it’s just so unspeakably ghastly. And yet the movie still hasn’t gotten as dark as it’s going to. Because the next thing you know, there is, yes, another blood-cult ceremony, this time with Willie as the sacrifice and Indy as the priest.

Chapter 3 (1:17:00-1:27:30) Hey, wait a minute! These Kali-worshipers just had a ceremony, like, ten minutes ago! And now they’re having another one! How many of these ceremonies do they have in a day? How are the worshipers supposed to get anything done? What is the rest of their day like? I have this image in my head of a bunch of Kali worshipers getting back to their office jobs after changing out of their Kali-worshiping duds, and they’re filing papers and entering data and playing Minesweeper, and then suddenly one of their co-workers comes along and says “Hey guys! They’re doing a second sacrifice today! Everybody back to the Temple!” and everybody kind of looking at each other like “Hey, you know, Kali is great and all, but I have a life, dude.“

Speaking of which, if Mola Ram has a congregation of zombies that are able to drop whatever they’re doing at a moment’s notice to come attend a sacrifice, why doesn’t he use them to help dig for diamonds? Surely they’d be more efficient than child slaves.

Anyway, so Indy is now bad and Willie is now his sacrificial victim. And I suppose there may be a metaphor at work here — if Willie represents the cynical, greedy side of Indy, and Indy himself has now been boiled down to a “true believer,” then there could be a comment in here about the bad side of pure faith.

But something tells me that it’s really just “plot.” I suspect this because, fact is, the rest of the movie from here on out is pretty much just plot. This is a good thing. Movies need plot, and few directors understand plot better than Spielberg, and, as any screenwriter will tell you, plot is hard. In fact, I’m going to go ahead and say that Temple of Doom is probably the most tightly plotted movie in Spielberg’s filmography, which is the reason I find it so compulsively watchable.

Oh, and the action/suspense elements of all this are just masterfully presented. The roasting cage bobbing up and down with Willie inside, Indy backhanding Short Round, the fight on the altar, it’s all just incredible.

Anyway, Short Round cures Indy (that is, the son cures the father, a plot turn I attribute to George Lucas, since he made six movies revolving around the idea), driving us into —

ACT IV (1:27:30-1:54) Here we have another textbook ur-Dreamworks “race to the finish line” final act, a breathless sequence of stupefying, expertly-mounted set pieces, each topping the last.

Chapter 1 (1:27:30-1:35) We begin with the massive slugfest in the mine, as Indy and his family free the enslaved children and beat the crap out of their captors. The chapter climaxes with Indy’s fight with the Enormous Thuggee atop the Rock-Smashing Machine.

Chapter 2 (1:35-1:43) We go straight from the stupefying slugfest into the stupefying mine-car chase, a sequence so mind-bogglingly complex I cannot even begin to imagine how it was planned, much less shot. The chapter ends with a literal cliffhanger, as Indy and his family are left, yes, hanging from a literal cliff as torrents of water blast out of the mine entrance.

(Of course if I slow down long enough to ponder the design of this ridiculous mine, which apparently is inside an active volcano, the whole thing seems kind of silly.)

Chapter 3 (1:43-1:54) The cliffside scene bleeds into the bridge scene, and at this point I’d like to pause to break the fourth wall and tell a personal anecdote:

When I was at Dreamworks working on Antz, I had an idea for a scene that took place on a high, narrow bridge. As it happened, Spielberg was in the room during the pitch meeting and so I pitched the scene and added “you know, like the end of Temple of Doom,” at which point Spielberg closed his eyes like he had a headache and said, with no small amount of anguish, “I hated that scene.” And I could barely think of what I was supposed to say next about my own project, because all I wanted to say was “What? You hated that scene? But, but — you’re Steven Spielberg! And when you shot Temple of Doom you were at the peak of your powers! What power could have compelled you to shoot a scene you hated that much?” This moment bothered me for years, rolling around in my head — how, why, would Spielberg shoot a scene he hated? I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the “making of” DVD and the mystery was solved: Spielberg explains that while shooting Temple of Doom he found out, too late, that he has a fear of heights. This fear kept him from shooting the bridge scene the way he had planned (he literally could not make it more than a third of the way out onto the bridge without breaking out in a cold sweat) and he spent the entire shooting of the sequence in a state of physical discomfort. Needless to say, the bridge scene did not make into the script for Antz.

End of personal anecdote.

