Thursday, March 10, 2016

Steven Spielberg, part VIII: The new hero


No introductions required.

Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by George Lucas, Philip Kaufman, and Lawrence Kasdan
With Harrison Ford (Dr. Henry "Indiana" Jones, Jr.), Karen Allen (Marion Ravenwood), John Rhys-Davies (Sallah), George Harris (Capt. Katanga), Denholm Elliott (Dr. Marcus Brody), Alfred Molina (Satipo), Ronald Lacey (Maj. Arnold Toht), Wolf Kahler (Col. Dietrich), and Paul Freeman (Dr. Rene Belloq)

Spoiler alert: you have seen this movie fifty times

South America, 1936.  A man stares ahead, his back to us.  He seems unaware of his enemy.  The hammer of a revolver cocks, and a crack of thunder cries out—the sound of an object moving past the speed of sound.  But it's not a bullet; it's a bullwhip.  The man has turned.  We've never seen him before, but we certainly know him now.

We'll follow this man, as he is recruited by the American government to recover the lost Ark of the Covenant in Egypt, before the Nazis can find it; we'll follow as he pursues a clue to the Himalayas, where he becomes reacquainted with an old flame, and where he discovers, much to his displeasure, that the Nazis are as much on his trail as he's upon theirs; we'll follow as the pair of them fly to Egypt, where they court death once again; we'll follow as he unearths the Ark; and we'll follow as the Nazis snatch the artifact from his hands, then force him to sit by while they reveal its secrets for their own enlightenment.  We'll follow gladly, and this was inevitable.

But something I found striking, on what I don't doubt really is my fiftieth time through Raiders of the Lost Ark, is that we will not, in fact, actually hear Indiana Jones' full nomme de guerre spoken aloud until over twenty-seven minutes have gone by.  Indeed, we won't even hear his surname (contained in that rather unassuming "Dr. Jones") till the end of the opening scene; and his nickname, "Indiana," is first heard, almost swallowed up at the end of one of Denholm Elliott's lines, at least fifteen minutes after we've been introduced to the adventurer-archaeologist.  Of course, it wouldn't be till the 2000s that the film's title was changed to include its protagonist's name: the average filmgoer, simply arrived at the theater to see whatever was playing, may have seen the name on the poster outside, but they just as easily might not have, and thus walked into this weird throwback to the serials of the 1930s and 40s with only the vaguest idea of what they were about to watch.

But then, Raiders is one of the most confident motion pictures ever made—not merely unshakably secure in its own abiding belief that this man in the hat is one of the most important people to ever appear on a movie screen, but absolutely assured that you shall believe it, too.

It's not necessarily the kind of confidence you'd expect from the man who'd just made 1941, is it?  1941, as we so recently discovered for ourselves, was the exact kind of bloated waste that would've kneecapped the career of any director who hadn't already made Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind—which, it should be recalled, were themselves characterized by all manner of wasteful bloat, but which also made enough money to keep anybody from pointing it out.  That's how, in a certain perverse way, Raiders' rather arrogant complexion makes sense: it's what had to happen when Steven Spielberg needed to prove that he could make a movie with a hack's blunt professionalism, and when his bud George Lucas handed him the most perfect possible B-movie material with which to do just that.  We know now, of course, that the B-movie they made together would be the thing that would cement both men as the two populist geniuses of their age—by beginning the second of the two greatest populist film franchises of any age.  (The first being Star Wars, in case that even needed to be mentioned.)

Meanwhile, sometimes people remember Lawrence Kasdan, and sometimes they do not.

It comes down to Spielberg's unerring eye for iconography, yet it was only happenstance which gave him his icon.  We've mentioned previously that Spielberg is the luckiest filmmaker alive, but it really does keep coming up.  It was only after several other, lesser possibilities had been exhausted that Spielberg, somewhat over Lucas' objections, was finally allowed to poach from the Star Wars series' cast list, and combine the role with the actor who would define it.  (Indeed, that actor has defined it so thoroughly that—even 35 years later!—no other face beneath the fedora is really imaginable.)  And thus, as with Spielberg and Lucas behind the camera, it was here that Harrison Ford became the indispensable man in front of it.  Turning smoothly from the charismatically roguish Han Solo to the likewise charismatically roguish Henry Jones, Jr., Ford never forgets that—once you scratch their surfaces—each hero's unique configuration of roguish charisma actually makes for two substantially different characters.  (And if you disagree, please: try to imagine Han Solo reading a book—or, for that matter, Indiana Jones chafing under an inferiority complex brought about by the presence of a princess.)

