Indiana Jones and his racist literary origins in adventure stories
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
To the contemporary viewer, the Indiana Jones franchise feels like a genre unto itself - or at least like the origin of one. By now, our whip-wielding hero's adventures have inspired countless others, including the tomb-raiding Lara Croft, the Declaration-of-Independence-stealing Benjamin Franklin Gates in "National Treasure," the Mummy franchise, "Uncharted" and "Duck Tales."
Of course, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and their Indiana Jones collaborators drew heavily on the adventure stories of their childhoods, and those of generations before them, when they created the character. What fragments of literature, history and popular culture came together, in such uneven ways, to make this film series such a massive global phenomenon? Excavating the origins of a genre text like Indiana Jones is dangerous work: Once you've torn through all those old libraries, dusty tomes, misleading maps and forgotten, trap-filled labyrinths, are the contents of those cultural tombs worth anything at all?
The most direct antecedents of Indiana Jones are the Flash Gordon and Zorro serials from the 1930s and '40s, which famously thrilled Lucas as a boy. Organized around cycles of thrilling cliffhangers and daring escapes, they featured a style of storytelling that was already old-fashioned when Lucas was devouring it in matinees growing up in California in the 1950s.
It's a bit hard to accept that almost as many years separate "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981) from "Zorro Rides Again" (1937) as separate "Raiders" from "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny," out this week. That "Zorro" film can be watched in full on YouTube these days, and, while undoubtedly dated, it contains inspired stunts and surprising, Marvel-style moments of action comedy, such as the scene where Zorro cracks his whip to keep a bar full of ruffians at bay (as the lead thug holds his bruised fingers and moans).
Adventure novels from around the turn of the 20th century, a genre coded as "boys' entertainment," are another important antecedent for Indiana Jones. Most notable among them may be the H. Rider Haggard cycle of Allan Quatermain novels (1885-1927) that began with "King Solomon's Mines" (1885). These books saw their swashbuckling hero, a master hunter, seeking lost treasures across Africa, Asia and South America, eventually uncovering over the course of the series a hidden world of mystery, magic and danger far exceeding the rationalist, scientistic expectations of mainland Europe. Quatermain's first-person narration is funny and gripping, especially coupled with the footnotes from an "Editor" issuing their own corrections and commentary - but it is very hard to ignore the story's racism, beginning with an extended commentary on racial slurs in the novel's first chapter. Ngugi wa Thiong'o singles out Haggard for special scorn in "Decolonising the Mind" as one of the "geniuses of racism," and the award is not undeserved.
The basic outlines of the adventure genre will be familiar to Indy fans, though its structure is heavily beholden to the colonialist politics of Haggard's era: A brilliant White man, very often a professor, deploys personal reserves of cleverness, resilience and unrelenting determination in the service of exploration, discovery and resource extraction. That narrative template guides these stories even when the author attempts to push back on their ideological implications. Think, for example, about how the Indiana Jones films use the Nazi menace to distract from the fact that our hero is almost always appropriating the treasures of Indigenous or pre-colonial peoples. It's as if they felt obliged to remind us that there's always a worse White man, as a sort of alibi. It makes perfect sense, from this perspective, that Indiana Jones's least-successful films are the ones that, like "Temple of Doom," leave the Nazis out.
As the adventure genre developed, it grew to incorporate what we now call science fiction - and Indiana Jones's escapades have plenty of overlap with that genre, too. Indy frequently encounters improbably intricate traps built by preindustrial cultures that apparently require no maintenance over millennia - and, of course, he once saw a UFO. That also speaks to some of the material in the franchise's DNA: Similar stories can be found in such novels as Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth" (1864), Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost World" (1912), Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan novels (1912-1966) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton's "Vril, The Power of the Coming Race" (1871). The last of those contributed to a feverish and largely apocryphal fascination with Nazi occultism that lingers to this day, thanks in no small part to the way the Indiana Jones franchise picked up on it.
If these influential texts are haunted today by their unavoidable racism, it's not as if Indy's creators - who grew up loving these stories - were wholly unaware of the problems with them. "You and I are very much alike," taunts his first major doppelgänger, Belloq (Paul Freeman), in "Raiders of the Lost Ark," in a speech that has been plagiarized by movie villains ever since. Even the original '80s films know, on some level, that Jones is a villain in his story. The climax of every Indiana Jones movie, after all, comes only when Indy finally decides to relinquish whatever it was he was trying to get, rather than follow his obsession over a cliff (or down a chasm, or into space); the happy ending is when he gives up and just goes home.
