Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Spielberg's latest film is glorious, glittering, golden popcorn. You've gotta see it.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Starring: Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Karen Allen, Ray Winstone, John Hurt, Jim Broadbent, Shia LaBeouf
Paramount Pictures | 123 minutes

If a poet can do something three times in a great work, he displays a cosmic excellence: “Three times Achilles dragged Hector around the walls of Troy.” Stephen Spielberg has just made his fourth Indiana Jones movie. Is this latecomer sequel a trashy and grotesque excess, a violation of the rule of threes in art, the aesthetic equivalent of a “bigger and better” (read oversized and tacky) Texan belt buckle? Or is it a piece of art confident enough to bend the law of threes, full of panache, vim, verve, and the well-earned appearance of an artist at his peak. Which is Indy 4? Both.

The late, great New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael forced moviegoers to admit that we go to most movies because of the sheer “fun of trash.” The largess, the inanity, the superficiality, the appallingly brusque enthymemes—these delight us when the silver screen overwhelms us in the theater. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull delighted me, and, if your expectations are calibrated according to the rule of Kael, it will surely delight you. Mayans, Russians, aliens, atom bombs, death-by-army-ant, motorcycle chases through Ivy League libraries — any other film, and this list would be a spoiler. Not Indy 4. This movie is magnificent trash.

The film lives for camp, pulp fiction reference and easy stereotyping. Harrison Ford delivers Indiana Jones once again, but with that Lethal Weapon “I’m getting too old for this” touch so common in films appealing to Baby Boomers, most of whom are approaching retirement. Bad guys and bad girls are hilariously bad. The well-played KGB doctor Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) looks like a Maoist china doll brandishing a rapier. A few cheap political jabs are made at McCarthyism, which seem like sly jabs at our present day Patriot Act. Ridiculous madcap action and cartoonish violence abound—like any good Indiana Jones movie.

Yet this movie seems to go one step further. For instance, one scene involves a high speed jungle car chase and sword fight, a double homage to Errol Flynn and the speeder chase on the Moon of Endor from Return of the Jedi. It ends when hero-in-training Mutt (Shia LaBeouf) becomes snagged in some vines and quickly discerns how to swing like Tarzan. Then, leading a battalion of allied rhesus monkeys, he catches up to the motorcade and swings back into the attack. In light of such absurdities, one can almost see the director winking at you as if to say, “Hey, it’s the movies, and I know the movies. Watch me work! You know you love it!”

Stephen Spielberg knows his craft, its limitations, and just how to bend those limitations to achieve a fine result: “Sure such monkey business is trash, but, nonetheless, my film is art, and as such, I can communicate to you that which I know while showing you my good-natured desire to delight you.”

And here we come to the dual nature of this trashy film that both flouts and seems to outdo the law of threes. Spielberg, like a good poet, peeps out from time to time in such a way as to remind you that someone is behind this film, and, like all someones, this director has something to tell you.

The film is remarkably moral, not to mention entirely free of “adult” content. Without spoiling the details, destructive vices and noble virtues are showcased in a manner akin to the medieval morality play. Different characters embody wrath, greed, loyalty, and knowledge. And vice is treated at times with great subtlety. In fact, the centerpiece of the film involves the dangers of the desire to know, the hypocrisy of philanthropy that so often accompanies it, and the proud aspiration to “be like gods” that ends in one character’s Genesis-like fall and death. One character goes so far as to quote the poet John Milton, of Paradise Lost fame: “the golden key / that opes the palace of eternity.”

The fall and division of sin takes on a social dynamic in the movie as well. Critics of Spielberg often note his theme of eternal recurrence: the broken family seeking reunion could be called a career-spanning obsession for the award-winning director. Good stories are worth repeating, I suppose. The familiar human drama comes across in pleasant rhythms and light touches throughout Indy 4. A father ought to be there for his child; parents care deeply about their children’s education; love requires sacrifice; bickering can ruin a relationship and hurts kids; fatherhood is not limited to genetics; and, most telling of Spielberg’s project, true love requires a marriage to make it right.

Forgive an actual spoiler, but the end of the film, like a good Shakespearean comedy, ends in a marriage. Indiana marries Marian, his true love from the first film. And as the bride and groom kiss, a character, the one who quoted Milton, quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson: “How much of human life is lost in waiting.” This oracular utterance from a character who prior to that could do nothing but babble and speak in oblique riddles, spoke for Spielberg who has throughout the film, as Shakespeare might have, been trying to tell you this very thing with those same signs and riddles: Love one another; be simple; and do not wait.

That this film is pure popcorn is undeniable  -- but popcorn that aspires to be art. Spielberg himself thinks so. For the first time since E. T., he chose to premier his film at Cannes. It met with great success and drew the biggest crowds even among the black turtleneck set. The silver-haired Spielberg, the successful director, through poetry, through the characters and plot, and through a trashy film, counsels his universal audience to universal goods: to family, to marriage, to virtue, nature, and love. Trash it may be, but one man’s trash is pop culture’s treasure.

Matthew Mehan is a US Contributing Editor for MercatorNet.

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