When The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones first began appearing on TV, episodes opened with a garrulous, one-eyed, ninety-something coot latching onto strangers to tell them a ripping yarn from his childhood and youth. This boring old geezer claimed to be Indiana Jones but we knew he was lying because there’s no way the real Indiana Jones survived into his nineties!
There’s no way he survived into his fifties.
Not unless he’d given up adventuring for full-time teaching.
One of the charms of Harrison Ford’s portrayal of Indy in Raiders of the Lost Ark was that Ford made it clear that Indy had already lost a step or two. At the ripe old age of 37, Indy was wearing down. “It’s not the years, it’s the mileage,” he tells Marion, and he’s racked up a lot of miles and is feeling every single one.
At the point we meet him, Indy is already getting by on grit, quick but desperate thinking---those plans he makes up as he goes along are inspired by his realizing that his knees hurt---dumb luck, and that great motivator, fear.
The opening mini-adventure of Raiders is a series of failures that Indy manages to survive pretty much by accident.
Raiders of the Lost Ark starts off by establishing our hero’s weaknesses, limitations, and vulnerability. We’re immediately confronted by the possibility that Indy doesn’t have what it takes to get him through the rest of the movie.
This is one of the grace notes that save Raiders from being a routine action-adventure flick and Indiana from being Rambo or the Terminator in a fedora, our sense that one of these days, and not in the distant future, Indy won’t be able to outrun another boulder or make the jump across a hole opening up in the floor beneath him.
Ford underscores this with the way he plays Indy in Temple of Doom, which is set a few years before Raiders. Indiana, in his early 30s, is cockier, more arrogant, and more brutal. We can see that the series of bruising failures and/or protracted hospital stays that have sapped his confidence and his strength by the time he starts chasing the lost Ark are still ahead of him.
This is one of the sour notes that makes Temple of Doom the least enjoyable of the first three movies. Ford deliberately set out to make Indy less likeable. He’s physically more attractive but personally less appealing.
The problem of Indy’s accumulated mileage was pretty much set aside in the playful Last Crusade, except that we can’t help but notice that in the end Indy saves the day by finally listening to his father. He slows down to think things through and remembers he’s a scholar before he’s an action-adventure hero.
And that’s where we leave him---or he leaves us, as he rides off into the sunset---alive for now and likely to stay that way if, as he seems ready to do, he retires to the classroom and leaves the grave-robbing adventures to younger, more resilient heroes.
Of course, we don’t want him to survive, not that way.
We want him to go on adventuring, even though we know that he can’t or that we can’t watch him because it would mean watching him die and we don’t want to see that any more than we want to see him accept a gold watch at his retirement dinner at the university.
The only way, then, for us to have our Indy alive and mortal too is to leave him frozen in time, cycling endlessly through an eternal 1930s. Which is easy enough to do because he’s a fictional character. Fictions are exempt from the wear and tear of time.
Having him show up as his ninety year old self forces us to think of him as if he was not a fiction but a real person on a forced march through time like the rest of us, which then raises the question of how he got here and since we know from Raiders that it is unlikely he could have done it by continuing the way he was going he either didn’t, which is too dull to contemplate---Indy turning slowly into a version of Marcus?---or Raiders got it wrong, he was Rambo in a fedora.
There’s a third possibility that the reactions of everyone the old coot Indy buttonholes imply---that the whole thing, from Raiders through to the latest of these television adventures, has been an old man’s lie.
Fortunately, the old coot was edited out of the series when it was released on VHS and the episodes became much more enjoyable as a result.
One of the other things that makes them enjoyable is that the series leaves Indy in the early 1920s, which opens up another whole decade for Indiana to continue to be a young adventurer in our imaginations.
Incidentally, it left open a whole decade to fill with new movies.
It would have meant casting another new Indiana Jones, an actor in his late twenties or early 30s, but as great as Harrison Ford is the Bond franchise proves that audiences are willing to accept casting changes if the casting is right---the new Star Trek drives that point home with a cheerful vengeance, but it was made too late to be an example to Steven Spielberg and George Lucas when they decided, without a compelling reason, to bring back Indiana Jones.
In Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Indiana is now fifty-eight years old. Still a long way from ninety but also a long way from the thirty-seven year old Indy of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
So Crystal Skull starts by making us ask the question I thought Lucas had realized it wasn’t a good idea to make us ask, How did Indiana live to be this old?
