Indiana Jones + UFOs = Amelia/2

[bloodyrosemccoy]

I know I’m a bit late to the game, but I finally figured out why I took the developments of Indy 4 completely in stride.

 

See, I loved Indy 4. It was exactly what I expected: a long, live action Saturday morning cartoon.  As such, I was fine with the plot and action, and didn’t quite get why everyone was up in arms over it.

 

Here’s why.

 

Picture, if you will, Amelia at ten or eleven years old.*  She has never actually watched Indiana Jones—at this point she’s a bit chicken about scary images in movies, and will be for a few years.  But she knows the stories intimately, and one of her buddies is obsessed with it and has posters, video games, and his own Indy costume. Amelia loves the idea of Indiana Jones as having all these adventures and looking for treasure and swashbuckling around, and spends hours imagining and playing out scenarios featuring her in the role of intrepid hero going into volcanoes to meet volcano people or finding a lost jungle city or something, or going on a Legends of the Hidden Temple search for some Valuable Artifact.** This is the real influence of the Indy movies: adventure games and discovery.

 

Now open this same Amelia’s backpack, and take a look at the enormous number of book dealing with all the standard Legendary Mysterious Things—UFOs, the Nazca drawings, the Loch Ness monster, the curse of the Hope Diamond, Atlantis, Mothman, Area 51, and more UFOs.  Yes! Eleven-year-old Amelia loves these stories!  She is not sure if she necessarily believes any of it,*** but it’s so damn much fun to read about that she can’t resist the pure intrigue value presented by it.  She will devour any story about saucers aliens (which she sees as a distinctive subgenre from other types of aliens, like Star Wars ones), has just seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and can tell you that the only interesting thing to have happened on her birthday is that it’s the anniversary of Betty and Barney Hill getting probed (at least till Talk Like A Pirate Day).  Plus, she really likes neon lights.

 

Right. Got that all firmly in your mind?  Now let’s come forward in time to last Friday.  Here’s Amelia, who has increased her age by 100% since that last flashback, in the theater watching Indy 4. And on the screen gets projected … the exact contents of Amelia’s eleven-year-old head: UFOs and swashbuckling adventure.

 

I’m not so much saying this was nostalgia, though it was a hefty dose of that.  I’m saying that as far as I was concerned, the content of this movie made absolute sense to me, because it meshes with an exact mindset I had.  If they’d stuck in something featuring Super Mario, it wouldn’t have even fazed me. I wasn't bugged by the religious imagery in Raiders or Last Crusade or its lack thereof in Temple and Kingdom. It's not about cohesion with legends—the Indiana Jones world follows the Lancre Principle, which I named for Terry Pratchett's kingdom where it is a principle: all the folklore is true. All of it. Even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff. ALL OF IT IS TRUE. God? Check. Aliens? Check. Voodoo? Check.

 

And that's how I was at that age. For me, that movie met me halfway, and so I have no complaints. Indy 4 was everything I could have expected.

 

 

*Coming up once I get hold of colored pencils: a bad drawing of Amelia at 15 years old, as part of the Draw Yerself As A Teenager Meme!  I had a lot of fun with that.

 

**Such as Napoleon’s tambourine or, to cite an example given by lycheetwistwhen talking about that game show, “Amelia Earhart’s jock strap.”  I’m not sure what she was actually trying to say, but this is going to become my standard example of a Valuable Artifact.

 

***I certainly never believed in the Aliens Taught Us Civilization idea.  As a kid I just thought it was weird that people thought we couldn’t, you know, invent farming or plumbing on our own; now I realize it’s the same reason I was always bothered by the idea that God taught us to do this stuff and we’d be a load of dumbasses without guidance.  And with the folklore classes I’ve taken that deal with aliens as either messianic, apocalyptic, or in the same nebulous-moral territory as faerie rings, I see where my reaction was coming from.

Comments

[wyndfire.livejournal.com]

I read all the Legendary Mysterious things as a kid too. I was positive I would grow up and discover the truth behind the Loch Ness Monster, especially. I spent hours coming up with theories, reading everything I could get my 8-year-old hands on, etc. Loved all that stuff. Still do. ;)

[xaandria.livejournal.com]

Exactly! I loved Indy 4. It was certainly more believable (to me, at least) than Raiders. And it was enjoyable. The only things that got me was the selective magnetism of the box--not the skull, but the box itself.

I honestly don't understand why people hate Indy 4. What exactly were they expecting, some deep and involved plot about the fragility of mankind? The entire Indy franchise is, as you said, a giant live-action swashbuckling cartoon complete with sucker punches and whips and manpurses and ophidiophobia. And villians with the sharpshooting skills of Stormtroopers.

