Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom: A Fresh Look, 25 Years Later

By John David Ebert 

After a casual viewing of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom over the weekend, I decided that it would be fun to write a retroactive review of the film, which I thought actually contains some interesting implications for where we’re at now, twenty five years later. This was the second of the Indiana Jones films, made just a few years after the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1980, and it is the best of the sequels, which become gradually weaker with each subsequent entry in the series.  

The film is an almost textbook case of the descent of the solar hero into the underworld, where he fights through tests and trials in order to emerge reborn after his nightsea journey beneath the earth. In ancient Egypt, this was the myth of the sun god Re, who travelled each night on his solar barge along the nocturnal equivalent of the Nile, beneath the earth, travelling from West to East, where he made his way across a weirdly glowing, bioluminescent landscape filled with terrifying demons, monsters, and above all, the great Apophis serpent, which the god Set helped him to kill each night. Indiana Jones’s phobia of snakes is an interesting echo of this myth. 

But now take note of the film’s overarching structure: Jones and his two companions, the boy Short Round and the lounge singer Willie played by Kate Capshaw, drop down out of the clear blue sky, escaped from a crashed airplane, right into the middle of India. There, they wash ashore at a small Hindu village which has been devastated by a waste land situation caused by the abduction of all the children in the village, together with the theft of three magical Shankara stones, which are said to be sacred to the god Shiva. Jones agrees to travel to a mysterious palace in the middle of the jungle in order to retrieve the stones for the villagers. When he arrives, he is confronted by a beautiful palatial society of dancing Hindu women, elegantly dressed palace officials and a Maharaja who is only a young boy, effete and spoiled.

But this palace world of opulence and beauty turns out to be only a surface world of Apollinian appearances, concealing a darker, Dionysian world, a subterranean world, in fact, that lies below the palace and where Jones and his two sidekicks discover a cult of Kali worshippers in full swing, still practicing human sacrifice (in this case, by imitating the Aztecs and ripping out beating human hearts). The Kali worshippers are fervent and apparently in a trance, but they are utterly devout.

Jones decides to attempt to steal the three Shankara stones from them, but he and his sidekicks are captured, and he is momentarily turned into one of these irrational worshippers by being force fed some of their blood. Jones, however, snaps out of it and he and his companions escape, liberating the enslaved children which have been put to work in the mines below. The film climaxes with a flood of water that forces the emergence of the heroes from the underworld beside a cliff, where a dangerous and exciting scene on a wooden bridge follows. 

This is all good comic book mythology with flat two dimensional characters who are no more than walking masks. The entire film, in fact, exists in a two dimensional world that is made up of icons and archetypes without the slightest bit of three dimensional daylight complexity. But inside this comic strip landscape, I would like to suggest, lie some interesting mythic structures that are worth excavating.

The film is about the conflict between Modernity and Archaic Religiosity, and in this respect, at least, it seems to me to have been quite prescient about the world situation we find ourselves in right now. The film was released in 1984 before the breakout of the various religious fundamentalisms into high gear that took place in the subsequent decade of the nineties and two thousands: we recall the nerve gas attacks by the Aum Shunrykyu cults in Japan in the early nineties, for instance; the ethnic cleansing that went on in the former Yugoslavia all throughout that decade; Marshall Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate suicide cult; Waco, the Oklahoma City Bombing; and of course, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in the wake of the CIA abetted creation of the mujaheideen in Afghanistan, with a first attack on the World Trade Towers in 1993, followed by the death blow dealt them on 9/11.

The world is now locked, it seems, into a deadly battle between Modernity, or rather, a hypermodern, late phase consumer driven capitalism which seems intent upon sealing off the entire planet beneath an airtight dome of virtual reality in which the only thing of value seems to be the circulation of signs through a global economic metabolism; and a newly arisen and fervently strengthened return to archaic and outmoded passionate religiosity that creates core values out of death, blood and individual human sacrifice in the form of willing suicide bombers and deathcult members for whom the world is not worth living shorn of the deeper and darker emotions of pious religious frenzy.

Art is always a step or two ahead of what’s coming down the pike, and in the case of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, they seem to have been quite prescient about the major world conflict going on twenty five years later. That film was about the conflict between an archaic, bloodthirsty form of outmoded religiosity coming up against the mentality of a capitalist consumer society for which the treasures of the past have absolutely no religious significance whatsoever, but are fit to be collected and placed into museums, where they are tagged, catalogued and carted away into vast warehouses and forgotten about.