Han Solo would go on to be mass-produced, but Indy is the kind of movie hero they don't make anymore—and, honestly, never did, despite his clear line of descent from the jungle adventurers of the serial era.  Sold to Spielberg by Lucas as a vehicle for Spielberg's desire to make a James Bond movie, only without the inconvenience of dealing with the tyrants at Eon Productions, Lucas wasn't wrong when he also said that Indy was, in fact, something better.

Obviously, Indy's adventures offer the same basic kind of formula: the globetrotting to exotic locales; the colorfully foreign sidekicks and villains; the overwhelming production design; the complex action setpieces (though Bond wishes his setpieces were as good as Indy's); and, of course, the in-your-face orientalism.   If they leave out, by the necessity of their setting, the Bond films' techno-fetishism, they make up for that deficiency (and then some) by doubling down on their own inimitable combination of period detail, grotty cellar mystery, even more orientalism, and bloody horror.

Most importantly, however, the Indy films offer an actual character—whereas Bond has rarely been more than the agglomeration of poses struck by his performers (and, truthfully, Bond is typically worse when they do try to make him more), Indy is incredibly human, perhaps the most human of his decade's veritable plague of badass heroes.  Each film in the series would make him yet more of a flesh-and-blood man, but even in Raiders—where Indiana is at his least human of all—we are given vast insights into his inner life.  Perhaps most appealingly, he is the ideal combination of muscle and of mind.  (Indeed, this may be the most archaic thing about him, or his movies.)  If anything, the balance tips to the scholar in Indy: the climax of Raiders turns entirely upon his foe's knowledge that he would die, and see his lover die, rather than subject a piece of history to destruction.  It's this tension, this obsession, which makes Indy so fascinating, and elevates him above the rest: there is no hero of the modern age who both holds a Ph.D. in one of the liberal arts, yet laughs—you can see him laugh!—when an enemy gets his face hacked off.

Guy should've remembered his Charlemagne.

And maybe that's why Indy is just so endlessly entertaining, too: he's kind of awful.  Yes, there's idealistic bedrock at the bottom of Indiana Jones' soul—there's no doubt about this.  But, moment to moment, he is ruled by the kind of ruthless pragmatism that never, ever stops being exciting to watch.  Let us behold this new hero from the creators of Jaws and Star Wars, then: he happily uses children as a human shield; he leaves his girlfriend in the clutches of a lecherous, Nazified Frenchman, because the Ark is more important; he sees a man who brings a sword to a whip fight—and so he guns him down like a dog in the street.  Meanwhile, more subtly (but well in keeping with Indy's period racism!), my favorite Indiana Jones Is a Dick moment occurs right after he's located the Ark.  At this moment, he enthusiastically grabs a shovel—which he holds for all of about two seconds, before handing the job over to a gaggle of poorly-paid Arab serfs.  (No doubt he was conserving his energy for the magnificent chase scene he foresees in his immediate future.)

The best chase scene up till that point in film history, even.

It's impossible to overstate how important Ford is in this equation.  For all that Indy is never outright despicable (not in this initial outing, anyway), he's not a very nice man; yet he is somehow incredibly likable.  If there's one constant to all of Ford's great performances, it's that he errs on the side self-effacement; for Indy, Ford's instinct to concede weakness to the camera is genius.  Thus—and astonishingly often, for a character so deliberately calculated to be legendary—Indy winds up looking like an an abject clown, the absurdly-abused victim of forces he cannot master.  (And much credit must be extended to Vic Armstrong, Ford's stunt double, too; some stuntmen make it look easy, but Armstrong's inspiration was to make his acts of physical prowess look really hard.)  Yet it's not like Spielberg just stood out of Ford's way, either.  Spielberg emphasizes (often in viscerally painful ways) that Indy is, at the end of the day, an eminently punchable sack of meat, who merely happens to have a doctorate, a whip, and an indomitable will to obtain rare antiquities.

