March 5, 2025 • 21 mins
Lydia welcomes you to her attic room to talk about her love for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Come curl up under a granny square blanket and discuss the sublime, the painful origins of the adventure genre, and the excellence of Marion Ravenwood.
Attributions:
- Opening music: Struggling performed by the Johnny Dodds Trio, obtained from the Open Music Archive, licensed under the Public Domain.
- Closing music: Beautiful Cinematic Piano Music by Denis-Pavlov-Music used with permission under the Pixabay License.
- Soundscape: Various clips used with permission under the Pixabay License. Mourning dove sound clip by Spanac used with permission from the Free Sounds Library under the Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hi! Come on in and spend some time with the film hobbyist. My name is Lydia and I love movies.
(00:30):
We're sitting here in my attic room. I'm in an old desk chair with cracks in the
pleather lining. You're sitting on a forest green Walmart futon with a black
metal frame. It's not the most comfortable seat in the world but it has
a history. I've watched a lot of movies there. Sorry if it's a bit chilly up
(00:52):
here. The insulation isn't great. You can reach for that granny square blanket if
you get cold. Since this is your first visit I've thought a lot about which
movie to talk about. I know that you can tell a lot about someone from their
movies. I'm one of those people who comes over and spends half the time
(01:13):
looking at shelves. What books do you have crammed in layer on layer? What
blue rays are next to the TV? What games? And I've decided that as good a movie as
any to introduce myself and how I see movies is Steven Spielberg's 1981
classic Raiders of the Lost Ark. This is one of those movies so ubiquitous that
(01:37):
even if you haven't seen it you've seen something from it. It's often parodied.
Its iconography is repurposed and reused. It practically defines the adventure
genre and I think it's a perfect film. Now what do I mean by a perfect film?
First of all I mean a film that exhibits a fully executed vision. The writers, the
(02:01):
directors, the production team, the actors, the composers, all of them works
together to create a single unified whole without a weak link. If I were to
rate the craftsmanship of this film I would have to give it five stars. You
might disagree. That's fine but that's how I see it. I'm not saying this film is
(02:25):
important art. Far from that. If I were to rate the thematic significance of
this film I'd give it one star. This film is pure fluff and that's not a bad thing.
This film is a 1930s adventure serial. It's good guys versus bad guys. It's
archetype and thrill and excitement. It isn't interested in the finer points of
(02:49):
colonialism or the moral dubiousness of grave robbing. It isn't interested in
sexual ethics either. It doesn't need to be. This movie is here to take you on a
ride and I think it does that with excellence. I love this movie. I've
watched it more times than I can count. I came to it a little bit later than some.
(03:12):
I've always had a low tolerance for scares. If you choose to come back and
visit you'll find I have a complicated relationship with horror movies. As in
I'm very interested in them but I can't actually watch very many and so I didn't
watch this movie until I was probably 12. Even then I don't think I watched the
(03:33):
finale of this movie with my eyes open until I was much older. But we had a copy
of it on VHS recorded off TV and we had one of those chunky portable TVs with a
VCR attached and I know that the summer I was 16 was particularly difficult for
teenage drama reasons. So I spent a lot of time hiding in my room alternating
(03:56):
between watching a particular BBC miniseries and this movie. Again I don't
know how many times I watched it but it was a lot. So why? It isn't just the
excellent craftsmanship, the story and acting choices, the music and stunts, the
set pieces and it certainly isn't the excellent brainlessness of this movie. My
(04:20):