Anyway, I think the bridge sequence comes off well enough — the shot of Indy realizing the extremity of his dilemma is probably my favorite of the character, and the action of the climb back up to the cliffside is, again, expertly handled. Although of course I would love to know what Spielberg had intended for the scene to begin with. I imagine the cuts to the alligators below could have been more gracefully integrated — I never believe that anyone is ever actually eaten by an alligator, although it would serve the people right for all the disgusting things that get eaten in this movie — but otherwise I think it all works fine.

Once Indy gets Mola Ram in his sights, he snarls “Prepare to meet Kali — in Hell!” And I just can’t help but think “Jeez, what a lame threat.” Honestly, howis Mola Ram supposed to be scared by a guy who doesn’t even have a token understanding of his faith? Threatening Mola Ram with “prepare to meet Kali — in Hell!” is like threatening a rabbi with “Prepare to meet Jehovah — in Hades!” or threatening a Muslim with “Prepare to meet Mohammad — in Nirvana!” or threatening the Green Goblin with “Prepare to meet  Spiderman — in Gotham City!”  I want Mola Ram to look scared for a second and then pause and say “What? What the hell are you talking about? Why would Kali be in Hell? Who are you?” And then Indy would have to do some hasty backpedaling: “Well, you know what I mean, I mean, you know, whatever bad-place afterworld you guys have — I’m sorry, I haven’t studied Kali blood cults that much.” And then Mola Ram could say “Why not just say ‘Prepare to meet Kali?’ You had me up to that point, my heart was really racing, but then you had to add “in Hell” and all I could think was “Christ, what a douche.”

Indy’s complete ignorance of Mola Ram’s faith is confusing since, mere seconds later, he knows just the magic words that will make the magic rocks ignite into flames. “You betrayed Shiva!” he growls, then helpfully translates the phrase into, I’m guessing, Hindi. Because, apparently, Shiva, up to this point, was unaware that Mola Ram had acquired the Sankara Stones and was using them to amass a power base for himself on Earth. No, it took Indiana Jones pointing that out before Shiva, wherever Shiva hangs out, to look up and say “What’s that? Mola Ram betrayed me? Well, I’ll settle his hash, you just watch! Gimme my rocks back!”

(As with the Ark in Raiders, Indy, the non-believer, is spared the wrath of the god-of-the-moment and allowed to make off with the magic artifact. There is a message in there somewhere.)

The young Maharajah, now transformed into a good colonialist, leads Capt Blumburtt and his troops to the bridge to help save the day. And I can’t help but wonder if that’s necessarily a good thing. There is a troubling thread of colonialism running through all the Indiana Jones movies (and all of George Lucas’s movies too for that matter) but Spielberg breezes past the moment without comment, even though its perfectly obvious that, if not for people like Capt Blumburtt, there wouldn’t be people like Mola Ram in the first place.

(As Walter Sobchak might say, “Say what you want about the tenets of the Kali Ma, at least it’s an ethos.”)

WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? The problem with “Kick the Can,” unsurprisingly, begins here. Who is the protagonist of this short? The plot is: Kindly old Mr. Bloom comes to an old folks home and Teaches Folks A Lesson. The protagonists of a story like this would most effectively be the ensemble of elderly folks who are confronted with Mr. Bloom. What to make of the mysterious outsider who sees things differently from the status quo, who uses magic and wry irony to show us the error of our ways?

But none of the ensemble of “Kick the Can” is developed in any kind of interesting way. Each character is a stereotype for quick reading — the kvetching Jew, the faded romantic, the bitter loner, et cetera. They are thoroughly uninteresting, and Spielberg shoots them with unflattering lenses and lighting, turning them into cartoon characters. The only character Spielberg seems to be interested in is Mr. Bloom, who arrives with a twinkle in his eye and mischief up his sleeve. We are on the outside of the ensemble, on the side of the magician, looking down at the status quo, giggling with giddy joy at the mischievous lesson we’re about to teach the poor benighted folks who don’t know any better.

And so Bloom becomes the protagonist of “Kick the Can.” This is like making Peter Pan the protagonist of Peter Pan (which Spielberg would, of course, eventually figure out a way to do). More to the point, it’s like making E.T. the protagonist of E.T.

Why is this a bad thing? Dramatically, it instantly evaporates a great deal of dramatic tension. We know Mr. Bloom is magic and we can see that the ensemble is a bunch of easily-manipulated sheep, so as an audience all we can do is sit and wait for the magic to happen. Mr. Bloom comes to the old folks home, creates a desire in the minds of the ensemble, then caters to that desire, then points out with leaden earnestness the futility of the desire. Essentially, he comes to the old folks home, says “You know what you people need? You need to be tricked.” And the ensemble says “Say, you know? We do need to be tricked. Trick us.” And so Mr. Bloom tricks them and says “Now look at how foolish you look, falling for my trick. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” The intent is to instill a warm glow of magic, but the result is curdled and smug, demonstrating not the power of magic but the power of manipulation.

