![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Indiana Jones and the Creeping Cynicism
Aug. 31st, 2013 07:10 pmThe end of Raiders of the Lost Ark sets up this weird question of Indiana Jones' belief in the supernatural. He's clearly someone who doesn't believe in the supernatural and says so, so it's pretty reasonable that he caves when Beloq offers him a chance to see the thing opened. As soon as Beloq opens the Ark and things start blowing up though, he pretty quickly changes his mind.
That's straightforward, but it's less straightforward in light of Temple of Doom. Here, Indiana's seen that the supernatural exists.
But if he's a committed enough rational atheist, there's a lot you could rationalize in that movie - the Black Blood of Kali Ma is obviously some sort of drug thrown off by severe shock, the Sankara stones glow because of some sort of crystalline resonance, the burning heart thing is some sort of sleight of hand trick (Mola Ram does have robes and a hat where he can palm things), and as for the village being revitalized, heck, it was going to be monsoon season anyway, right? So there's no reason for him to think of the Ark as anything other than a Canaanite portable shrine which might function as a big electromagnet or something.
Es brings up the far nastier possibility that Indiana's a little bit of a cultural imperialist, and dismisses everything he witnesses in Temple of Doom because it's not Western European - compare to the reverence he shows for the Grail. The Ark might be somewhere in between. This is uncomfortably easy to believe from the same guy who disrupts a 6th century burial to make a femur into a makeshift torch, tears up late Classical mummies and who clearly feels that if there's artifacts from another culture, the place which will actually preserve them is an American museum.
That's straightforward, but it's less straightforward in light of Temple of Doom. Here, Indiana's seen that the supernatural exists.
But if he's a committed enough rational atheist, there's a lot you could rationalize in that movie - the Black Blood of Kali Ma is obviously some sort of drug thrown off by severe shock, the Sankara stones glow because of some sort of crystalline resonance, the burning heart thing is some sort of sleight of hand trick (Mola Ram does have robes and a hat where he can palm things), and as for the village being revitalized, heck, it was going to be monsoon season anyway, right? So there's no reason for him to think of the Ark as anything other than a Canaanite portable shrine which might function as a big electromagnet or something.
Es brings up the far nastier possibility that Indiana's a little bit of a cultural imperialist, and dismisses everything he witnesses in Temple of Doom because it's not Western European - compare to the reverence he shows for the Grail. The Ark might be somewhere in between. This is uncomfortably easy to believe from the same guy who disrupts a 6th century burial to make a femur into a makeshift torch, tears up late Classical mummies and who clearly feels that if there's artifacts from another culture, the place which will actually preserve them is an American museum.