And the answer isn’t, By never leaving the classroom.
That might have made a better movie, having Indiana dragged out of retirement and trying to save the day by being his old self but forced by the realities of his age and old injuries to save the day by being his father. But it turns out that for the last twenty years he’s been as busy robbing graves as ever.
And, although decades of grave robbing had made a wreck of the thirty-seven year old Indiana, in the twenty years since he hasn’t noticeably slowed down or been more hobbled by time and age than he was at the beginning of Raiders.
In one of the funnier moments in the opening mini-adventure of Crystal Skull, Indiana attempts to swing himself onto the back of a speeding truck and winds up falling through the windshield and into the front seat of the truck following behind.
“Damn,” he growls, “I thought it was closer.”
Age catching up to him, eyesight dimming, reflexes not what they were, right?
Except that the same thing happens to him twice at the beginning of Raiders. First, he miscalculates the width of the hole in the floor he tries to jump and barely manages to catch hold of the edge on the far side and then he tries to swing on a vine out to the waiting plane in the river and the vine isn’t long enough and it snaps under his weight, dropping him far short of immediate safety and he has to swim for it.
The effect is to give the impression that Indiana Jones has defied aging, which he clearly hasn’t because Harrison Ford clearly hasn’t. Ford is in great shape for a senior citizen. Pushing seventy, he looks better without a shirt---briefly---than a lot of much younger male movie stars. He can pass for a man ten years younger, as long as it’s a given that that man is a much weathered fifty-eight. But Ford’s trouble in Crystal Skull is that he has to try to pass as a man ten years younger who can still run, fight, swing, move, and take a beating like a man twenty years young than that.
It doesn’t work.
Instead each new and more improbable feat of derring-do on Indiana’s part having us thinking “Phew!” or “Wow!”, we can’t help thinking, “Isn’t it cute how Harrison Ford can still do that sort of thing at his age?” and “But, boy, did that stunt look tired.”
But it’s not just Ford and Indiana who have grown too old and tired for this sort of thing. So have Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.
People age in mind and heart as well as body, although if they’re careful and lucky at a much slower and less debilitating rate and artists tend to be more careful and luckier than the rest of us. But age still creeps up on them. It is vital for an aging artist to be able to remember what it was like to be young in mind and heart as well as body, but remembering is very different from being.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull isn’t a terrible movie. But it has the feel of a pickup softball game played by teams of former major leaguers. It’s fun to see the old gang get together and to remember past glories, but that’s just it, the glories are past, the fun’s all in remembering and nobody’s fooled. We know that none of the players on the field are up to anything like what they once did with ease and without giving it a thought.
With Crystal Skull, Lucas and Spielberg and Harrison Ford set out to relive past glories and it shows on the screen as they are clearly going through the motions while taking us on a tour of the high points of the first three movies without adding anything new. Shia LeBeouf’s character, Mutt Williams, turns out not to be the new, replacement hero but a stand-in for all the young whippersnappers Lucas and Spielberg aim to put in their place.
“See, punk, we old coots can still pull it off.”
Putting the whippersnappers in their place is a sad ambition anyway, but it’s even sadder when you have to stack the deck. Not once in the entire movie do they risk letting Mutt rise above being a sidekick. In a better, fairer, younger hearted movie, Mutt would have routinely done things than Indiana no longer can, but in Crystal Skull Mutt can’t even drive his own motorcycle without Indiana’s constant instructions.
And as great as it is to see Karen Allen back in action as Marion, Marion herself isn’t put into action very much while the only other female character in the film, although certainly active, is thoroughly desexualized, because we can’t have a couple of middle-aged women upstaging the old men or taking the camera’s attention away from them, can we, plus if the villainess did have sexual feelings they’d be directed at Mutt not Indy.
The result is a movie whose main appeal is in reminding us how much fun Raiders of the Lost Ark was and what a fine job Harrison Ford did back then. Crystal Skull makes no case for itself as a movie and no case for continuing the series.
And yet, apparently, the series is going to continue!
At least, Ford, Spielberg, and Lucas are talking seriously about it. A fifth movie only won’t happen if the three of them can’t agree on a script. Something to pray for. Given the length of time it takes to get a movie from pre-production into the movie theaters, we’re looking at the next movie getting made with a seventy-something hero.