And so it occurs to me that, just as E.T. symbolizes Spielberg’s artistic talent, Bloom is a stand-in for Spielberg himself. Looked at this way, “Kick the Can” makes perfect sense — Spielberg sees himself as a magic wanderer, a trickster who arrives on a scene where everyone’s sitting around staring at each other and masterfully manipulates the crowd into a state of wonder and awe, makes them realize some profound truth or other, then moves on to the next unsuspecting bunch of rubes. It’s a movie very pleased with itself, which I suppose makes it a good adaptation of Rod Serling, who similarly had a dim view of society (and his audience) as children in need of a lesson.

ACT I (0:00-24:00): This act could be called “When E.T. met Elliott,” and is, essentially, a series of purely mechanical scenes illustrating that narrative demand. How does a lost man from outer space meet a lonely 10-year-old suburban boy? We meet both characters in the extremities of their situations (E.T. being chased by Keys and his men, Elliott being undervalued by his brother and the gang) and bring them, plausibly, together.

ACT II (24:00-57:00) This act could be called “The Education of E.T.” Elliott secrets E.T. in his room and, first chance he gets, begins educating E.T. about everything important — Star Wars mythology being first on the list, with Jaws coming a close second, then expanding outward to food and entertainment, and eventually basic science and broader concepts. When Elliott goes to school, E.T. furthers his own education by getting drunk and screwing around, pursuing an afternoon of wild free-association. By the end of the act, he’s sufficiently educated to hit upon the idea of building a machine to contact his people.

ACT III (57:00-1:17:00) This act could be called “Building and Activating the Machine.” Elliott, Michael and Gertie all help E.T. build his machine and conspire to activate it on Halloween night. Their efforts are, or seem to be, spectacularly unsuccessful, even though there is much wonder and humor on the journey to failure. At the end of this act, E.T. is found face down in a stream bed being investigated by hungry raccoons, Elliott is ill and his house has been invaded by Keys and his men.

ACT IV (1:17:00-1:34:00) This is almost too short to be considered an act, but the arc is too pronounced to ignore. It could be called “Keys Invades,” and it involves Elliott’s family’s house being taken over by government scientists (at least I think they’re government scientists — I don’t think the script actually specifies who Keys works for). It climaxes with E.T.’s death and concludes with the first hint of his resurrection.

ACT V (1:34:00-1:50:00) Here we have, perhaps the first Dreamworks “race to the finish line” final act: sixteen minutes of pure cinema — Elliott and Michael slap together a hastily-considered plan to get E.T. to his spaceship and, miraculously, make it.

NOTES:

LOVING THE ALIEN: “Invert the cliche” is Bob Dylan’s advice to the writer. This sentiment is expressed in the halls of Dreamworks as “Turn the idea on its head.” This concept is central to Spielberg’s success. If you’re making a flying saucer movie, make the saucer-men friendly. If you’re making a WWII movie, take the most irreverent approach possible to the war and its causes. If you’re making a haunted house movie, make the house an anonymous suburban tract house. (In my case, if you’re making a movie about an ant, make him an individualist ant.) In the case of E.T., if you’re making a movie about contact with an alien, start by telling the story from the alien’s point of view.

I am now going to spend a little time writing a little about the very beginning of the movie. Because it’s sheer genius. This paragraph will take longer to read than it takes to watch the passage discussed, and much longer to write.

I’m watching E.T. at a Saturday matinee on opening weekend. The crowd is substantial and the energy is palpable. The lights go down and the Universal logo comes up, with its Earth spinning around in those odd little cosmic energy bands that hover around it.

Here’s what happens next: the Earth in the Universal logo zooms away from us, and out of sight, leaving us in empty space. The audience laughs at this mild logo-joke, but then Spielberg goes to black and gives us his simple titles on a black background, with spooky music that prepares us for, perhaps, a redux of Close Encounters. After the titles, space comes back up on screen, as though we are back in that logo. The audience believes we’re still in space and giggles with anticipation — the movie seems to be starting over, or even running backwards. We’re somewhere out in space, watching a movie called E.T.: The Extraterrestrial. What’s going to happen next?

What happens next is the camera tilts down, the sky lightens a bit, and we come to a tree-line. After a brief pause, we cut to a shot of E.T.’s ship, already landed, in a clearing. The shot is from a tree-height camera — one of the very few camera placements in the entire movie that’s above belt-level.

