Summer blockbuster season has only begun, but it already appears to be a bumper crop year for shock and appall. Hindu groups demand that Mike Myers’ Love Guru be banned from India because it is “potentially offensive” and “religiously insensitive.” In Russia, Communist Party members have deemed Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull “anti-Soviet propaganda,” and want the Russian Culture Ministry to bar the film. On at least three separate occasions this summer, friends have told me they can’t wait to see Iron Man, “even though I hear it’s kind of racist.”
While trailers for the Love Guru appear too senseless to warrant banning the film, and Iron Man generated plenty of media attention upon its release (but only so much as we now expect of a Marvel movie), the return of Indiana Jones was a veritable event. Movie mag Empire outdid itself, printing a virtual shrine to the franchise, complete with a special Indiana Jones collector’s book of first-hand accounts from the film’s main creators. Indy made the front page, above-the-fold photo in an edition of La Presse and received a lengthy comment in The Independent on Sunday. It garnered a standing ovation at Cannes.
If you’ve watched any of the first three Indiana Jones films recently and have a passing understanding of post-colonial theory, you’ve likely noticed that the films scream for an Orientalist critique. Archeology professor Indiana Jones is an enlightened, rational skeptic who warns his students constantly about the dangers of folklore and myth, or, as he puts it, hocus pocus and superstition. Non-Western peoples are shown as being pre-Enlightenment. Indy is in a position of cultural superiority, sometimes reaching the point of godlike or savior status: a protagonist to be emulated by people of other cultures. In some cases, the imperial ramifications of this presentation are explicit. At the end of Temple of Doom, banned from India for its “racist portrayal of Indians and overt imperialistic tendencies,” the British army comes to the rescue. As the title of the third film puts it, Indiana Jones is on nothing less than a crusade—one in which he puts everyone else in a museum dedicated to his own glory. As is sometimes hinted at in the films, he has grave robber tendencies.
It might seem obvious that the Indiana Jones films stereotype other cultures. But while I have no problem ignoring films like Love Guru, I have trouble applying the same rule to Indy. I know several fans that feel the same way. Despite how uncomfortable the films’ representations of different nationalities make us, our attachment is difficult to break. That’s the unfortunate reality of living in a racist society: you inherit its effects.
In high school, my go-to movies when I was sick were Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Last Crusade and A Room with a View. For a long time, going through university, I hid this fact from my friends. If a film presents ethnic stereotypes or Eurocentrism and I enjoy the film, it must mean that I’m a deep-down racist as well—otherwise, why the repeated viewings? This isn’t a question I enjoy asking, but if I’m going to be honest with myself, it can’t be avoided. The Indiana Jones movies are racist, and I love Indiana Jones.
In November 2001, the Egyptian journalist Hani Shukrallah wrote an article about the franchise’s first film for the daily Al-Ahram. He called Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Arc “probably one of the most blatantly racist films ever produced by Hollywood, which is saying a lot, especially when the object of racism, as in this film, happens to be Arab.” It may be difficult to deem a film the most racist, but that doesn’t make the author wrong.
Shukrallah analyzed a scene in which Indy encounters a maniacal swordsman of Arab origin (we can tell he’s an Arab because he wears a turban) as a metaphor for the United States’ approach to the Middle East. If you’ve ever seen an action movie, you know the kind of drawn-out fight we’re in for as the crowd in the souq (the setting is stolen directly from A Thousand and One Nights) parts to display the skilled, black-clad threat. Spielberg breaks with tradition, though. Ever practical, a dysentery-ridden Indy shoots the guy dead, just like that. It’s an uncomfortable scene if you’re at all concerned about Western imperialism. It’s also 38th in the top 50 film gags as chosen by Empire. Here’s the shocker: despite himself, when Shukrallah watches this scene, he laughs. “I might as well admit to one of my shameful little secrets. I’ve enjoyed the Indiana Jones film series.”
The issue is not whether the films are Orientalist, but how we’re supposed to relate to them. For Shukrallah as for me, the issue of the Indy movies’ appeal relates to why Umberto Eco classified Raiders as a cult film. According to Eco, Casablanca is popular because it’s a pastiche of many films that came before it, and, in the viewer’s mind, the films that came after it as well. Watching the Indiana Jones movies, the same applies. The films are a jumble of highly-charged scenes, as Indy himself exemplifies familiar tropes in film history: he can be Bogey, he can be the fastest gun in the West, he can be Tintin all grown up. Spielberg and Lucas were inspired by images from the B-movies and pulp magazines of their youth. Viewing an Indiana Jones film allows you to turn off your filters. You can watch them again and again without having to worry about following a coherent narrative, enjoying the sensation of déja vu as one iconic image after another washes over you.
The use of such icons is what entrenches the Indiana Jones series into the censorship debate, but it’s also the source of their appeal. Before groups like the Russian Communist Party worry that Indiana Jones will burn anti-Soviet propaganda into the retinas of today’s youth, they should recognize why Cate Blanchett in a bowl cut butchering the Russian accent is entertaining in the first place.
