The Phenomena must be the only cinema in Barcelona that does not sell numbered tickets. Thirty minutes before the movie, the line wrapped around half the island. Almost all of us were over forty years old and our history with the protagonist. My companion was called Indy at school, and as a child I wanted to be an archaeologist. Growing up too: it was my second choice when applying for a degree that could not be studied in Mallorca under any circumstances. I entered Journalism, which, in some way and at a different pace, responds to the same adventurous vocation to unearth what time wants to hide.
Against all odds, we’ll find a good place to sit. The audience, motivated, applauded the trailer of Mission Impossible. And suddenly you were back at the Chaplins in Palma, twelve years old and your best friend, who was also in love with Indiana Jones. And you were scared again at your aunt’s house, when her heart is almost ripped out in the cursed temple. And I can’t remember where I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time, but I know those three movies by heart.
The dial of fate is an inside joke, an intimate wink, that look charged with complicity between best friends, aunts and nieces, obvious secret lovers, a lifelong marriage, generation mates. People who share anguish because we are no longer who we were and because it is difficult to face the passage of time. To the point that we would stay in the past so that it never happens.
The farewell to Indiana Jones is the farewell to a world that ends in us, in cinemas without numbered entrance, with long queues at the door, two-dimensional screen and applause; to the adventures of the 20th century, without internet. At the end of the film, many of us will cry, aware that we are analog, we are archaeology, all we have left is nostalgia. “I’m back,” says Indiana Jones. And for a moment we forget that he did it to say goodbye.