And there you have it — Spielberg, in that brief, wordless sequence, has essentially made his movie’s argument. By putting the logo joke up front, he got us used to the idea that we are out in space, far away from home. Then, as the titles end, he puts us back in that shot, then tilts down to reveal that, yes, we are out in space, far away from home, on Earth. We are put in E.T.’s POV before we even meet him. By shooting the ship from above, he deliberately removes any sense of threat or menace — the exact opposite of his approach in Close Encounters, where the alien ships are always above us, messengers from the heavens.

LOCATING THE METAPHOR: While watching E.T. during its 2002 theatrical re-release (with the superfluous extra scenes and the idiotic federal-agents-wielding-walkie-talkies redaction) it was my first viewing as a professional screenwriter and I pressed myself to locate the screenplay’s metaphor. All fantasy screenplays must have a metaphor or else they inevitably run off the rails. I hit upon this notion that Elliott needs to be noticed, and E.T. is God, leaning down and saying “It’s okay, Elliott, I see you, in your loneliness and fatherlessness. I see you and I love you — you’re the most special kid in the world.” This is a moving and worthwhile metaphor, but on closer inspection I’ve decided I’m wrong. Unlike the aliens in Close Encounters, and contrary to the Michaelangelo-inspired poster art, E.T. is not an emissary from Heaven.

Rather, he springs from a more internal location — Elliott himself. E.T. is a movie about a kid who knows he’s special but finds himself in a position where he is undervalued and overlooked. He needs badly to be noticed, to be counted — and so he creates a situation where that happens in a very profound, unexpected way. E.T. is a part of Elliott himself — that’s why the alien’s name is a compression of the protagonist’s.

Elliott makes the point over and over that E.T. is “his.” He is horrified when Gertie dresses him in girls’ clothes and disdainfully snorts “he’s a boy” when Gertie suggests otherwise. The bulk of Act II exists to demonstrate that they are psychically linked. E.T. is the “special” part of Elliott, as though Elliott has found a way to take his specialness and make it physical. When Elliott says “I believe in you” to E.T., he is really talking to himself.

From there it’s not too much of a leap to see that Elliott is the boy Spielberg and E.T. is his filmmaking talent — his artistic impulse. Like an artistic impulse, E.T. is weird, unpredictable, simultaneously ancient and innocent, powerful, wily and difficult to harness. Spielberg, like Elliott, grew up in a suburban house with an absent father, and it’s not hard to see in Elliott the young Spielberg, anonymous and slighted, convinced of his genius and determined to one day prove it to everyone. The fact that Elliott yearns to be recognized by his older brothers’ gang suggests (to me anyway) Spielberg’s yearning to be taken seriously as an artist by his older, better-reviewed director pals. If we say that Michael is Steven’s “brother” George Lucas, the rest of the gang could be seen as Scorsese, Coppolla and DePalma. That might sound like a stretch, but I can’t think of any other reason why the “gang” needs to participate in the action of Act V. Elliott and Michael simply need to get E.T. to his spaceship — the gang have nothing to do with the effort but tag along anyway, specifically to show that Elliott, once the tag-along squirt, is now the leader and center of the group.

On the other hand, one of the gang members wears a hat marked “Camus,” which, well, I don’t know what to do with.  Maybe Spielberg is shooting at bigger fish than his film buddies.

THE ARTISTIC IMPULSE: E.T. is thrust out into our world, abandoned and alone, fragile and terrified. Anyone who’s ever created a work of art knows this feeling. You feel tender, exposed and fearful — you created a thing out of love and who knows what people are going to do with it? E.T. is born into and emerges from the forest, which any folklorist will tell you is a metaphor for the subconscious. He is inspired by, and assembles his machine from, the detritus of suburban American homelife — toys and gadgets and comics and TV. In this way,E.T. the movie is exactly like E.T. the character, and Spielberg’s artistic impulse, finding magic and wonder in the pop-culture garbage that sits strewn around every American household. “Want a Coke?” pipes up Elliott when he isn’t sure what to say next to E.T., making America’s most universally recognized brand, well, more universally recognized.

If E.T. is Spielberg’s artistic impulse, then who is Keys? Is he “the critics,” eagerly pursuing E.T. in order to examine him, tie him down, quantify him and maybe kill him in the process? Or is he the studio hacks, the capitalists who can’t wait to get their hands on the artistic impulse to package it, brand it and make a ton of money off it? Elliott’s desperate cry in Act IV, “You’re just going to cut him all up!” takes on new meaning in this context — he could be talking about E.T., or he could be talking about the filmmakers terror at turning in an edit to the studio.

