On Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom
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.
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