The underworld is not just the realm of the dead, but often functions in ancient narratives as the world of the values which the mainstream culture has rejected. Thus, in Greek Mythology, ancient Crete became identified with the underworld, since it personified archaic religious values of goddess worshipping bull jumpers and sacrificed kings long since rejected by the Homeric world of individual and very patriarchal warriors. In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, India itself, we note, serves as the underworld through which the solar hero makes his night sea journey, where he encounters the whole cast off realm of human sacrifice and irrational forms of ancient religiosity long since thrown aside as irrelevant within the world horizons of consumer driven late capitalism. But the struggle between the two modalities indicates that modernity may not have triumphed quite so cleanly after all: it may still have some reckoning to do with a past that it once thought discarded back into the archaic dark abysm of the human past with all the totems and taboos of the rest of superstitious humanity.

In the underworld, the values which are encountered by the solar hero on his nightsea journey can either be completely rejected or they can be wrestled with and in some way integrated and brought back to take their part in the superstructural world above. In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the values of archaic, fiercely religious humanity are totally and thoroughly rejected, but it is evident nowadays that this particular solution isn’t going to work. Despite Sam Harris’s fervent rejection of such values as incompatible with Modernity in his book The End of Faith, they aren’t going to go away anytime soon, and indeed, are most likely here to stay.

The Western consumer mentality isn’t simply going to triumph over darkness, irrationality and religious piety in the simplistic way that it thinks, by converting the entire earth to the religion of the dollar bill with nobody offering any objections. That’s not going to happen. Western global hypermodernity is going to have to ask itself some difficult and very deep questions that it has not yet resolved, for sweeping religion under the rug only generates a demonic and wrathful counterattack in the form of more and more converts and suicide bombers who are forced out of desperation to take greater and greater aim in order to gain some form of recognition.

When terrorists attack, they are not just being sadistic and vicious for no reason; they are actually signalling that their point of view has been neglected and rejected and that they will not stand for being simply dismissed out of hand. The more one closes one’s ears to them, as Sam Harris, for instance, does, the greater and more violent the counter reactions are going to be.

We had better start listening to what the other side wants and we had better start deciding just where we are going to build new temples for the Furies who demand their due. Otherwise, we are merely cloning new shopping malls and clearing out land for the construction of new suburbs in order to create a world built on lies and self-deception. The NIMBY’s of the world are soon going to find out that their nearest neighbors are happily becoming members of strange new cults with bizarre death rites and that there will soon be no more green suburban pastures for them to escape into with all their golf courses and whites only country clubs.

The religion of the dollar bill is a very poor excuse for the needs of the deep psyche, and the world is simply not going to submit to its transformation into a gigantic California suburb. No matter how many Blackberries, IPhones or Laptops we offer the world as bribes, there are some values, ancient, archaic and eternal, that are never going to go away and simply cannot be bought off by offering cheap electronic junk as substitutes. 

The human soul is like an ocean compared to such gadgets: far wider, deeper and more mysteriously unfathomable than any need which they could ever meet. It wants Death and death experiences and world horizons that build Death into them, and gadgets cannot meet this need, no matter how many of them are created or how clever they are.     

Synecdoche New York: A Movie Review

By John David Ebert

Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche New York, recently released on DVD, is his directorial debut and very possibly his finest work to date. Kaufman made himself famous as an auteur screenwriter in a medium which rejects the very idea of a screenwriter becoming an auteur, since film is primarily a director’s medium. Screenwriters are a dime a dozen in this business, and few of them ever manage to carve out recognizably distinct signature visions, since screenplays are usually so heavily trademarked with the director’s style and personality that there is usually not much left that can be credited as unique to the screenwriter. But Kaufman, beginning with Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, managed to rise above the limitations of the medium with a vision so wry and sardonically Kaufmannian that it was also immediately its own trademark; in the films that followed, such as Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it was evident that Kaufman’s own particular way of looking out at the world is unmistakably his own and as readily identifiable as, say, Stanley Kubrick’s. No one can duplicate the feel of a Stanley Kubrick film; Kaufman’s vision, it is becoming apparent, is just as inimitable.

In Synecdoche New York, Kaufman explores the phenomenon of time, ageing, senescence and death. The film is littered with references to Kafka and Proust; its opening scene of the film’s protagonist, Caden Cotard, waking up to an alarm clock talk show immediately reminds us of the opening of Groundhog Day, a film that explores similar themes; and its weaving in and out of the events of a play embedded within the film’s overarching narrative such that at times the viewer is not sure whether he is watching a scene from the play Caden is staging or an event in Caden’s life is thematically similar to the cartography explored by David Lynch in Inland Empire. Thus, the film belongs to a landscape molded out of the topography of other movies like A.I., Mulholland Drive, Jacob’s Ladder, or David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch. If you like those sorts of films, then you are likely to like this one; if not, then Synecdoche New York is probably not for you.

