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. ;)