The best line in Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (written by David Koepp from a
story by George Lucas) comes right at the beginning when the title
character, still played by a game but now-aged Harrison Ford, is
single-handedly battling a gang of Russians who have invaded and
taken over an American military base. The improbably sexy leader of
the commies, Agent Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), taunts the hero,
whom she has briefly in her power, by saying in the tones of the
comic-book villainess she is: "No defiant last words, Dr.
Jones?"
Indy outwits his captors as he always does, but before he
springs away like the sprightly 40-year-old he was a quarter of a
century-ago, he cries out: "I like Ike."
Like most of the other lines in the movie, it is intended as an
in-joke. There is no question of Indy's really liking Ike -- which,
for younger readers, was the nickname of America's 34th president,
Dwight Eisenhower. It's meant as a nudge and a wink to the
audience, a reminder that here we're only playing at being
two-fisted, 1950s-style action heroes. We're not to suppose that
this Ike-liking paragon is something anyone could take seriously
today -- or even at the time, for that matter. It's just the
movie's way of claiming for its hero a moderate, even apolitical
liberalism meant to contrast with the supposed zealotry of the
communists. The line is the post-modern equivalent of Russell
Kirk's reply to the John Birch Society's accusation that Eisenhower
was a communist: he was not a communist but a golfer.
More importantly, the picture can't help being nostalgic for
what it regards as an era of simple moral certainties, even though
it shares none of these certainties itself. Into that ironic gap,
as into a po-mo black hole, this movie quickly and completely
disappears. It's also why the plot is even more absurd than that of
the original film, involving as it does space aliens in place of
the more traditional supernaturalism of the Ark of the Covenant. I
guess when you consider that the 1982 Ark ultimately turned itself
into a lightning machine for zapping Nazis with some kind of
melt-ray, it's not so different. The space aliens might have been
involved there too, since we now know that they were must have been
playing around with similar technologies in ancient times.
Anyway, biblical mysteries have presumably lost some of their
allure during the intervening decades, perhaps on account of
The Da Vinci Code, and space aliens are always a
convenient way to short-circuit any questions about advanced or,
indeed, impossible technologies as well as to explain the
persistence of such legends as El Dorado. You'll not be surprised,
by the way, to hear that Indy, having already bagged the Ark of the
Covenant, some world-mastering sacred Indian stones and the Holy
Grail, now adds another notch to his bull-whip and bests all those
old-timey conquistadores by finding the city of gold -- as
well as the fact that those cool aliens were archaeologists like
himself, and collectors of human artefacts.
But the real point of the movie is to re-unite Indy with Karen
Allen from the original Raiders of the Lost Ark and --
spoiler alert! -- through her to provide him with a long-lost
illegitimate son and heir called Mutt (Shia LaBeouf). Mutt embodies
all that Hollywood remembers about the 1950s besides "McCarthyism,"
which is the leather-jacketed, rebel-without-a-cause type teenage
desperado and first avatar of the youth culture. For this reason,
Mutt rides a motorcycle like Marlon Brando's in The Wild
One and is always combing his D.A. hairdo like Edd, "Kookie,"
Byrnes on "77 Sunset Strip." That's how we are meant to know what
he stands for: the birth of the cool.
McCarthyism, too, gets a mention, by the way. For in spite of
liking Ike, Indy gets blacklisted and persecuted by FBI agents who
conform to the movie stereotypes of today -- being vicious and
stupid -- rather than those of the period for FBI agents. His
nervous university dean (Jim Broadbent) tells him that he himself
will have to resign as he can't be embroiled in "that kind of
controversy in this charged climate." He tells Indy that "I hardly
recognize this country anymore. The Government has got us seeing
communists in our soup" -- which you might think an odd sort of
complaint to make of the government in a movie that begins by
showing a gang of non-imaginary reds taking over an American
military base on American soil. Disgusted, Indy says he might go
off to Leipzig to teach. Presumably it has slipped his mind that
that would have made the government's case for his being a
subversive, since Leipzig was in communist East Germany at the
time.
Anyway, he doesn't go to Leipzig but battles the communists
simply as the bad guys du jour who, apart from a mention
or two of Stalin, now deceased, don't have any real existence as
such but are only the usual cannon fodder to Indy's one-man army.
All that matters is that the latter has sired Mutt out of Marion,
and Mutt will obviously continue the line on behalf of generations
of coolness yet unborn. It's sort of like a royal pedigree. His is
the house of Attitude, which is the royalty of cartoon-land, though
why anyone with a mental age greater than eleven would want to
spend any time there is more than I can fathom.
topics:
Hollywood, Military, Russia, Oil