Here, we find the traces of another weird antecedent of the Indiana Jones franchise, distinct from all the others: the religious conversion narrative. A self-obsessed and lonely skeptic, a man of science who has let his career crowd out all other aspects of his life and induced him to make morally questionable decisions in pursuit of fortune and glory, is granted a momentary gift of grace, a glimpse of the divine (or, once, aliens), which changes his life forever (at least until the next movie is greenlit and the whole cycle starts anew). In this way every Indiana Jones film is really just a genre-swapped version of "A Christmas Carol."
Indiana Jones has many children, and the franchise's influence is so sweeping that even the biggest video game in the world at the moment, "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom," bears its mark. But, five movies and 42 years in, we might start to wonder whether Indiana Jones does belong in a museum. The two movies produced in the 2000s, "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" (2008) and "Dial of Destiny," have each been preoccupied by the concept of Jones growing old. In "Dial of Destiny," especially, we find Indy exhausted and bitter as he finally retires from his tenured professorship at Marshall College, with the advertising for the film loudly promising/bemoaning that this time it really is his last adventure (really). Today, the figure of the Great White Hero feels almost completely used up. In 2023, Marshall College undoubtedly begins its events with a land acknowledgment and has probably scraped Jones's name off whatever building it was on. It makes perfect sense that the plot of "Dial of Destiny" sees the character fighting with Nazis (again) over an ancient doohickey that can do time travel. Even those of us who love the character can do so now only by winding back the years.
Gerry Canavan is a professor in the English department at Marquette University and the author of "Octavia E. Butler."
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I think we all knew that these movies were problematic in how they depicted exotic cultures. In The Temple Of Doom they show Hindus eating monkey brains, which is actually not a thing but fits a racist prejudice.
However, one could look at the racial stereotyping in the movies as the product of Indiana Jones times rather than through the perspective of modern sensibilities. The Indiana Jones movies largely take part in the 1930's when misconceptions about exotic cultures were very widespread.
Quite the retort.
I was young when I first saw the movie, but from the first time, and each time thereafter, I got the sense that the dinner was not intended for any purpose other than to deter Indy. They did not want him there, snooping around. To that end, I have never taken the dinner offerings as inaccurate depictions of another culture, but as part of the plot of the movie, and their attempt to make Indy feel other than welcomed.
Do you think such a movie would have shown, let's say, Englishmen eating monkey brains ? I dont.
I think that's an accurate analysis
Immaterial to the point. Would the movie makers have shown Englishmen , or Frenchmen, or Americans for that matter, eating monkey brains? I think not.
Hannibal Lector was an aberration.
Indiana Jones ate the monkey brains and he's an American
He was going with the flow. It wasnt his idea.
I doubt it, since there is not a population of monkeys, to my knowledge, in England.
To your assertion in 1.2.3 . Lector may be an aberration, but that does not mean that the depiction in Temple of Doom is not also an aberration. A cult has taken over the area, and even brainwashed the young maharaja. Are they trying to deter Indy, by serving a banquet of crazy food? Have they fallen to consuming such a cuisine because of the cult?
I've never thought about this issue. Upon looking into the Indiana Jones lore, I found a webpage. Wouldn't you know it, apparently, the intent of the story was to show that the dinner offerings were not normal, and Indy apparently noted the same in a journal.
I don't know how much stock to put into that, but it is in line with what I always perceived.
Cooked animal brains are not uncommon in many countries.
I know people who eat pig brains cooked with scrambled eggs. When we got a whole pig to roast somebody usually wanted the brains, I just wanted pulled pork
I had a major problem with this when it came out. Everyone knows monkey brains are to be served at room temperature.
I swear some people have to interject politics into everything and suck out all the fun. They are adventure movies based on serial adventures of the filmmaker's childhood. Nothing more, nothing less.
I agree with you in general, but we approach it from the view of an American audience that is accepting of this sort of stereotyping. Series such as Tarzan, Charlie Chan, Abbott and Costello in Africa, and many others drew a sharp contrast between "civilized" westerners and the "ignorant" and "savage " black, brown , yellow, and red people in other parts of the world. At the time these movies depict, very few Americans had ever traveled to other countries and all they knew about them is what they saw in the movies.
