Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls: A Review

By John David Ebert

The original Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, had concerned the descent of a solar hero — hence, his antipathy to snakes, for snakes are usually lunar — into the underworld of Egyptian civilization in order to retrieve from the sunken depths of our perceptual field the Ark of the Covenant, the central fetish around which the Hebraic tradition had revolved. The significance of the retrieval was precisely that it was a religious object that had to be restored and brought into the field of focus of our modern, secular society, since the religious object becomes pars pro toto for the religious experience as a whole. It is precisely a sense of communion with the divine which we moderns have lost, and it was the goal of the first film to retrieve this lost experience as a way of bringing it to our attention and making the point that contact with a spirit world is indeed what we have lost in the building of modernity.

Read the rest of this entry »

Iron Man: A Review

By John David Ebert

In ancient mythology, blacksmith heroes are normally devious, crafty, morally ambiguous figures who cannot be trusted. Their creations are often faulty and sometimes redound fatally upon their users. Worse, they are often murderers. The name of Cain, for instance, who committed the world’s first murder in Biblical mythology, means “smith” and Tubal-cain later became the world’s first worker in bronze and metallurgy. In Greek mythology, Daedalus was a man who was chased out of the city of Athens for murdering his cousin Talos, of whom Daedalus was jealous since Talos was said to have invented the first saw after being inspired by finding the jawbone of a snake. In Scandinavian myth, Volund the smith was imprisoned on an island and hamstrung by a king who wished to prevent him from escaping so that he could use Volund’s talents for the making of weapons, but the crafty smith murdered the king’s two young sons and transformed their skulls into bowls and their eyeballs into jewels which he sent to the king as “gifts” before inventing wings and flying away from his island prison. Ancient societies seem to have been well aware of the warping effects of technology on the human personality. Read the rest of this entry »