Another Indy Classic

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull Directed by Steven Spielberg

Indiana Jones first appears in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull being thrown onto the ground. He’s in the midst of some ongoing escapade with new-to-us foreign-accented villains and a treasure-hunting mercenary—familiar stuff, although it doesn’t quite give us our bearings. Yet this is true to form for the most problematic movie series in Hollywood history; it was less about Indy in peril than the filmmakers working through disoriented feelings about Americanism and the world.

The 1980s Indiana Jones trilogy was notable for starting out fresh every time. Unique for a Hollywood entertainment enterprise, it was made during the era when pop filmmakers could experiment in philology—as in the self-reflexive overture sequence of The Last Crusade: It made Indy’s backstory both a biological jest and a catalog of chase-movie conventions. The clichés of the serial adventure form had become the staple of television, but Steven Spielberg elevated them with cinematic wit.

As the most versatile Hollywood film artist since D.W. Griffith, Spielberg can’t help showing off his mastery, doing so in a challenging, though eager-to-please, way. During a marathon Kingdom of the Crystal Skull chase scene—one of those non-stop, gear-shifting, three-ring-circuses-on-wheels that you expect from the series—a brief interval shows a character bounced from a hurtling jeep and then moving bodily through trees as if in an aerial ballet. The details of this swinging, rapturous jetée must be seen to be believed (and its humor instantaneously interpreted). Spielberg turns a jokey, lowbrow movie reference into a distillation of character and an anthropological theorem—without ever slowing the moment’s pace, or lessening its significance as a plot point. Film craft at this level is wondrous indeed, not only surpassing expectations for the Indiana Jones formula (action, action, action) but enhancing it with a bonus of suggestive lyricism.

But most impressively, Crystal Skull carries the burden of making popular entertainment that must also be taken seriously. Spielberg assumed that mandate through the conceit of planning the Indiana Jones films in the mass-art style of afternoon movie serials but with a modern sensibility that could galvanize the revanchist Reagan-era culture. It worked almost too well. The 1981 Raiders of the Lost Ark was a hyper-smart action-movie pastiche—produced by super-square George Lucas before Tarantino made such things hip. Lucas and Philip Kaufman’s story idea was written by Lawrence Kasdan in the revisionist spirit of ’70s American Renaissance movies, yet remained essentially juvenile like Lucas’ Star Wars. When the impudent, postmodern imperialism of Raiders was followed by the comic essay on the morality of speed in 1984’s Temple of Doom, both needed some crucial political correction—eventually provided by The Last Crusade’s overview of Western political and religious heritage.

Between those films, Spielberg had made the radical-humanist The Color Purple (1985) whose cultural-racial insight helped him alter Indy’s jingoism, compressing a psychological arc—from national arrogance to enlightenment with honesty that the slickly nationalistic James Bond series never dared. In the stout-hearted person of Harrison Ford, Indy was a new generation’s Ethan Edwards—a young John Wayne-bwana dispatched to curate the third world. Not an identity-cloaked sci-fi superhero but a bullwhip-toting, fedora-wearing, two-fisted sophisticate who respected the Bible and saved the children of India—a superb hero yet an intrinsically nostalgic figure.

Spielberg turned claptrap into a reconsideration of what tickled America’s sense of international sovereignty; non-thinking adolescent viewers (of all ages) could thrill to the can-do effrontery. Now, in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, archeologist-adventurer Indy confronts fascists and mercenaries on native soil. It’s 1957 Nevada, yet it feels startlingly close to home. Action then moves to South America where Indy attempts to rescue Oxley (John Hurt), a professor devoted to finding the Crystal Skull of Akator. Indy outraces Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), a Soviet agent with Nazi ties who seeks to use the occult, extraterrestrial powers of the skull as a paranormal military weapon.

So it’s back to claptrap but phenomenally executed—as in that wondrous, airborne divertissement. And that’s what sticks. Think back on those relentless battle scenes in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the unintelligible carousing in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies or that stupendously stupid dinosaur chase in Peter Jackson’s King Kong. They all reduced movie kinetics to CGI excess. Since the last Indiana Jones film (1989’s The Last Crusade), we’ve seen the standard for crowd-pleasing action lowered year by year—reason enough to justify Spielberg’s decision to resurrect his and Lucas’ series, to go at their Americanism project once again.

The pressing challenge of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is for Spielberg to address the generation that grew up with Indiana Jones and may now feel they have outgrown him. But to avoid that fickle self-loathing (the sort that made the Star Wars generation turn against Lucas’ Star Wars prequels), Spielberg has to raise their appreciation of action-movie tropes. Not an easy task when the lusterless, pandering Iron Man is lavished with praise due to its bland political postures. Crystal Skull’s chase and fight set pieces and its scenes of natural and anthropological spectacle (such as a waterfall sequence that compares to Way Down East) feature comically laid-out cause-and-effect routines (like that land-and-trees car chase), plus untricked-up action-clarity (keeping track of each hard-charging character; balancing strategy, fluke and danger). Virtuosity as, apparently, only Spielberg and editor Michael Kahn know how to do.

First, Spielberg has to compete for his stolen, degraded audience (kidnapped by Peter Jackson and Gore Verbinski; simplified by National Treasure, Godzilla, The Mummy). Then, he needs to work through the geo-political quandary of post-9/11 pop. This is what makes the series of cliffhangers more than rote; their flamboyance becomes trenchant. Last Crusade taught Indy his place in global politics; but when that lesson was applied in Brett Eisner’s Sahara, the example of political engagement went unappreciated. Going back to the “naiveté” and isolationism of Raiders would be unconscionable, so Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp patch together an intermediate solution: These action scenes are reminders of courageous effort, the impetus that has seeped out of American pop culture except when practiced by characters who are gangsters or drug dealers. (Courage is anathema in today’s mainstream depictions of soldiers at war.) Crystal Skull may lack the contemporary political relevance of Sahara, but it sublimates post-9/11 paranoia into a version of Spielberg’s cosmology while also depicting past political lessons about which we are no longer naive.