personal rankings have so much to do with the feeling a film gives me, the way
I connect with it and thrill over it and I think there are two big factors for
why I love this movie so much. I really connect with the adventure genre. A hero
or a group of people coming together to accomplish a task or to find something
(04:43):
in the midst of an exciting landscape just scratches an itch. But it isn't the
ploddy nature or the found family or the romance that stands out. It's the
atmosphere. It's the presence of the sublime. The sublime is an aesthetic
principle largely outlined by British and German philosophers in the 18th
(05:05):
century. I'm sorry if this is all a bit pretentious. I learned about it in
college in my literature classes. It's sort of a foil to beauty. It's darker
cousin. Beauty is associated with peace, with rest. It's a sunny day in a field of
flowers, the birds singing while a brook chirps. It's symmetry and order. The
(05:29):
sublime is danger and excitement. It's thunderstorms and tumultuous seas, a
steep mountain path lost in the fog. It's fascinating ugliness, the attraction of
chaos and I love it. The 19th century romantics were obsessed with the sublime
(05:50):
and their works paved the way for most of modern speculative fiction, fantasy,
sci-fi, horror and yes adventure. The sublime is a feeling, thrill, excitement,
awe and I think Raiders of the Lost Ark revels in the sublime. John Williams'
(06:14):
score does a lot of work but you can't discount Douglas Slocum's
cinematography, the way he captures how light falls through trees in the jungle
or the many shadows Indy finds himself emerging from and most of all the
direction of Steven Spielberg. This film drips with atmosphere. It's in the
(06:38):
decision to follow Indy and shadow, the pacing of the temple heist in the
beginning. It's that moment Marion pulls out the medallion and the candle
splutters sparking in her eyes. It's the decision to open the Well of Souls under
thunder and lightning which a thunderstorm in the middle of the
desert where no rain actually falls, that's the kind of thing you do just for
(07:02):
atmosphere. It's the ponderous camera movements, how it pulls slowly over the
floor of snakes or the sunlight shining down on the staff of Ra in the map room.
And Raiders of the Lost Ark follows the sublime to its natural conclusions. It's
supernatural conclusions actually. It's there in the aesthetic choices yes but
(07:28):
it also translates to the story itself. George Lucas and Philip Kaufman smartly
let the story fall away from a world of pure reason into the world of sublime
supernaturality. The modern world of adventure films takes supernaturality as
(07:48):
a given but it wasn't necessarily that way before Raiders. The most influential
adventure stories took an air of scientific explanation for its
credulity stretching hijinks. Jules Verne's stories for example or Edgar
Rice Burroughs Tarzan. It isn't magic that makes Tarzan be able to speak ape.
(08:11):
It's a fudged sort of science assuming that animals can communicate with each
other in their own way. Now there was magic of a sort in pre-indie adventure
stories but to talk about them we actually do have to address one of those
pesky thematic ideas that Raiders of the Lost Ark isn't particularly interested
(08:32):
in and that's colonialism. The adventure genre exists because of colonialism and
that makes me kind of sad. I really like adventure stories but the whole premise
of the genre is that there are unexplored places of our world hidden
corners that contain lost cities or civilizations of untold riches and
(08:55):
secret knowledge. Unexplored by whom? Hidden from whom? And clearly the
civilizations exist so it isn't them. They clearly don't count as people the
same way our protagonists do. There's a kind of manifest destiny to adventure
stories that white people lay some claim to every corner of the world and although
(09:20):
some push back and concede that maybe there are corners that can't be
conquered but in both of these we have to acknowledge the idea of othering.
