Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Supernatural
Warning: This commentary contains spoilers for the latest film.
After nineteen years of absence from movie screens around the world, the re-appearance of Indiana Jones in a new movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was accompanied by security precautions worthy of a new Pentagon weapons project. Movie extras were required to sign a non-disclosure agreement about the content of the movie, and one actor was allowed just a few hours to read the script in London prior to contract-signing before a courier flew it back to Los Angeles to re-deposit it in a safe. In Los Angeles, in a police sting operation, a man was arrested for trying to sell production photographs that he had allegedly stolen from the offices of producer George Lucas.
The global appetite for these movies has proved insatiable since the first in the series, Raiders of the Lost Ark, appeared in 1981. Much of the appeal of the series must go to actor Harrison Ford, who portrays the archeologist and adventurer Indiana Jones with a winning combination of traits: arrogance, cynicism, manly decisiveness, and not infrequent klutziness. Each of the movies, directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by George Lucas, has been fast-moving and colorful with highly imaginative plot devices. Together they have grossed more than a billion dollars. Spielberg and Lucas must be doing something right.
What the series have demonstrated above all, however, is that the movie-going public has an enduring appetite for portrayals of the supernatural. Producer Lucas has made it clear that he recognizes this. “Indiana Jones movies,” he has said in interviews, “aren’t action movies. They’re primarily mysteries with a supernatural object. It’s kind of like the X-Files.” He adds, “It’s important for us that there’s a real supernatural mystery going on. . . . They’re always going after some supernatural object. It’s not something that we made up. It’s something that actually exists, or people believe exists—whether it does or not is in dispute.”
Lucas himself appears to believe in the supernatural, if filtered through a generic New Age lens rather than the prism of any conventional religion. He told the PBS interviewer Bill Moyers, “There are mysteries and powers larger than we are and you have to trust your feelings in order to access them.” His directing colleague Steven Spielberg has told people that he believes in UFOs. Between them, both men have created a modern supernatural mythology through such movies as those in the Star Wars series, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and E.T. The question is, how does this new mythology address age-old questions traditionally answered by religion?
Star Wars introduced the concept of “the Force,” a sort of vague New Age supernatural power whose only moral distinctives were “the Force” itself—presumed to be beneficent or at least neutral—and “the dark side,” presumed to be malevolent. The lost alien in E.T., befriended by an earthly child, turns out to be well disposed to the human race, which, inevitably, is insufficiently advanced to grasp this.
But the Indiana Jones adventures deal squarely with age-old concepts of the supernatural in human history: the biblical Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Hindu sacred stones in The Temple of Doom, and the Holy Grail in The Last Crusade. The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull features a tie-in between ancient pre-Columbian religious beliefs and superhuman powers supposedly possessed by aliens who landed in the U.S. in the super-secret “Area 51” of New Mexico.
The dramatic tension of all the Indiana Jones movies is the battle between Jones and his cohorts and the machinations of truly evil humans who believe in the allegedly supernatural powers and wish to use them for their own wicked purposes. In Raiders, it is the Nazis, who, despite their contempt for the Jews, believe they can use the powers of the Ark, an artifact from the Hebrew Scriptures, for their own purposes. In The Temple of Doom, a deranged Hindu mystic wants to control the world through the possession of five magic-possessing stones. In The Last Crusade, the Nazis are back in the limelight, apparently understanding that control of the Holy Grail will grant them eternal life. In Crystal Skull, the supernatural powers are mind-control techniques sought by the Soviets in their Cold War rivalry with the U.S. and—inevitably—linked both to knowledge of aliens supposedly held by pre-Columbian Indians and to the actual aliens supposedly investigated by the American government at Area 51.
As in all the Indiana Jones movies, there is a mix of the real and the imagined in the supernatural themes. It was true, as Crystal Skull asserts, that Stalin and his successors toyed with the paranormal as a means to attain superior weaponry vis-à-vis the U.S. I once had a fascinating conversation with a former Soviet soldier who had been trained in a special military unit that employed paranormal techniques to improve the soldiers’ aim of weapons systems. (It was in New York and the ex-soldier was thankfully employing his special talents to drive a late-night cab. But he said that it worked.) But where truth and fantasy dance a tango is in the Spielberg-Lucas conflation of pre-Columbian myths and the super-advanced intelligence of aliens supposedly first encountered by the U.S. government back in the 1940s in New Mexico. The Area 51 and Roswell stories die hard, which is certainly convenient to imaginative moviemakers.
Despite Lucas’s New Age leanings, however, he firmly sides with traditionalists in the view that ancient religious artifacts of traditional religions contain real powers that should not be tampered with by human beings. The pro-Nazi archeologist in Raiders is destroyed when he looks at the Ark in its full display of power; Indiana Jones escapes death by keeping his eyes shut. The Nazi archeologist in Last Crusade falls to her death by grasping for the Holy Grail as the cup tumbles out of her reach. By analogy, Indiana Jones escapes death by letting the cup fall from his hands. In Crystal Skull, the Soviet scientist/agent Irina Spalko meets her death by demanding from the aliens ultimate knowledge. It proves to be a force so powerful that she is literally consumed by fire and dies. Her ally against Jones, the British traitor Mac, gets sucked into a different dimension in his greed for pre-Columbian wealth.
In effect, though Lucas-Spielberg have created a new mythology of supernatural power—the Star Wars–Close Encounters–E.T. mythology—they seem unwilling to dispense altogether with older belief systems and supernatural contrivances. This seems to irritate deeply some ultra-rationalist critics of their enterprise. The website of an organization called “The Center for Skeptical Enquiry” attacks the two Hollywood moguls for having “created a legacy of films that attack reason, sell transcendental fantasies, and undermine appreciation for science and progress.”
It’s an unconsciously ironic charge; The Golden Compass, the trilogy by Philip Pullman that has been turned into a somewhat successful movie, is a deliberate attack on Christianity, yet it is filled with “transcendental fantasies.” The ultra-rationalists cannot have it both ways; either Christianity and Judaism have real, supernatural truth-content, or their use of fantasy techniques quite parallel to the Indiana Jones series are equally invalid by their own criteria.
The global movie-going public, however, is not so puritanical about reason and the imagination. Just as the Indiana Jones movies convey a fascination with the most powerful ancient myths—or, if you prefer, beliefs—of all history, so they leave open the option that those beliefs might, just might, be true. In this case, Indiana Jones serves up escapism, fantasy, and imagination. But he may also serve up more truth than his creators realize.
Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.
Columns, David Aikman, Arts and Culture, Faiths and Worldviews, Thu 19 Jun 2008
