wednesday, march 12, 2008
Raiders of the Lost Ark
“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” - Joseph Campbell, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”There is a compelling power to Raiders of the Lost Ark that electrified audiences in 1981 and has continued to make the film a fantastic experience even for those who have seen it countless times since.
It is a fact all the more remarkable since the charm of the franchise sags visibly in the films that followed it. While the sequels mimic the structure and symbolism laid out in the first installment, they rarely transcend the formula itself as the original did consistently and are painfully weakened for it.
When Raiders of the Lost Ark was released in 1981 it was a sensation on par with George Lucas’ previous triumph Star Wars and Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws. As much as it was heralded as an exemplar of action/adventure genre, the way it seemed to touch the American psyche suggested something more - a point reinforced by the ensuing installment’s failure to match it in that respect.
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While Star Wars was an unapologetic revisiting of the classic science fiction, cliff-hanger style matinee films of Lucas’ youth Raiders of the Lost Ark cast a wider net encompassing the genre of adventure and western. But its heart was still in the classic tropes of the trailer reel short.
The idea of genre films invoking past forms and creating a sense of familiarity for the viewing audience has often been seen in a pejorative light to more ‘classic’ films that deny these same types of conventions.
The French New wave, obviously, turned this state of affairs on its head by using the trappings of genre create a loose structure that the filmmakers were able to release their creative energy through. It was the one thing you could hold onto while the rest of your preconceptions of film were being tossed to the winds.
While the French were busy deconstructing the genre, Lucas and Spielberg’s experiment was to rebuild it but with the techniques and insight the previous generation of filmmakers had bequeathed them. Raiders of the Lost Ark is their most fantastic success in this respect.
By the time Lucas took on Raiders of the Lost Ark he had already an avowed disciple of Joseph Campbell and, perhaps, it is this influence that works so spectacularly with the film.
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Because Jones, unknowingly on the path of the monomyth, describes this type of “folklore” as one of the great dangers of archeology for keeping the truth from its practitioners. The search for what he believes is truth blinds Jones from the true object of his own quest.
Of course, the onset of post structuralism and the oh-so-nouveau theory of Derrida and Foucalut have led to Campbell’s ideas to be dismissed as quaint or worse. Certainly his mish-mash of Jung, Joyce and just about every world religion had much to do with the goofy multitheism that is prevalent today. Follow your bliss, indeed.
All of which may well be but while the use of the hero myth might be the inspiration which drives the symbolism in Raiders of the Lost Ark the film rises above it and finds itself taking on even more profound philosophical issues.
This might be why the action sequences – which are done to perfection – seem more powerful in Raiders of the Lost Ark than in the sequels. You, as the observer, are more invested in the quest due to the underpinnings of meaning Lucas and Spielberg fill the films with. If Jones dies your own quest is thwarted as well.
In the Campbellian monomyth, the hero starts in the ordinary world, and receives a call to enter an unusual world of strange powers and events. But Raiders of the Lost Ark turns that upside down to start with it’s hero already in the strange world at the onset. He’s like Dante lost in the wilderness but instead of attaining paradise he’s just trying to find his way back to the ordinary world.
The structure of the film is almost a treatise on Platonic realism. The appearance of his shadow on the wall of the Nepalese bar is an almost perfect cinematic representation of the "Allegory of the Cave" (hell, the film starts with Jones entering a cave). When the camera finally follows Ravenwood’s gaze and beholds the hero he seems small and impotent in comparison.
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The totems of his character – taken deliberately from the amoral Fred C. Dobbs played by Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of Sierra Madre – are all in evidence from the start, jacket, hat and whip. Jones certainly inherits the moral ambiguity of his archetypical forbear but his totems bequeathed by the loutish Dobbs give him power only in his shadow-world and not in reality.
His normal visage, shorn of his artifacts, is bumbling and lost almost without his inherent masculinity. He stumbles around clumsily in the daylight, his glasses magnifying the sense of his myopia.