There are other people who aren't white westerners and they are either savage
monsters or exotic angels something more than human and magic is wrapped up in
(09:43):
all of that. They have primitive religions and beliefs and in some stories
those beliefs turn out to be true. A good deal of Egypt based stories fall into
that category but in others these savage monsters or exotic beauties are easily
won over by science the conquering truth of Western civilization. We see this in
(10:05):
the cold open of Raiders how Indy understands that the spiritual beliefs
about the temple are just there to hide well-constructed booby traps and how
bellock uses the superstitions of the natives to rob them blind but what's
interesting is that the Ark isn't a made-up thing from an invented religion
(10:27):
practiced by savages. It's a backbone of ancient Jewish tradition and three out
of four of the storytellers here Spielberg, Kaufman and screenwriter
Lawrence Kasdan are Jewish. The lost artifact here with genuine power comes
straight out of Sunday school and it's Jewish spiritual power that conquers the
(10:51):
scientific Nazis who assume they can bulldoze the desert for a weapon they
can control. As a lover of the adventure genre and someone who cares about
thematic conversations this movie isn't overtly engaged in it's a real relief to
see the supernatural divorced a little from othering colonialism and allowing
(11:13):
that the colonizing Nazis are literally melted by their attempts to own the
world. It's also a big reason why I'm very much not a fan of Temple of Doom
which is gross in its cultural depictions of all kinds and a piece of
why I prefer the Last Crusade relying on Christians adjacent mythologies of the
(11:33):
Holy Grail even though I have to admit that the Crusades were one big attempt
at colonization. All that to say that the supernatural experience stuff is pure
sublime. It's this dark dangerous thing we can't understand. The idea of lost and
(11:53):
hidden artifacts, of the specific mystery to be uncovered, that spine-tingling
thrill of discovery or that which cannot be discovered all of that is the
sublime and the climax of this film is not a fight or a chase or even an action
set piece it's the opening of the Ark and the discovery of the dangerous
(12:17):
alluring unknowable power inside. Indy survives by respecting the sublime, by
bowing to it and allowing himself enough awe to shut his eyes while we the
audience get the full darkly glorious face melting spectacle. Science doesn't
(12:38):
win. Reason doesn't win. Beauty and peace and order do not win. Chaos wins and the
best we can do is box it up and not touch it.
I said there were two big factors for why Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of my
(12:59):
favorite movies and the second is the one the only Marian Ravenwood. I don't
think this movie works without her and I think you can look at the other two
classic indie movies and know exactly what's missing. Part of the legend of
this film is that Steven Spielberg wanted to make a James Bond movie and
this was pitched to him by George Lucas as being the closest he could get as an
(13:24):
American. A grand trope of the James Bond film is the Bond girl which usually
comes in one of two flavors. She's either a convenient bombshell Bond
seduces along the way or she's a femme fatale come to seduce him to destroy him.
There is a third category of hot and skillful babe whom Bond wins over.
(13:45):
Modern Bond girls often go this direction which really just makes her an
update of flavor one. Marian is almost the last kind except she very much isn't.
She's much closer to the plucky young woman trope usually seen in detective
novels. A young woman often boyish at heart who assists the older detective in
(14:07):
his work. She isn't the most skilled but she has Viv and Pep and Moxie. In those
stories the detective isn't romantically interested in the plucky young woman.
She's more likely to have an age-appropriate sweetheart. So you can
see the limits here but Marian is a character designed to stand on her own
(14:29):
two feet. Yes it is weird that she and Indy had a relationship ten years before
the movie. She refers to that age as being a child though Karen Allen was 30
when she played the role so that does get us closer to the age of consent than
George Lucas's original idea. But I appreciate that Marian is in control of
(14:53):
every part of her relationship with Indy. When Indy first walks through her door
he gives her a charming smile while Marian gives him a classic smooth
speech about his appearance and then she sucker punches him. We see her rage throw
her a little off kilter as she tries to dismiss the past but she's not conceding
(15:14):
any ground about what he did to her. He tries to ask about the headpiece
dismissing its significance and offering her a wad of cash. Marian doesn't give
him the piece even though she's literally wearing it she tells him to
come back tomorrow. It's Marian who insists on coming with Indy to see the
(15:37):
quest through. When she finds herself kidnapped and discovers Indy won't
rescues her she uses her high drinking tolerance to escape which would have
worked if not for the convenient appearance of Tote. While she is
helpless in the Well of Souls she initially refuses Indy's offer to carry
her. Her yells of fear are comical unlike Kate Capshaw's incessant screams in the
(16:02):
sequel. While she ends up trapped in the plane later and must be rescued by Indy
she ends up there because she knocks out the pilot to save Indy and gets stuck in
the plane so she can use the guns to again rescue him. When Indy and Marian do
have a romantic scene Indy is bruised and injured and whimpering and Marian is
(16:26):
the one who does the seducing. She is the one in control and that's cool.