It is, of course, to Spielberg’s credit that he doesn’t demonize Keys. Whether Keys symbolizes critic or studio exec, he knows the artistic impulse and, in Act IV, admits that his impulse is identical to Elliot’s. “I’ve been to the forest,” he says, and, “He came to me too. I’ve been dreaming of this since I was ten years old.” Keys is not evil, and neither are critics or studio execs — they just don’t have the power that Elliott has to make their artistic impulse flesh.

OTHER THOUGHTS IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER:

I very much appreciate Spielberg making Michael an Elvis Costello fan. And I imagine Elvis Costello appreciates it too.

My son Sam (6), of course, sat up wide-eyed and amazed when he saw the interior of Elliott’s room, festooned as it is with Star Wars toys. “Hey! He’s got a Hoth Rebel Cannon with Probot Playset!” is a typical exclamation from Sam as E.T. is shuffling around Elliott’s room.

(For those curious, Sam’s reaction to E.T. is curiously muted. He enjoyed it and had no complaints, but he didn’t spark to it the way he sparked to Jurassic Park or Raiders of the Lost Ark. I cannot account for this — I thought it would hit him like a sledgehammer.)

The Peter Pan references in E.T. seem to be there primarily to lift the burden of Christ comparisons from E.T.’s shoulders. E.T. doesn’t come back to life like Jesus, the movie insists, he comes back to life like Tinkerbell. Both plot turns hinge on issues of faith, but one doesn’t need to believe in Jesus to believe in E.T., one only needs to believe in fairies. And the power of storytelling devices.

Elliott’s father is missing. He, like E.T., has been abandoned. I don’t quite buy the scene in the garage where Michael and Elliott contemplate their father’s shirt, but otherwise I greatly admire the way the missing father is delineated. One of my favorite moments is in Act III, when Mom, storming out the door to go look for her truant kids, backs the car out of the garage and says only “Mexico,” the country, we are told, the father ran off to.

I love the slowly-uncoiling yellow extension cord, which is all we see of the scientists doing recon work on Elliott’s house. Perfect example of Spielbergism, the object standing for the thing, the thing more frightening because we can’t see it.

I do, however, have some reservations about the acting in E.T. and, really, all of Spielberg’s 80s work. The warm naturalism that abounds in Sugarland Express, Jaws and Close Encounters was turned into eye-popping cartoonism in 1941 and movie-movie shorthand in Raiders. Now, and for the foreseeable future, Spielberg’s actors are all very good, but never quite as human as the least supporting player is in his early movies. This is, I’m guessing, a symptom of the “high concept”, er, concept that E.T. created that went on to sweep Hollywood in the 80s. Story, it was decided, does not spring from character any longer — it springs from an irresistible “concept,” and the acting is there to help illustrate the concept.

Of course, no besieged family in a Spielberg movie can be left that way, and by the end of E.T. we are to believe that Keys, far from being an antagonist, will replace Elliott’s father. This is indicated by Keys checking out Mom’s rack as E.T. prepares to blast off.

In addition to Peter Pan, Spielberg also refers to Jaws, of course, and John Ford’s The Quiet Man, and also puts Wile E. Coyote in the kids’ closet, a reference to The Sugarland Express. Michael finds E.T. in a stream next to a storm drain, a visual reference to a key scene in Amblin.’ Spielberg then takes the most terrifying scene in Close Encounters, the siege on Gillian’s house, and stands it on its head at the climax of Act III, when Keys and his men invade. Mom in E.T. responds exactly the same way that Gillian does, and the otherwise-unmentioned suddenly self-operating electric train set makes the link permanent.

In addition, E.T.’s afternoon-long journey from innocence to experience echoes that of Dumbo, who, the viewer will recall, was also an overlooked child with hidden specialness. Spielberg forges the link to Dumbo by having E.T. make his breakthrough the same way Dumbo does — by getting drunk. A drunken alien and a drunken 10-year-old boy seem like odd things to put in a children’s movie, but Disney used to do it all the time — all the way from Dumbo through The Rescuers we find characters getting drunk, getting high and having hallucinatory experiences. For E.T., the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. E.T.’s technological breakthrough is echoed, cinematically, by Elliott’s sexual breakthrough. As E.T. brainstorms his machine, Elliott grabs his pretty blond lab partner and plants a juicy kiss on her lips. He is led off to the principal’s office as the blond swivels her foot in rapture. This sexual side of Elliott’s maturity is,oddly, out of the blue and never referred to again — I have the feeling Spielberg is working out something private in this sequence.