Crystal Skull puts Indy into the Cold War ’50s—of Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog,” the homegrown Red Scare, incredible suburban sprawl, Soviet espionage and fear of The Bomb. These slightly updated stakes are not a retreat; Spielberg can only hope his franchise will appeal to a matured sense of history that the original three films gradually established. It should enable audiences to take in an expanded historical view. Crystal Skull’s self-referential concept is also philology but complicated by an emotional disturbance that any pop adept (who isn’t thinking like a Variety tout) should realize parallels our deeply troubled national-domestic confidence. This is a remedial Raiders. Koepp’s plot closes a circle for the series, providing Indy a young ’50s juvenile delinquent sidekick named Mutt (Shia LaBoeuf) and re-establishing Indy’s relationship with Raiders’ Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen).

To view Crystal Skull as commercial gimcrack is superficial; it blithely ignores the ethical and aesthetic project that always troubled the series. Far from perfectly conceived, it slaps together a family reunion and an ancient celestial visitation almost desperately. Karen Allen pops up with wide-eyed pluckiness, but she can’t resolve the 1981 problem that she and Ford have no rapport; their bonding feels conviction-less. LaBeouf works better as the smug Mutt (a perfect name for Boomer-era privilege and a kid who combs his ducktail as a narcissistic tic). When Mutt discovers that Indy is more than a teacher, he looks genuinely impressed—and filial. Mutt’s entrance in leather jacket and jeans on a motorcycle intentionally evokes Brando in The Wild One as a shortcut cultural marker. Its glibness is excusable only because it quickly folds into a Back to the Future 1950s spoof: Indy prompts Mutt to start a fist-fight in a diner to distract a pair of Soviet goons and the melee (a preppie shouts “Get that greaser!”) ironically reminds us there was class conflict in the context of the Cold War. Through these scenes Crystal Skull looks at American history Indy-wise—as a pursuit of cultural knowledge.

The low point comes (unsurprisingly) from bad luck Blanchett’s Spalko; this off/on, Soviet/Nazi, rapier-wielding, kung-fu fighting, dominatrix/sorceress belongs to no specific era. Spalko’s pursuit of the Crystal Skull and trifling with the otherworldly suggests Mad magazine (without the jokes). Her treachery is best revealed in the subtle cross-cut from Indy inside the Crystal Skull temple to an exterior where the sound of gunshots from Spalko’s troops introduces a pan over the bodies of dead jungle natives—genocide memorialized in a glyph. Unfortunately, these travestied third worlders retrojects Crystal Skull past Sahara, back to the shallowness of Raiders. Koepp could have created a South American archeologist to personalize the threat of global fascism. Indy’s quote of Robert Oppenheimer quoting from a Hindu bible (“Now I am become death—a destroyer of worlds”) lacks urgency; avoiding that the kind of chauvinism is what makes The Last Crusade the peak Indy film.

Like Griffith, Spielberg uses pop idioms without corrupting their cultural significance. Genre-manipulating directors like David Cronenberg and Todd Haynes cannot claim such pop articulation. Our familiarity with Indy (Harrison Ford’s principled, clean-cut, robust, determinism) makes his exploits relatable. This older Indy runs by shifting his body weight for stability. It’s an unavoidable adjustment, like the cinematography that shows Janusz Kaminski’s one limitation: He can’t match Douglas Slocombe’s polish, that sharp gloss that was itself a comment on the Hollywood imperium. But when Crystal Skull works best, the battle of good guy/bad guy motives comes down to observable action—logistics match dialectics and we knowingly behold contemporary myth. 

That’s the significance naysayers deny about Spielberg’s imagery. Note the extraordinary elegance of the film’s first car chase, a camera-and-vehicle maneuver that puts the one-note, overemphasized torsion of Tarantino’s Grindhouse car chase to shame. Because it also plays out Indy’s anti-fascist effort, it has rare expediency. Another instantly classic sequence—a poetic etude like that airborne ballet—shows Indy stumbling upon a American suburb where he hears a ’50s TV jingle echoing throughout a neighborhood that’s as eerily uninhabited as that housing tract in L’Avventura. This scene discloses a time warp of domestic paranoia, utterly true to the ’50s but that traps Indy—and us—in a state of moral suspension that uncannily evokes post-9/11 trauma. This is Spielberg at his most pop and most amazing: turning the shiny American quotidian into an authentically numinous and strange experience. The astonishing image of Indy rising from post-WWII rubble to observe a nuclear mushroom cloud has the effect of situating historical catastrophe in modern terms. (Something Richard Kelley bungled in Southland Tales and that the Wachowski Brothers’ goofy astrophysics never came close to in Speed Racer.) It simultaneously updates the Raiders series’ original, mid-century setting while implicating the modern audience as conscious, wide-eyed witnesses to the phenomena of modernity. Playfulness at this level gives way to shock and awe.

In Crystal Skull Spielberg moves beyond the WWII topics that the media has lately glued to him; a deeper move into the efficacy of fiction. This storytelling gift is what’s most widely acknowledged about Spielberg. Yet, paradoxically, it’s also what’s least understood about his art: He displays aplomb conscientiously. At the Kennedy Center Honors two years ago, too much emphasis was placed on Spielberg’s ìseriousî war dramas, dismissing the personal essence of his other films. Having transcended genre—especially recently in A.I., War of the Worlds and Munich—Spielberg returns to his Indy genre for the very reason Godard outlined in Histoire(s) du Cinema: “Form tells us what is at the bottom of things.”