Marian is a character who challenges Indy at every turn. Yeah she sometimes
makes life more difficult for him but she also talks to him like an equal. She's
(16:47):
smart and scrappy and ready for a challenge. Again one of the reasons
Temple of Doom fails as a sequel is that there isn't anyone to match Indy like
this. Willy is a mess and while short round rules he is a child. His bravado
crumbles and while that might bring pathos it means that Indy's character
(17:10):
suffers as a result. A huge reason why the Last Crusade is a close second to
Raiders is that Henry Jones Sr. is another character who matches and
challenges Indy as an equal. That dynamic, that taking down a peg of Indy, that
refusal to let him fully be a James Bond level mythic hero makes the good Indy
(17:34):
films stand out. Of course Marian isn't just a scrappy girl with swagger. The
Nepal sequence gives us a girl with layers. Yes she can drink a man under the
table. Yes she runs a bar and has a level of authority. Yes she has female rage
(17:54):
against Indy and her dad and scoffs at their archaeological loves. But then we
get to see Marian alone. Before the adventure, before the danger, Marian gets
a wordless scene. This MacGuffin of a medallion really mattered to her dad. It
(18:16):
was his life's work and yeah he dragged her all across the world and left her
stranded in Nepal. But she carries that medallion around her neck. It matters to
her. She pulls it out, her large eyes glassy with awe and feeling. You can see
(18:38):
her love for her dad there. All that childhood belief buried under layers of
cynicism. And then she looks at the cash on her hand. There's a way out. She looks
conflicted. She looks back at the medallion, apologetic. Then she looks back
at the cash and grins hanging up the medallion. In this short scene absolutely
(19:04):
filled with the sublime by the way, we understand Marian's wounds. Her
understanding of the situation despite her insistence to the contrary and her
absolute drive to survive and escape. While Marian is beautiful, she defies
(19:24):
being a sex symbol. While she is wily, she also gets to be goofy. While she is
petty, she is also serious. Marian is not a bond girl. She's a delightfully
rounded character. Complicated but also at home in the broadness of the adventure
(19:46):
genre. It's a character that makes me feel seen and one that makes me wish for
an entirely different set of indie sequels. Ones where she gets to be a
co-adventurer with Indy. Where he isn't James Bond and they are somehow a
dysfunctional team. And maybe that's a big part of why I watched this film
(20:07):
countless times the summer I was 16. Longing to escape to a world where women
are more than some man's fantasy. One filled with thunder and sudden gusts of
wind and spluttering torches. With awe and danger and wonder. A perfect film. The
(20:30):
kind that I can use to introduce myself and how I see movies.
Thanks for coming.
Hi! Come on in and spend some time with the film hobbyist. My name is Lydia and I love movies.
(00:30):
We're sitting here in my attic room. I'm in an old desk chair with cracks in the
pleather lining. You're sitting on a forest green Walmart futon with a black
metal frame. It's not the most comfortable seat in the world but it has
a history. I've watched a lot of movies there. Sorry if it's a bit chilly up
(00:52):
here. The insulation isn't great. You can reach for that granny square blanket if
you get cold. Since this is your first visit I've thought a lot about which
movie to talk about. I know that you can tell a lot about someone from their
movies. I'm one of those people who comes over and spends half the time
(01:13):
looking at shelves. What books do you have crammed in layer on layer? What
blue rays are next to the TV? What games? And I've decided that as good a movie as
any to introduce myself and how I see movies is Steven Spielberg's 1981
classic Raiders of the Lost Ark. This is one of those movies so ubiquitous that
(01:37):
even if you haven't seen it you've seen something from it. It's often parodied.
Its iconography is repurposed and reused. It practically defines the adventure
genre and I think it's a perfect film. Now what do I mean by a perfect film?
First of all I mean a film that exhibits a fully executed vision. The writers, the
(02:01):
directors, the production team, the actors, the composers, all of them works
together to create a single unified whole without a weak link. If I were to
rate the craftsmanship of this film I would have to give it five stars. You
might disagree. That's fine but that's how I see it. I'm not saying this film is
(02:25):
important art. Far from that. If I were to rate the thematic significance of
this film I'd give it one star. This film is pure fluff and that's not a bad thing.