Then, for good measure, in the closing moments of the movie he throws in the tympani roll from 2001, not being able to resist forging a link between Kubrick’s masterwork and his own, taking the narrative conceit of the grandest of science-fiction movie of all time and placing it in a suburban back yard.

ACT III (59:00 – 1:30:00) involves a simple (simple!) series of pursuits and thefts, escapes and chases. Indy steals the Ark from the Well of Souls, Belloq steals the Ark from Indy, Indy steals the Ark back from Belloq. Belloq steals the Ark from Indy and “in exchange” gives him Marion, underlining Marion’s significance in the story — Indy can pursue the Ark (that is, power) or he can take care of Marion (that is, be a “good man”), but he cannot do both.

CHAPTER 1 (59:00 – 1:10:00): Indy descends into the Well of Souls as Marion uses her mutant drinking power to try to escape Belloq. The interesting thing about Belloq giving Marion the flouncy white dress and the gourmet meal is that he is, perhaps unintentionally, being the “good suitor” that Indy never was and still isn’t. Belloq provides her with dinner, a nice dress and a bottle of wine from his family’s private vineyard. He’s got money, power and social standing. He’s polite, gracious and generous. We know that Marion isn’t going to fall for it, and yet she actually says at one point to him that she’d like to see him “under different circumstances.” So on some level we see that Marion could go for a version of Belloq, that she isn’t necessarily at home in a Nepalese bar drinking locals under the table. This both suggests a poorly-developed narrative tension for Marion and a further example of Belloq and Indy being two sides of the same coin.

Marion, of course, tries to escape and runs into Toht. Toht walks in, they do the gag with the coat hanger, and then Toht sits down and, in a creepy, giggling Nazi voice to rival Peter Lorre, suggests that a long night of torture is about to occur.

The next time we see Marion, she shows no signs of being tortured or even strongly questioned. So what happened with her and Toht? I puzzled about this for a long time, and then, while watching the “making of” documentary of 1941 the answer was presented. The coat-hanger gag, it turns out, was originally part of the sequence on Cmdr Mitamura’s submarine. In the earlier movie, it was Nazi Christopher Lee threatening Slim Pickens with the coat hanger. The gag in 1941 is poorly staged and the gag didn’t get the laugh Spielberg wanted, so he insisted that he was going to work the gag into every movie he made until it got a laugh. That movie turned out to be Raiders, and here it is, and it works like gangbusters. And what I realized is that Toht doesn’t torture Marion, or even question her — the scene is there only to include the coat-hanger gag. Once Marion reveals that she is not falling for Belloq, that she has gotten him drunk (shades of Judith of Bethulia) in order to escape, the scene is done — Belloq is betrayed, Marion is caught and Belloq throws her away.

This is, perhaps, the “lesson” Marion needs to learn — the “nice guy” may have power, wealth and influence, but the rough-hewn rogue will give you independence, freedom and adventure — when he’s not causing you to be kidnapped and murdered, anyway.

Indy and Sallah descend into the Well of Souls (imagine my shock to learn there is such a thing!), nab the Ark (I always cringe when, after lifting up the stone lid of the sarcophagus, Indy and Sallah just chuck it to the floor, where it shatters into dust — what the hell kind of archaeologist is this? Some history lover!) and head back, just in time for Belloq to show up to throw Marion down with Indy.

Here’s a question. Belloq has the Ark, Indy knows Belloq’s got the Ark, we know Belloq has the Ark, but does Belloq know he has the Ark? The narrative says yes, absolutely, but after watching the movie oh, approximately fifty million times, I suddenly found myself asking “Hey wait, Belloq doesn’t even open the crate to check to make sure that the Ark of the Covenant is inside. How does he know for sure that he has it?” And, more to the point, why does he seal the Well of Souls with Indy and Marion inside? The moustache-twirling villain answer is obvious enough, but again I have to ask, what kind of brilliant archaeologists are these guys? Indy routinely demolishes sacred temples and Belloq seals the Well of Souls without even taking a look inside. Isn’t he even curious about what sort of things might be found in a super-secret chamber called the Well of Souls? What other treasures might be squirreled away in such a super-secret chamber? There are mummies-aplenty down there, and thousands of snakes, but Belloq doesn’t even seem to care that there might be some cool statuary or illuminative artwork on the walls. He doesn’t even remark on the giant jackal statues holding up the roof. If I was a world-renowned brilliant archaeologist, and I had my nemesis on the ropes, and a million Nazis at my disposal, I’d send a few guys with machine-guns down into the Well of Souls to kill Indy and Marion, drop in some poison gas to kill the snakes, and spend a substantial amount of time quantifying all the mysteries of this room that hasn’t been seen in, you know, four thousand years. But no, Belloq has his crate, he’s perfectly happy to seal up the Well of Souls and head back to Berlin (well, by way of Anonymous Mediterranean Island, to be sure, but still).