The story follows the life and course of Caden Cotard, a theater director who receives a MacArthur grant and decides to use it to stage the ultimate play set on the proscenium of a giant replica of New York City inside a hangar that looks like it could put Pennsylvania Station to shame. The remarkable thing about Caden’s play is that it takes him many decades to assemble; the cast is enormous, full of thousands of extras; and it is a story that is based upon his own life and experiences. No sooner do we watch an “episode” of Caden’s life than we see it mirrored and duplicated in his play.

But, the viewer soon notices, there is no audience for Caden’s play and it never receives a grand opening. Slowly, the viewer begins to realize that he the cinemagoer watching Synecdoche New York is the audience of Caden’s play, and that Caden’s play is not really a play at all but rather a metaphor for life itself. Life is a play and each of us is cast in supporting roles in everyone else’s lives, Kaufman seems to be saying. No one is the star because everyone is the star. And then we die. And, moreover, in undergoing the dying process, Kaufman adds rather originally, it seems to me, each of us is slowly stripped of his or her own individual traits, becoming more and more generically “human” as death approaches and less and less a unique phenomenon.

Now, of course, as the film’s title implies — Synecdoche New York deliberately parallels Schenectady, New York, where the film begins — the other main theme is the creation of a parallel reality to the physical world. Art is about creating a virtual double of the world which mirrors it in strange, tangential ways. But even more so, we today, as Jean Baudrillard never tired of pointing out, are involved in a global corporate endeavor to construct the world’s double, a gigantic virtual clone of the world that is essentially meaningless: the pyramids are duplicated as casino hotels in Las Vegas; the original Lascaux is closed to the public and then reopened as a carefully constructed facsimile; actors and celebrities, by descending into the electronic plasma pool of mediatic hyperreality are constantly engaged in the dangerous process of reproducing clones of themselves, clones which tend to destabilize and alienate the personalities of their originals; and so forth. Postmodern culture is engaged in creating a duplicate of the world, the earth’s double, if you will, constructed on a global scale.

Kaufman’s film explores this current hyperrealization and cloning of reality by electronic culture with its central metaphor of a duplicate of New York City built as the “stage” for Caden’s play. Everyone in Caden’s play is a “double” of a real person, himself, his girlfriends, etc., but these doubles are always less interesting than the real people they are based upon, for they are two-dimensional reflections, as are all mirror images, whether glass-based or lens based, of a real, three-dimensional and much more complex “originary” phenomenon that constitutes reality.

Another of Kaufman’s points: the film swallowed up the play, just as the planet has been engulfed by electronic optics. With the surrounding of the earth by satellites, as McLuhan pointed out, the earth was placed, for the first time inside a mechanical / electronic environment. The ubiquitous presence of the camera eye watching us all from orbit in outer space–the orbital space surrounding the earth which used to be occupied, once upon a time, by gods–has simultaneously transformed the entire planet into a gigantic theater with no spectators, only actors. We are all watching over these cities like playgoers watching actors on a stage, only the stage has been transformed and replaced by the electronic video monitor. Hence, with the death of the play as an art form, electronic technology has given it back to us in the form of the global video screen watched by each theater goer inside the flickering cavern of his own private living room. Now we watch each other, as we go about the business of constructing the world’s double.

But the main idea of Kaufman’s film is the passage of time: it is a unique attempt to capture the flow of time and its attendant emotions; the years slipping past you without notice, until one die somebody dies and you realize that decades have indeed gone by. You are older, as the Pink Floyd song goes, and the years are dwindling and the days are running out. People around you are dying and transforming into memories, taking up residence in your head, where they exist now only as ghostly reflections. Memory captures it, this flow, interrupting it, sustaining it, slowing it, but never stopping it except only momentarily.

We are all headed for death and there is nothing any of us can do to stop it. But in the meantime, we can write plays, build theaters and tell each other stories. It’s all we’ve got on this earth.

There may not be anything more.