That one-eyed old coot from Young Indiana Jones is creaking back into view.
Really, though, there’s a good case for re-booting the series. Find the right new Indiana and we can have some of those lost years of the late 1920s and early 1930s back. We can watch Indy swoon over a teenage Marion. We can meet Abner Ravenwood. We can have more melting Nazis!
I nominate Chris Pine. His Captain Kirk owes as much to Ford’s Han Solo and Indiana Jones as to William Shatner. But I’m sure there are other young leading men who can handle the part and whom I’d much rather watch mishandle the part than have to watch Harrison Ford shake his grizzled head over the hippies taking over the college campus.
Cast a new Indy, hand the writing and directing off to younger filmmakers, and if Ford, Spielberg, and Lucas want to relive past glories together, let them organize a charity softball game.
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Reading this reminded me of how similar the Indiana Jones saga is to the old Uncle Scrooge comics of yore. Scrooge had a similar problem of overcoming memory loss, rheumatism, poor eyesight, et al, while proving a grizzled oldtimer like him could still outdistance the whippersnappers on daring adventures in the Klondike, high seas, and forgotten Inca mines. Unlike in Indiana's case, though, this dynamic seems to work better when dealing with a cast of ducks. Once you've suspended your disbelief enough to accept that the world's richest multi-gadzillionaire is a duck, I suppose there's room for anything.
Posted by: CrayolaThief | Tuesday, November 09, 2010 at 01:06 PM
First, he miscalculates the width of the hole in the floor he tries to jump and barely manages to catch hold of the edge on the far side and then he tries to swing on a vine out to the waiting plane in the river and the vine isn’t long enough and it snaps under his weight, dropping him far short of immediate safety and he has to swim for it.
Disagree on both.
First instance, Indy has no choice but to jump. He KNOWS the hole is too wide (else why give the whip to Satipo when he swings across? He has to jump because the door behind him is closing and his assumption is the only way out is forward.
Second instance, he swings out on the vine because it raises him out of the line of fire of the Hovitos. If you watch the scene carefully, Jock has the plane in the middle of the lake, probably to avoid someone stealing onto the float. Indy would need a vine the length of the Statue of Liberty hanging from a tree as high to reach the plane on the fly.
Posted by: actor212 | Tuesday, November 09, 2010 at 02:06 PM
Very good analysis. Personally, I thought Shia LeBouf was miscast, and the scene where his character swings through the trees like Tarzan was both lazy and insulting to the audience's intelligence.
Posted by: Ken | Tuesday, November 09, 2010 at 08:40 PM
Lance, your take makes sense, but was kind of a jolt at first:
I never remember to think of Temple of Doom as a ‘prequel’ to Raiders, even if Indy is much buffer. It fits too much into the more-depressing-second-episode-after-the-good-first-one-that-would-have-been-just-fine-on-its-own-and-before-the-somewhat-hokier-third-episode-that-goes-for-the-rosy-hued-happy-ending-and-reconciliation-with-Dad-no-matter-what pattern of the Lucas/Spielberg machine from those days.
bn
Posted by: nothstine | Tuesday, November 09, 2010 at 10:33 PM
For me, Crystal Skull boils down to one scene that just stuck with me: Indy ending up on the atomic test site and having to hide from the blast in a refrigerator. I keep going back and forth as to whether it was brilliant or pathetic. On the pathetic front, it seemed even more unbelievable than the alien skull angle. On the brilliant, it was one of the few times I've seen the atomic age addressed by modern moviemakers.
Perhaps the problem is that the movie has a genre-collision issue. 1930s thrillers were about jungle adventures, and 1940s ones were about war and Nazis, and the Indiana Jones movies clearly tap into both. 1950s thrillers, however, were about spies and sneaking, or about aliens and monsters and atomic mutations, and neither really fits well with the earlier kinds that the movies were riffing off of.
Posted by: Rana | Wednesday, November 10, 2010 at 10:29 AM
I grew up around outdoorsmen. There were a few, who in their early sixties, were tougher and more agile than the teenagers they were overseeing on occasion. Not everyone ages at the same speed. The main issue is fragility - some old folks can go all day, do a lot of very agile things, but the recovery time goes up and every injury can be the one that puts their physically active days behind them.
Posted by: Ian Welsh | Monday, November 15, 2010 at 01:18 PM