Why don't you look up how much the Indiana Jones series made world wide?
Seems that people all over the world really weren't that offended consider how many people would have to go see it to make that much.
I can agree with that.
How can anyone take Indiana Jones seriously? It is meant for fun- just like Lara Croft and Nathan Drake.
Next people will blast these types of movies for showing the characters surviving unreal perils that would have killed any normal person several times over.
I just watch movie like these to be entertained. I never look for any racism in them.
Normal folks don't. Ya just gotta SYFH at people who do. Must have been miserable childhoods or some other driving force to constantly look for something, ANYTHING to be offended by. Truly screwed up.
The internet was created for the sole purpose of anonymously bitching about whatever one wants to on any given day. If it's not transphobia or racism or some studio has subliminal images of penises in their animation... fuck, whatever - it's how many people use to outlet their displeasure of the world around them. Then, we get those who make their money by clicks or campaign cash to make people outraged and get the hyper partisans of the world with nothing better to do will unite and dog pile on.
In other words, you cant disagree with a word of the article, you just wish people wouldnt say such things.
We can actually understand stereotyping and racism without freaking out over it.
I like the Indiana Jones movies and have seen almost all of them, but that doesnt have much to do with whether or not the writer is correct.
Wrong.............
I can't imagine going through life looking for racism in everything.
Does that mean you can go through life never seeing racism in anything?
If everyone did, it would cease to exist except in the minds of those who exploit the hell out of it
Thats probably true, but your conception that racism only exists because the victims think about it so much is ridiculous.
No.
It means I don't go looking for racism and stretch things in bizarre ways to declare something is racist.
In other words, I am not consumed with racism.
Wrong again.
I think 2.2.29 was a hint for you.
You just said that dude. At least own your own words.
That is interesting, since the last comment on this seed is 2.2.14
Whoops...2.2.9
Did you ever notice when a sentence starts with "in other words" they are almost always wrong? Just like when someone starts a sentence with "I hate to say it" you wonder why they continue to say it if they hate to say it?
Yep! Never fails...............
No one has disputed what is in the seed, they just say they dont care. Fair enough I guess.
Yeah, some of us don't care about imagined racism in an old movie, just not the hot topic of the day, I guess.
I knew I made a mistake not seeding this in my group.
Now I have to depend on someone else to delete your incessant trolling.
Flag my on-topic with your comment post then but for God's sake stop whining about it.
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I always find it fascinating what people find important or not important. Of course everyone is entitled to their own beliefs but sometimes I just wonder. For instance some seem to believe a scene in a 40 year old movie is worth scrutiny and denouncing while men competing in women's sports today is shrugged off as not one of the pressing topics of the day.
Indiana Jones is not brought up by the writer because it is a 40 year old movie. It is brought up because the new Indiana Jones movie is opening this week.
It does not take a lot of thought to understand that. Some of you would be better off just remaining silent.
The comments are based on statements in the article. Even your first comment was specifically about a 40 year old movie. Some people should really think before seeding shit.
Do you the difference between a seeded article and a comment ?
Do you the difference?
Sometimes a movie is just a movie.
And there we have it ladies and gentlemen..............................
Sometimes you just have to exercise your imagination on what the authors of the script really meant!
And some are really exercising hours every day.
Maybe Donald Trump once met the script writers way back when.
Maybe it is an evil extreme far-right wing plan to slip racism into everything.
Maybe it is just a movie, made to entertain us.
It can't be easy looking for secret meanings to everything all the time. I gave up with playing one of the Beatles albums backwards to try and determine if Paul was dead.
They arent secret meanings.
This forum is getting dumber by the minute.
On that we agree, although we might not agree on where the stupidity is.
I would have to imagine that it would be exhausting!
But there will always be someone to step up and fill in the void!
Thread @3.1 locked for meta and slap fighting. Play nice, please.
I totally missed this article when it was posted, so it must have been posted and then pushed off the Front (Home) Page while I was sleeping. Although there are comments or parts thereof that are contrary to the Red Rules there is no purpose in my policing them at this late stage - just disappointed that the seeder did not do so.