This film is a 1930s adventure serial. It's good guys versus bad guys. It's
archetype and thrill and excitement. It isn't interested in the finer points of
(02:49):
colonialism or the moral dubiousness of grave robbing. It isn't interested in
sexual ethics either. It doesn't need to be. This movie is here to take you on a
ride and I think it does that with excellence. I love this movie. I've
watched it more times than I can count. I came to it a little bit later than some.
(03:12):
I've always had a low tolerance for scares. If you choose to come back and
visit you'll find I have a complicated relationship with horror movies. As in
I'm very interested in them but I can't actually watch very many and so I didn't
watch this movie until I was probably 12. Even then I don't think I watched the
(03:33):
finale of this movie with my eyes open until I was much older. But we had a copy
of it on VHS recorded off TV and we had one of those chunky portable TVs with a
VCR attached and I know that the summer I was 16 was particularly difficult for
teenage drama reasons. So I spent a lot of time hiding in my room alternating
(03:56):
between watching a particular BBC miniseries and this movie. Again I don't
know how many times I watched it but it was a lot. So why? It isn't just the
excellent craftsmanship, the story and acting choices, the music and stunts, the
set pieces and it certainly isn't the excellent brainlessness of this movie. My
(04:20):
personal rankings have so much to do with the feeling a film gives me, the way
I connect with it and thrill over it and I think there are two big factors for
why I love this movie so much. I really connect with the adventure genre. A hero
or a group of people coming together to accomplish a task or to find something
(04:43):
in the midst of an exciting landscape just scratches an itch. But it isn't the
ploddy nature or the found family or the romance that stands out. It's the
atmosphere. It's the presence of the sublime. The sublime is an aesthetic
principle largely outlined by British and German philosophers in the 18th
(05:05):
century. I'm sorry if this is all a bit pretentious. I learned about it in
college in my literature classes. It's sort of a foil to beauty. It's darker
cousin. Beauty is associated with peace, with rest. It's a sunny day in a field of
flowers, the birds singing while a brook chirps. It's symmetry and order. The
(05:29):
sublime is danger and excitement. It's thunderstorms and tumultuous seas, a
steep mountain path lost in the fog. It's fascinating ugliness, the attraction of
chaos and I love it. The 19th century romantics were obsessed with the sublime
(05:50):
and their works paved the way for most of modern speculative fiction, fantasy,
sci-fi, horror and yes adventure. The sublime is a feeling, thrill, excitement,
awe and I think Raiders of the Lost Ark revels in the sublime. John Williams'
(06:14):
score does a lot of work but you can't discount Douglas Slocum's
cinematography, the way he captures how light falls through trees in the jungle
or the many shadows Indy finds himself emerging from and most of all the
direction of Steven Spielberg. This film drips with atmosphere. It's in the
(06:38):
decision to follow Indy and shadow, the pacing of the temple heist in the
beginning. It's that moment Marion pulls out the medallion and the candle
splutters sparking in her eyes. It's the decision to open the Well of Souls under
thunder and lightning which a thunderstorm in the middle of the
desert where no rain actually falls, that's the kind of thing you do just for
(07:02):
atmosphere. It's the ponderous camera movements, how it pulls slowly over the
floor of snakes or the sunlight shining down on the staff of Ra in the map room.
And Raiders of the Lost Ark follows the sublime to its natural conclusions. It's
supernatural conclusions actually. It's there in the aesthetic choices yes but
(07:28):
it also translates to the story itself. George Lucas and Philip Kaufman smartly
let the story fall away from a world of pure reason into the world of sublime
supernaturality. The modern world of adventure films takes supernaturality as
(07:48):
a given but it wasn't necessarily that way before Raiders. The most influential
adventure stories took an air of scientific explanation for its
credulity stretching hijinks. Jules Verne's stories for example or Edgar
Rice Burroughs Tarzan. It isn't magic that makes Tarzan be able to speak ape.