Again, another 180-degree character reversal for the protagonist — he begins the chapter as the most powerful man in the world, and ends it locked in a death chamber, powerless (but with his beloved).

CHAPTER 2 (1:10:00 – 1:20:00) : Belloq’s disregard for history is soon topped by Indy, who at least has desperation on his side as he topples one of the jackal statues in order to demolish a wall and get him and Marion out of there.

(Another stupid question: where do the snakes come from, and how do theylive down in the Well of Souls? The narrative indicates that they come from outside, and apparently come and go as they please, but there are thousands of them — what are they eating all this time? And when the army of Nazis are looking for the Well of Souls, how come no one notices the hole in the ground where the thousands of snakes slither out every night looking for food?)

The Escape from the Well of Souls is followed directly by the Fight on the Plane, back-to-back blockbuster scenes, beautifully staged, choreographed and executed. The character beat I note in the Fight is that the Big Guy With Moustache easily bests Indy with one punch, and it isn’t until Indy realizes that Marion’s life is at stake that he gets up and takes him on. Again, the twin pursuits of Marion and Indy butt against each other — Indy, faced with BGWM, thinks twice about pursuing the Ark, but when the potential prize is Marion he finds the strength to fight on.

(At this juncture of the narrative, my five-year-old daughter Kit announced “there aren’t very many women in this movie.” Well, she’s got a point.)

Indy and Marion blow up the plane, causing the Nazis to load it onto a truck instead (which Sallah conveniently stops by to announce).

CHAPTER 3 (1:20:00 – 1:30:00) But the Ark isn’t on the plane, it’s been loaded instead onto a truck. Thus follows a ten-minute truck chase sequence, the longest in the movie, and another tour-de-force masterpiece of action, pace and choreography, ending with Indy getting away with the Ark.

ACT IV involves Belloq re-stealing the Ark from Indy and spiriting it away to the Unnamed Mediterranean Island (with the Secret Nazi Submarine Base), with Indy in pursuit. There is very little character left to be explored in the narrative at this point, just pursuit, capture and spectacle.

CHAPTER 1 (1:30:00-1:39:00) The Ark is loaded onto Capt Katanga’s vessel. Capt Katanga is presented as a red herring — a dark, mysterious, threatening character who turns out to be not only a good guy, but a wily manipulator of others’ perceptions. I’d like to see a movie about Capt Katanga and his adventures carrying risky cargo around the Mediterranean in the 1930s. His name is close enough to Kananga’s in Live and Let Die that I think it’s safe to assume the similarity is intentional (especially when you consider that Indiana Jones was George Lucas’s answer to Spielberg’s desire to direct a James Bond movie).

Belloq gives Marion a white dress and then throws her into the Well of Souls, then Katanga gives her another white dress (this one nicer than Belloq’s, but what do I know). Are we to infer that Marion just doesn’t get it, that men who give her white dresses don’t necessarily have her best interests at heart?

In any case, Marion appears in her white silk dress and Indy takes off his shirt and Marion and Indy have their almost-love-scene. And I find myself wondering about Indy’s relationship with Marion from “ten years ago — ” what did he do to her that was so abominable that it destroyed his relationship with Abner? Here, he’s such a thoughtless lover that he doesn’t even make it through sex — he falls asleep in the middle of the first kiss. And I can see Marion sighing and thinking “geez, at least with Belloq I’d get a decent wardrobe and some good food.”

Moments later, of course, Belloq turns up in a U-boat to grab the Ark and Marion. I can barely watch the deck scene where Belloq and Katanga barter for possession of Marion — not because of the sexual barbarism on display, but because the actress playing Marion is quite obviously freezing to death in her flimsy white dress.

CHAPTER 2 (1:39:00 – 1:44:00): Belloq takes off with the Ark and Marion and heads to Secret Submarine Base Island, with Indy secretly piggy-backing on the deck of the U-boat. Head Nazi Dietrich announces that he’s uncomfortable with “this Jewish ceremony” of opening the Ark, which made me wonder — is Belloq Jewish? He’s already a Frenchman collaborating with the Nazis, but is he also a Jew? The narrative does not say so explicitly, but Belloq dons the Jewish Priest robes and chants in Hebrew — is he “putting on a show” for God, or is he actually a Jew, with his own agenda against the Nazis he moves among? Think of that! If Belloq is a Jew, manipulating not only Indy and Marion, but also the Nazis, into getting him the Ark, planning to screw them all and become ruler of the world, just think of how much more interesting a character that makes him — he’s almost a better protagonist than Indy!