Also, if you liked Close Encounters, you might want to take a road trip to the Devils Tower, WY KOA. They show the movie every night in an outdoor theater in the shadow of Devils Tower. It's creepy and an almost religious experience.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

As far as I could tell, the biggest complaints critics have been giving the new Indiana Jones movie is that it is too much like an Indiana Jones movie. (And they wouldn't be satisfied with attempts at intelligent commentary, either--look what happened when George Lucas tried to politicize Star Wars ...)

I hear a lot of "BUT WHY ALIENS" complaints, too, with bitching that it's somehow farfetched From a series that had magic rocks and hypnotism and voodoo dolls and a scene where they opened a box and then if you didn't close your eyes your FACE would fall off. Let's put this in perspective, people.

Yeah, I was interested in how the box only started sucking the warehouse goods to it when they mentioned it was magnetism. But maybe this is also cartoon physics that require consciousness to work--like gravity when Wile E. Coyote walks off a cliff. He has to notice it for it to work. I did like the line about how gold isn't magnetic. I was picturing the producers and writers after about half the shooting was over going, "SHIT! Gold isn't magnetic, is it?" And then to fix it they just had Shia go, "Gold's not magnetic!" and went on with the story.

That might be fun! Got me some family in Wyoming; I may be able to swing that.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

The only thing I had a problem with was the "it'll attract the metal in the gunpowder" bit at the beginning. Gunpowder is potassium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal. There is no ferromagnetic metal in gunpowder! Of course, they establish later with the "gold isn't magnetic" line that it can't really be magnetism, but why would Indy have thought it would work in the first place?

It's a pretty simple thing to ignore, though. Just sit back and enjoy the ride.

All in all: better than Temple of Doom, not as good as Raiders or Last Crusade. A fun matinee.

[lookingforwater.livejournal.com]

I'm just peeved that it was aliens. I mean, you know why. Because like, every other religious artifact gets to have Real Honest Divine Intervention With Gods And Everything, We Mean It, except for the one that belongs to South America? Their divine whatsit has to come from fucking aliens? They're not cool enough to have gods or something?

It's a haunted crystal skull supposedly used to will death by high priests in Eons Past. You don't need aliens. Aliens are overkill.

But you've heard all this before.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Hey, this is the Indyverse. For all we know them aliens could've kicked God's ass. We don't really know what kind of a thing the Indy god WAS, so it could be something equally goofy.

I see aliens the same way I see gods, though, so that may bias me, too.

[shriekingsnape.livejournal.com]

wow. you have a long and eloquent answer to the "why does everyone hate it" question.

personally, it think it is for the same reason people hate the SW prequels. (similar, at least. I think the SW prequels are awkwardly told but very good stories)

But back why they hated it. Because they wanted to hate it.

Call me cynical, but I think people walked into those theatres having already decided that the movie was not going to be good enough and that they weren't going to enjoy it.

[placetohide.livejournal.com]

Totally unrelated to your post, but the current LJ writer's block question is about pirates vs. ninjas, in case you wanted more exampled of it. If you look through the answers to the writer's block, you could probably find lots of examples of people's opinions on the matter.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

NO WAI. *looks*

You, sir, have made my evening. THANKS *tips hat*

[killabee886.livejournal.com]

I didn't hate the movie either. It was everything I expected it to be, and I will see it again.

However, I think the ending was way too blatant than the other Indy movies. It would've been like Jesus coming down himself and giving the Holy Grail to Indy. The aliens appearing at the end was way too much for me. I would of liked it if it was a little more subtle.

Oh and surviving a nuclear blast in a coolerrator, if the blast didn't kill him, you think the fall from over 100 ft would've. Oh well, still like seeing Indy kicking Soviet butt.

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

Actually, the idea that ET visitors were the basis for all sorts of "gods" and similar myths is one of the few conspiracy theories I actually like. But that's mostly because it one-ups religions, which are among my least favorite sorts of myths.

What bugged me about the Indy Aliens (ok, "interdimensional beings", in which case why did they need a flying saucer?!?) was that they were so humanoid, with a slight leaning towards the Giger-esque. WTF is up with that?

[chaosvizier.livejournal.com]

Ah, Chariots Of The Gods, you were such a fun book.

I agree with your perspective. And I'm not really a hater of the movie. It was just not what I was expecting. Now I'm more braced for it and can deal. I just figure, Indy is especially about mythology, including but not limited to religious symbols. Surely there are other mythological "artifacts" out there that could generate a story above and beyond "interdimensional alien travellers".

Picture this. Commies/Nazis/enemy of choice raid London museums and steal old stuff. Indy looks into stuff and discovers they're trying to find the new resting place of Excalibur, for as legend tells, "whosoever draws this sword from this stone shall be rightwise King of all England", which would eliminate the need for a military campaign, by their reckoning. Indy follows/is followed around England to Stonehenge and Glastonbury and stuff. Wacky hijinks ensue. Bad guys die. Sword remains safe until it is needed. Indy bangs some British chick, gets knighted by the Queen, and all is well.

See? Totally good movie. No space men. ;-)