(08:11):
It's a fudged sort of science assuming that animals can communicate with each
other in their own way. Now there was magic of a sort in pre-indie adventure
stories but to talk about them we actually do have to address one of those
pesky thematic ideas that Raiders of the Lost Ark isn't particularly interested
(08:32):
in and that's colonialism. The adventure genre exists because of colonialism and
that makes me kind of sad. I really like adventure stories but the whole premise
of the genre is that there are unexplored places of our world hidden
corners that contain lost cities or civilizations of untold riches and
(08:55):
secret knowledge. Unexplored by whom? Hidden from whom? And clearly the
civilizations exist so it isn't them. They clearly don't count as people the
same way our protagonists do. There's a kind of manifest destiny to adventure
stories that white people lay some claim to every corner of the world and although
(09:20):
some push back and concede that maybe there are corners that can't be
conquered but in both of these we have to acknowledge the idea of othering.
There are other people who aren't white westerners and they are either savage
monsters or exotic angels something more than human and magic is wrapped up in
(09:43):
all of that. They have primitive religions and beliefs and in some stories
those beliefs turn out to be true. A good deal of Egypt based stories fall into
that category but in others these savage monsters or exotic beauties are easily
won over by science the conquering truth of Western civilization. We see this in
(10:05):
the cold open of Raiders how Indy understands that the spiritual beliefs
about the temple are just there to hide well-constructed booby traps and how
bellock uses the superstitions of the natives to rob them blind but what's
interesting is that the Ark isn't a made-up thing from an invented religion
(10:27):
practiced by savages. It's a backbone of ancient Jewish tradition and three out
of four of the storytellers here Spielberg, Kaufman and screenwriter
Lawrence Kasdan are Jewish. The lost artifact here with genuine power comes
straight out of Sunday school and it's Jewish spiritual power that conquers the
(10:51):
scientific Nazis who assume they can bulldoze the desert for a weapon they
can control. As a lover of the adventure genre and someone who cares about
thematic conversations this movie isn't overtly engaged in it's a real relief to
see the supernatural divorced a little from othering colonialism and allowing
(11:13):
that the colonizing Nazis are literally melted by their attempts to own the
world. It's also a big reason why I'm very much not a fan of Temple of Doom
which is gross in its cultural depictions of all kinds and a piece of
why I prefer the Last Crusade relying on Christians adjacent mythologies of the
(11:33):
Holy Grail even though I have to admit that the Crusades were one big attempt
at colonization. All that to say that the supernatural experience stuff is pure
sublime. It's this dark dangerous thing we can't understand. The idea of lost and
(11:53):
hidden artifacts, of the specific mystery to be uncovered, that spine-tingling
thrill of discovery or that which cannot be discovered all of that is the
sublime and the climax of this film is not a fight or a chase or even an action
set piece it's the opening of the Ark and the discovery of the dangerous
(12:17):
alluring unknowable power inside. Indy survives by respecting the sublime, by
bowing to it and allowing himself enough awe to shut his eyes while we the
audience get the full darkly glorious face melting spectacle. Science doesn't
(12:38):
win. Reason doesn't win. Beauty and peace and order do not win. Chaos wins and the
best we can do is box it up and not touch it.
I said there were two big factors for why Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of my
(12:59):
favorite movies and the second is the one the only Marian Ravenwood. I don't
think this movie works without her and I think you can look at the other two
classic indie movies and know exactly what's missing. Part of the legend of
this film is that Steven Spielberg wanted to make a James Bond movie and
this was pitched to him by George Lucas as being the closest he could get as an
(13:24):
American. A grand trope of the James Bond film is the Bond girl which usually
comes in one of two flavors. She's either a convenient bombshell Bond
seduces along the way or she's a femme fatale come to seduce him to destroy him.
There is a third category of hot and skillful babe whom Bond wins over.
(13:45):
Modern Bond girls often go this direction which really just makes her an
update of flavor one. Marian is almost the last kind except she very much isn't.
She's much closer to the plucky young woman trope usually seen in detective
novels. A young woman often boyish at heart who assists the older detective in
(14:07):
his work. She isn't the most skilled but she has Viv and Pep and Moxie. In those
stories the detective isn't romantically interested in the plucky young woman.