(It's worth giving Karen Allen a brief note, as well: as the baritone narrator on the making-of documentary says, Marion's a "hard-drinking, two-fisted woman."  It was not nearly as inevitable as Ford's own immaculate performance that Allen would be perfect, too, but she is.  Marion may become less active of an agent as the film goes on—so does Indy—but Allen herself certainly never seems false.  Perhaps it helps matters that Marion actually kills more Nazis than Indy does.)

And when it comes to Raiders' groundbreaking action, I feel no need to belabor the obvious.  Raiders, in its second half, has few equals when it comes to violence.  Powered by Michael Kahn's relentless editing and John Williams' equally relentless score, Raiders was, in its day, almost certainly the greatest action film yet made anywhere in the world.  (Meanwhile, the fistfight around the Nazi plane, I suspect, might to this very day remain the best-conceived, best-choreographed, and best-constructed fistfight to grace an American movie—every element of it is simply so perfect, from the David and Goliath framing of the contest to the sickening awesomeness of its denouement.  But the most important aspect of it, outside of those obvious things, has got to be that little bit of quiet foreshadowing Spielberg gets up to with the minor Nazi whom Indy beats up first, and whose wrench gets swatted out of his hand by the spinning propeller—at this moment, we know, deep in our gut, that someone is walking through those blades before this duel is over.)

That must be Raiders' real hallmark: a brand of storytelling so completely cinematic that Raiders could be silent and, with a dozen intertitles at most, still make perfect sense.  But—of course—this is no silent film.  It's one of the sound films—and this is not just in reference to Williams' score, even if it does include the best hero theme ever written.  I refer also to legendary sound designer Ben Burtt, who, like Ford, moved from one Lucasfilm triumph to another.  The fifth or sixth most important human being to work on Star Wars proved to be just as important on Raiders, too, offering up one more intoxicatingly heightened soundscape.  (Combined, the sound effects of the Star Wars and Indy franchises shall constitute the audio of my generation's fantasies till the day we die.)  And, naturally, I'd be negligent not to mention that Raiders has too many good lines (and far too many good reads) to suggest that it's not better as a talky.

But I sometimes do suspect that Raiders became as quotable as it did because of its visual language: when we recite Raiders' lines, it conjures up for us all the old feelings associated with those lines; but that doesn't mean those feelings were created by those lines.  That creation is Spielberg's, who privileges the expressions and body language of his cast over their mere words; and it's production designer Norman Reynolds', whose catacombs are peerless and huge and gross; and, perhaps most importantly, it's cinematographer Douglas Slocombe's, whose work occasionally suggests the hurried shooting schedule he was dealing with, but which, in Raiders' most sublime moments, enslaves enormous shadows to the story being told, or marshals golden light to reinforce the spiritual awe that Indy feels (and, therefore, that we feel) when he stands poised to discover secrets once thought lost to time.

It's artificial.  Even chintzy.  And it works!

And yet: it has become too customary to talk about Raiders as if it doesn't have any flaws, and damn it, it does have them.  It has its small ones, naturally: outside of the man with the scimitar, the comic staging of the initial fight in Cairo is honestly kind of awful (watch it again, and this time pay attention to whatever the hell it is Marion is supposed to be doing in the background); nor am I a great fan of the way Spielberg frames Marion when she puts on her dress, as if it is only at this moment that we're supposed to recognize that Karen Allen is incredibly attractive.

However, one thing that I am not willing to call a flaw is how, well, useless Indy turns out to be.  As has become a common criticism by now (and I am unsure how obvious it was to contemporaries), Indy's participation in the hunt for the Ark achieves absolutely nothing.  Less than nothing, even: Indy's actions lead directly to the Nazis' success.  However, what surprises me, watching these films back-to-back—especially given that Spielberg didn't write Raiders—is how closely it recapitulates Close Encounters in its final moments, only better, and without the conceptual problems.  Raiders is not about Indy beating the Nazis, after all; it's about his journey into mystery.  In the final moments he realizes that some graves are not meant to be robbed, that some truths are best left unexplored.  Indy would kill (and die) for knowledge; but his nemesis, Belloq, would sell his soul for it.  This, I imagine, is why he and Marion are spared: they had the sense to close their eyes.

