So much excitement in the media about Indiana Jones and the
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the first Indiana Jones movie
for 19 years, should not make us forget that it was the first movie
in the series, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), even more than it
was Superman or Star Wars three and four years
earlier, that killed off the old movie hero. The Star Wars
movies, though revolutionary in other ways, belonged to an
already-recognized movie genre, science fiction. And the
Superman films, also of the late '70s and early '80s,
amounted to a straightforward translation of the ethos and the
imagery of the comic book direct to the silver screen. But
Raiders represented the mainstreaming of the comic book
hero — from which there has since proven to be no return.
Indiana didn’t have exotic ray-guns and robots to make him
special, nor outlandish costumes and a supernatural pedigree. He
was outwardly a man among men, just like the movie heroes of old
when played by John Wayne or Gary Cooper. But it quickly became
apparent that, underneath that fedora and leather jacket, there
beat the heart of a superhero — someone whose adventures could not
have taken place in the world as we know it but only the comic book
world formerly confined, cinematically, to Saturday morning
serials. Since then the cartoon hero has proven to be a
particularly stubborn growth in the cinematic garden, a hearty weed
that hoovers up all the nutrients and starves more delicate flora.
He is the kudzu of the movie culture, the zebra mussel that has
taken over a whole entertainment ecosystem. Today, apart from
anti-heroes and victim heroes, it’s cartoon heroes all the way. And
now we welcome back the prototype of the cartoon hero if he were a
hero indeed. Perhaps we’ve forgotten what real heroes look
like.
Of course, this process has been speeded up by the demographics
of the movie business. Since Indy first cracked his whip, the
flight of adults from the multiplex has been remarkable. The advent
of the home VCR and DVD and, now, the high-tech “home theatre” has
kept grown-ups in their living rooms while pre-adolescents and
early teens predominate at movie houses. For them, movies provide a
public place to gather and meet friends — and to watch comic-book
style pictures untroubled by any awareness that there were ever any
other kind. Meanwhile, mom and dad back at home are left to wonder
why there isn’t anything to watch on their big screen TVs and
expensive sound systems.
Their kids’ dollars are more powerful than theirs in the
movie-marketplace. The kids are the ones going to first-run movies,
not their parents, and they’re going more than once if they like
something. Hollywood naturally concludes that the kinds of things
that appeal to 13-year olds — such as power-fantasies, explosions,
cool gadgets, fart jokes, blood and guts, and moral simplicity —
are the way to go to maximize box office returns. Later, the ‘rents
will watch it on DVD because there’s nothing else to watch —
although, like Tony Soprano, they may wonder from time to time
whatever happened to Gary Cooper. Today, the taste of the American
8th grader has become the world’s taste. The Crystal Skull
— the name says everything you need to know about its
cartoonishness — opened around the world on the same day, May 22,
so as to minimize the possibilities for piracy. But piracy would
not be a problem if there were not millions and millions of
grown-ups eager to get Indy into their home theatres.
You often hear it said that those pre-1970s movies with the
old-fashioned heroes were simplistic in their reduction of the
world to black-and-white. In fact, this is much more characteristic
of the cartoon Nazis — or, rather daringly in the new movie,
Communists — of the Indiana Jones franchise. But if you go back
and look at the best John Wayne movies — The Searchers, say, or Stagecoach or
Red River or Fort Apache or The Sands of Iwo Jima or The Man Who Shot
Liberty Valance — they are full of difficult moral choices.
The hero fails at least as often as he succeeds and he sometimes
dies. It’s a lot like real life. We admire the John Wayne hero just
because he’s not a Superman — or an Indiana Jones.
Eighth-graders were once thought to be not too young to admire such
heroes; now nostalgists of 50 are not thought to be too old for
Indiana Jones’s cartoon adventures.
Yet, after all, what are their choices in the heroic line? The
era of Indy has shown that comic book heroes have put an end to the
grown-up kind. Writing in the British Daily Telegraph,
Andrew O’Hagan deplores what he sees as the snobbery at work among
unnamed “critics” who have found fault with poor old Indiana merely
on the grounds that he is so popular. On his view, either you’re on
board with Indy-mania or you’re probably one of the pointy-headed
brigade who liked Lars von Trier’s ghastly Dancer in the Dark. Once a critic might have
attempted to make a distinction between “popular” and “vulgar,” but
that no longer appears to be an option. So there’s another critical
tool gone. But what the heck? Mr. O’Hagan’s article ends by
observing that “the world is big enough for The Simpsons
and King Lear.” Well, you’d think so, wouldn’t you? But in
practice this proves not to be the case. Where is the King
Lear for our times? Where, for that matter, is The
Searchers for our times? My conclusion: bad art, by which I
mean childish fantasy for adults, drives out good.