The Rise of the Machines: A Contrarian View

By John Lobell 

Many, including John Ebert, have been seeing movies like Terminator: Salvation as growing out of our unease, perhaps even fear of the intrusion of machines into our lives. And, as Ebert points out, the far out science fiction of these movies is fast becoming real. If you regularly follow Ray Kurzweil’s KurzweilAI.net, you keep up on breaking news of computers millions of times faster than those we use today, alterations to our DNA, and chips being built into our brains. Read the rest of this entry »

X-Men Origins: Wolverine: A Movie Review 

By John David Ebert  

There is a scene in this movie that occurs early on which shows how Wolverine derived his enormous physical strength. He was part of a government experiment that involved injecting his bones with an indestructible metal called “adamantean.” We watch as Wolverine descends into a tank full of water and a series of needles inject his body at various points with a liquid form of this metal which coats all his bones, effectively transubstantiating their calcium into a mythical metal that is indestructible. Read the rest of this entry »

Terminator Salvation: A Movie Review

by John David Ebert 

When James Cameron’s film The Terminator came out in 1984, the idea of machines becoming sentient and eliminating human beings from the world may have seemed far-fetched, a mere science fiction premise for an entertaining 80s drive-in movie. (Yes, drive-ins still existed in the 80s). But now, 25 years later, with the fourth Terminator film having just been released, the idea is not only no longer far-fetched, but it has in fact become a reality.

       You don’t believe me? Read the rest of this entry »

Star Trek: A Movie Review

By John Lobell 

The new Star Trek movie is so highly satisfying because it introduces a richness of back-story into a franchise we know so well, and because it adds a mythological depth. This depth does not approach that of Star Wars, but it is there. And since we now have time travel (the young Spock meets the old Spock, played by Leonard Nemoy), we may even get to see the development of a mythological relationship between James Kirk and his father. Read the rest of this entry »

Knowing: A Movie Review

By John David Ebert

Great artists are always sensitive to changes in our environment that remain subliminal to the rest of us. They pick up these transformations – usually inflicted by new technologies — with their ant-like antennae, and narratize them as pictures which often dramatize scenarios of invasion. George Pal’s 1950s version of War of the Worlds, for instance, was not about aliens from another planet, but about the invasion of our society by television. Note how the aliens bathe their victims in floods of electromagnetic radiation just like the average denizen of our modern living rooms bathed in low frequency pulses fired at him at light speed from his electronic scanning box. Read the rest of this entry »

Watchmen: A Movie Review

by John David Ebert 

When I put a mask on my face, it instantly changes the relationship between you and me. Whereas, only moments ago, there was you—a three dimensional human being troubled by various difficulties—and me—a similar type of entity also with similar kinds of problems—now there is you and it, a third thing, a new entity that has entered into the relationship. This third entity, more often than not, evokes some type of strange, otherworldly being: a monster or a demon or an evil spirit, or else, if it is a mask of another human being, tends to evoke a cliché, such as, say, Richard Nixon. In either case, the I that was me only moments before has temporarily—one hopes—disappeared into another realm entirely, namely, the world of ritual, dream, myth, superstition, stereotypes and even clichés. It is, in other words, a flatter world, simpler than ours, more iconic, two-dimensional rather than three dimensional, in which beings tend to exist as eternal icons. Read the rest of this entry »

A Glance Into the Symbolic Landscapes of Tarzan

By John David Ebert 

Descent

If Edgar Rice Burroughs, with his earlier protagonist John Carter, Warlord of Mars, had in 1912 established the pattern of the superhero who arrives on the ground from the heavens above, then with his second creation — Tarzan, Lord of the Apes – he invented the idea of the superhero who emerges, Titan-like, from out of the earth itself. The narrative pattern in which Tarzan is raised by apes in Africa to become a literate, thinking man capable of walking the streets of Western cities is a disguised retelling of the Darwinian myth of human evolution from apes to civilization. For Tarzan, brought up amongst a tribe of African apes, is symbolically descended from beings of the earth, the same beings, no less, who have spent six or seven million years quietly constructing the human physical body beneath an enclosed canopy of African trees. By the time this body was ready, with Lucy and her people, to embark upon the traumas of the open savannah, it was simultaneously prepared for the descent of the human mind which took up its residence in this newly constructed body like a mother bird settling down to brood in her nest.

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The Strangely Distorted, and Weirdly Elongated World of James Bond (Unabridged Version)

By John David Ebert 

1. 

The first James Bond novel, Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, appeared in 1953, just as the Korean War was coming to an end and the C.I.A. was planning the removal of Mossadegh from office in Iran. Within a few years, the U.S. government would begin sending U-2 spyplanes on reconnaissance missions over Moscow, to which the Russians would respond by imprisoning the entire planet within the orbit of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik. Thus, in the world into which Fleming’s famous character was born, everyone was busy looking over everyone else’s shoulders. Indeed, Bond himself is essentially an extension of the human eyeball, cut loose from the body and sent roving across the planet to peer through walls and behind closed doors. If the Berlin Wall was Russia’s response to the Marshall Plan, then the West’s response to the Berlin Wall was James Bond, a man who specializes in boring through walls.  

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