Jones’ journey is to move upward ontologically to the light of the pure form – God if you will, or pure meaning, perhaps. The Ark represents this or, at least, the container that possesses the light that will make the shadow substance. It is, of course, a Mcguffin (although one that Spielberg interesting imbues with a degree of personality as well with the odd scene in the hull of the ship when it burns away the Nazi symbol).
The true object of his quest is Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen). By contrast, Marion also starts out in her own armor – dressed as a man and assuming a male role. Abandoned by Jones and bereft of her father, she’s taken on the male role and even competes as an equal in male games. As her relationship with Jones rekindles her costume regularly evolves to more and more feminine garb until she is almost naked on the bridge of the ship and accepts the gift of a man’s coat to cover her nakedness.
Rene Belloq (Paul Freeman) is the opposite side of the coin. He appears to have more substance – wearing white and that dashing old-country accent – but he cruelly understand that there is no form beneath the appearance.
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“You and I are very much alike,” he tells Jones. “Archeology is our religion, yet we have both fallen from the pure faith. Our methods have not differed as much as you pretend. I am but a shadowy reflection of you. It would take only a nudge to make you like me. To push you out of the light.”
It is not by chance that the Frenchman seeks both prizes that Jones pursues. He hopes, as Jones doesn’t quite understand, that Ravenwood can complete him as well. His seduction of her is the one time his cynicism seems to crack and he allows himself sincerity.
Her refusal of him sets him on the path of destruction as much as Jones’ abandonment of the Ark as his goal redeems him.
Despite this, the journey, or quest, is what is important. Facing the trials is the key to Jones’ growing self awareness. Of course, as he progresses further and further he finds his totems are less and less effective. In the end, he loses them entirely and simply dons the garb of his nemesis. The outward appearance is irrelevant at this point.
There is a compelling philosophical conceit that holds evil as the absence of good. If the absolute good is equivalent to the absolute truth in the Platonic conception, evil is that which is void of meaning. The Nazis, who cover themselves in fancy uniforms and the semblance of order are the incarnation of this completely.
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One way that this theme helps the movie tremendously is in the amount of sexual tension that ensues as Jones and Ravenwood’s romance rekindles.
If there is any doubt about this look at the fantastically clumsy sexual frustration scene in the sequel Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Not only does there not seem to be a whit of attraction between Jones and Wilhemina Scott their pacing frustrated around their rooms reeks more of plot contrivance than desperate desire.
In fact, for a film whose most erotic shot is simply of a woman’s bare back Raiders of the Lost Ark is simply awash in lurid sexual imagery. The cave at the start of the film is disturbingly vaginal and fits nicely with the idea of the character searching for truth – nope, not gonna find it going back there, buddy.
The whip, and the fear of snakes is a treasure trove of sexual imagery that any good Freudian should have a field day with. As George Carlin once famously noted, you don’t have to be Fellini to figure out what is going on.
The climax of the film for Jones is not the opening the Ark but the decision to try and save Ravenwood instead of the prize he has fought so hard to win. In the desert he left Marion in captivity in order to unearth the Ark, choosing the relic he believed to manifest the truth he sought over her.
When he finally confronts the Nazis and Belloq on the island he threatens to destroy the Ark in order to save Ravenwood. That he is unable to follow through is not important – the quest for meaning is too primal to be pushed aside, that would be tantamount to self destruction. What matters is he chose the true meaning at last.
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Jones and Ravenwood, who choose not to behold the light and the truth are saved – they cannot transcend their shadow form but they can deny becoming immaterial and they can find the meaning within themselves.
In the end, Jones and Ravenwood are shown in regular street clothes, the false trapping discarded. Instead of the bumbling professor Jones looks in control and complete (the glasses are gone as well). Ravenwood wears proper women’s clothes and, although she offers to buy Jones a drink – the male role – it’s clearly in jest.
The iconic final scene is logically interpreted as the single ‘true’ Ark swallowed in the immense warehouse of empty boxes. Of course, it could be a warehouse of true Arks – each one holding power for one individual man seeking it in unwitting error.
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