On the way to the Place Where They Open The Ark (how did they decide on this location, I wonder? Why can’t they open it in the submarine dock? Why do they have to shlep across the island to this non-descript grotto?) Indy catches up to them and, disguised as a Nazi (his second disguise of the movie) threatens to blow up the Ark. Belloq calls his bluff and Indy backs down — he cannot destroy the artifact, even though it means that Belloq (and maybe Hitler) might rule the world. And so he is bound, literally, to his other prize, Marion.

(Belloq, of course, goes to The Place Where They Open The Ark because it makes for better drama cinematically, the exact same reason why the aliens land at Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters.)

CHAPTER 3 (1:44:00 – 1:51:00): A chapter of pure spectacle as the Ark is opened and fireworks ensue. My daughter was terrified at this scene — she was perfectly okay with the movie up to this point, but the angel/demons and the Wrath of God freaked her out plenty. My wife has some problems with this scene herself, and I have my own issues, although mine are not the same as my wife’s.

My wife’s problem with the scene is that she feels it’s tacky. The movie has been building up to this moment of what is going to happen when they open the Ark? and then when it’s opened and the Wrath of God is presented, it’s all rather Technicolor and scary and gory, with melting faces and exploding heads, which to her seems like an inconsistency. Myself, I think Spielberg has no higher aspiration here than presenting the Power of God in images that will match those in Cecil B. Demille’s The Ten Commandments, and in this he succeeds well enough.

My problem with the scene is that, after dozens of viewings, I’m still not sure what happens in it. Belloq says some magic words, the Ark is opened, and is revealed to contain sand. What does this mean? The first time I saw the movie I thought “well, that’s the remains of the stone tablets — over the years they’ve been pulverized into sand.” But subsequent viewings make me doubt this reading — we’re clearly meant, I believe, to think Belloq has picked a dud Ark, that it’s just full of the same sand that was sitting around the Well of Souls, or perhaps somewhere in history the tablet fragments have been swiped and replaced with sand to give the Ark some heft.

But then, in spite of the Ark being filled with sand, the magic happens and everyone gets zapped. Why? What does the Ark actually contain? Is it, as Belloq suggests earlier, not the container of the stone tablets at all, but rather “a radio for talking to God?” which would mean that, strictly speaking, there is nothing in the Ark, but the Ark itself is the artifact? But that makes no sense — the Ark was built by whomever to house the remains of the stone tablets, it shouldn’t necessarily have any powers unto itself.

It is, of course, called “The Ark of the Covenant,” which in one way suggests that it’s built to house the Ten Commandments, but in another sense it suggests that it houses an agreement with God, a kind of “hot-line” to God. Although it seems like God is cranky about getting unsolicited calls on this particular hot-line, which makes me wonder what the point of the Ark is in the first place. The New Testament God wouldn’t zap anyone who tried to open his hot-line, he’d ask them to pull up a chair and have some bread and wine while you chat about your troubles. Or maybe he’d have you whipped and tortured in the public square, you never can tell with the New Testament God.

A literal “pillar of fire” rises into the heavens, makes a u-turn and heads back down into the Ark — what is this? Is this some divine energy reaching into Heaven? If so, why does it stop short with the ionosphere and head back, to get locked back in the Ark?

More to the point, why are Indy and Marion spared? Because they “don’t look?” Does that mean that if Toht had had something in his eye when Belloq opened the Ark and turned away at the proper moment he would have been spared too?

(Dramatically, of course, this makes perfect sense. Indy is, essentially, a scientist, a skeptical inquirer obsessed with knowledge. He survives the Ark incident because he makes the decision to remain ignorant of whatever is inside the box. Shades of Pandora.)

Indy reluctantly turns the Ark over to the folks in Washington (getting screwed by the government, who had previously promised to turn the Ark over to the museum). He loses everything — he always does — but gains Marion. “They don’t know what they’ve got there,” grouses Indy, answered by Marion’s “Well I know what I’ve got here,” and Indy makes one small gesture of gentlemanliness by offering her his arm as they stroll down the steps of the government building.

Indiana Jones, of course, begins every movie cynical and jaded and ends every movie enlightened and humble, then starts the whole cycle over the next time. He never learns a thing, which is one of the things that makes him lovable.

A few posts back, one of my readers asked me if there is a Disney reference in all of Spielberg’s movies. I can’t find an overt one in Raiders (unless you want to call the roiling clouds a reference to the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence in Fantasia), but the closing reference to Welles is unmistakable.