Or, it really is simply because they weren't National Socialists.  As much as our latterday Serious Spielberg might regret making cartoonish villains out of the Nazis in his deceptively dumb matinee movies, there's as much here about the Jewish Holocaust as there could possibly be, and still let Raiders retain its digestible, entertaining form.  There's something magnificently and uniquely righteous about this aspect of Raiders, and perhaps it is this very righteousness that audiences have responded to when they acclaim Raiders to be the best of Indy's four adventures.

But let's not overlook Raiders' biggest and most frustrating flaw—and it would have to be a big flaw, since it arises from one of the Raiders' greatest strengths.  I alluded earlier to the coyness of Raiders' foreshadowing, deployed in service of both character exposition and of suspense: the wrench in the prop that lets us know that the Nazi will be chewed into mulch; the snake in the plane that lets us know that Indy will later be dropped into a pit full of asps; the drinking game that lets us know that Marion can hold her liquor; there are honestly too many examples to list.  Unfortunately, though, and thanks to perhaps the one really misjudged beat in the whole film, a certain mighty hand is beheld far too early, when He should be beheld all at once.  I refer, of course, to the moment when the Ark manifests its power for the first time—burning the Reich emblem off its container while nobody's watching.  It gives up the whole game!  Brody has told him, and Sallah has told him, and even Belloq has told him, but Indy does not yet believe that this so-called radio to God actually works.  Why should we know better?

After all, at this point Indy is a practicing Hindu, and worships only Shiva.  So imagine his surprise!

And that's why that one shot is terrible, because, right here, we're privy to something he isn't (and that's not very legendary, is it?).  Worse, even as a child I knew what must be coming—and there's not much suspense inherent to the wrath of an almighty deity, when He's been provoked by the persecutors of His Chosen People.  Now, as a child, I did not predict that our old friend I Am would deliver His wrath in the precise form it takes; but that is because Raiders, like Jaws before it, is not rated R, and I did not typically expect movies which explicitly feature exploding heads to be shown to me by my awesome parents.

Which is as great a place to end this rumination as any.  Yes, it may have its problems, but they're the kind of thing that, in the sweep of its great adventure and the soul-scarring violence of its climax, do not really matter.  There is a somewhat better version of this movie, and that is fine: you can say that about nearly any motion picture.  It does not not stop Raiders from standing astride the gates of the 1980s and daring every film thereafter to even try to do better.  This movie is a piece of me, and in a thousand years, it'll still be priceless.

Score:  10/10


  1. "Spoiler alert: you have seen this movie fifty times." Accurate.

    You're writing reviews faster than I can read 'em, man. Congrats on this insane run of quality work though!

    Question: Will you be considering Poltergeist during this massive project you've prepared for yourself?

    Also, I'm inspired by your dedication to certain directors and I would be lying if I said I hadn't thought about shamelessly copying your idea, but I'm not sure there's a director I could devote myself to in as much detail as Wes Craven, who is already nine films away from being complete on my blog. And there's no way I could compete with your Carpenter retrospective, so it's time for me to put on my thinking cap.

    1. Thanks, B. I actually wanted to go to something like a near-daily schedule, at least for March, but then things intervened before I could get to Raiders.

      As for Poltergeist, I'll be reposting a re-edited version of my Poltergeist review from back in 2014, in order to fit that in. (After that, the only other Extended Spielberg films that I have on my list for him are The Twilight Zone and The Goonies. That said, I'll also be getting to the Back to the Future franchise in the next like three or four days.)

      The great thing about director retrospectives is that, typically, they're full of good stuff, if the director's worth looking at in the first place. It's therefore probably the laziest thing I've ever done on this blog.

      You could do Joe Dante! Joe Dante's pretty swell, and has a manageable filmography. Guillermo del Toro too, I think. There's also David Cronenberg, but the back half of his career has been so much less interesting than his early stuff that it makes the idea of doing a Cronenberg retrospective a little unappetizing, even with Scanners and The Fly and all that.