She's more likely to have an age-appropriate sweetheart. So you can
see the limits here but Marian is a character designed to stand on her own
(14:29):
two feet. Yes it is weird that she and Indy had a relationship ten years before
the movie. She refers to that age as being a child though Karen Allen was 30
when she played the role so that does get us closer to the age of consent than
George Lucas's original idea. But I appreciate that Marian is in control of
(14:53):
every part of her relationship with Indy. When Indy first walks through her door
he gives her a charming smile while Marian gives him a classic smooth
speech about his appearance and then she sucker punches him. We see her rage throw
her a little off kilter as she tries to dismiss the past but she's not conceding
(15:14):
any ground about what he did to her. He tries to ask about the headpiece
dismissing its significance and offering her a wad of cash. Marian doesn't give
him the piece even though she's literally wearing it she tells him to
come back tomorrow. It's Marian who insists on coming with Indy to see the
(15:37):
quest through. When she finds herself kidnapped and discovers Indy won't
rescues her she uses her high drinking tolerance to escape which would have
worked if not for the convenient appearance of Tote. While she is
helpless in the Well of Souls she initially refuses Indy's offer to carry
her. Her yells of fear are comical unlike Kate Capshaw's incessant screams in the
(16:02):
sequel. While she ends up trapped in the plane later and must be rescued by Indy
she ends up there because she knocks out the pilot to save Indy and gets stuck in
the plane so she can use the guns to again rescue him. When Indy and Marian do
have a romantic scene Indy is bruised and injured and whimpering and Marian is
(16:26):
the one who does the seducing. She is the one in control and that's cool.
Marian is a character who challenges Indy at every turn. Yeah she sometimes
makes life more difficult for him but she also talks to him like an equal. She's
(16:47):
smart and scrappy and ready for a challenge. Again one of the reasons
Temple of Doom fails as a sequel is that there isn't anyone to match Indy like
this. Willy is a mess and while short round rules he is a child. His bravado
crumbles and while that might bring pathos it means that Indy's character
(17:10):
suffers as a result. A huge reason why the Last Crusade is a close second to
Raiders is that Henry Jones Sr. is another character who matches and
challenges Indy as an equal. That dynamic, that taking down a peg of Indy, that
refusal to let him fully be a James Bond level mythic hero makes the good Indy
(17:34):
films stand out. Of course Marian isn't just a scrappy girl with swagger. The
Nepal sequence gives us a girl with layers. Yes she can drink a man under the
table. Yes she runs a bar and has a level of authority. Yes she has female rage
(17:54):
against Indy and her dad and scoffs at their archaeological loves. But then we
get to see Marian alone. Before the adventure, before the danger, Marian gets
a wordless scene. This MacGuffin of a medallion really mattered to her dad. It
(18:16):
was his life's work and yeah he dragged her all across the world and left her
stranded in Nepal. But she carries that medallion around her neck. It matters to
her. She pulls it out, her large eyes glassy with awe and feeling. You can see
(18:38):
her love for her dad there. All that childhood belief buried under layers of
cynicism. And then she looks at the cash on her hand. There's a way out. She looks
conflicted. She looks back at the medallion, apologetic. Then she looks back
at the cash and grins hanging up the medallion. In this short scene absolutely
(19:04):
filled with the sublime by the way, we understand Marian's wounds. Her
understanding of the situation despite her insistence to the contrary and her
absolute drive to survive and escape. While Marian is beautiful, she defies
(19:24):
being a sex symbol. While she is wily, she also gets to be goofy. While she is
petty, she is also serious. Marian is not a bond girl. She's a delightfully
rounded character. Complicated but also at home in the broadness of the adventure
(19:46):
genre. It's a character that makes me feel seen and one that makes me wish for
an entirely different set of indie sequels. Ones where she gets to be a
co-adventurer with Indy. Where he isn't James Bond and they are somehow a
dysfunctional team. And maybe that's a big part of why I watched this film
(20:07):
countless times the summer I was 16. Longing to escape to a world where women
are more than some man's fantasy. One filled with thunder and sudden gusts of
wind and spluttering torches. With awe and danger and wonder. A perfect film. The
(20:30):
kind that I can use to introduce myself and how I see movies.
Thanks for coming.
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