Indiana Jones says goodbye to you. Harrison Ford was almost eighty years old – which he has already turned – when he shot Indiana Jones and the Dial of Fate, which opens in theaters on June 28. Does it make sense for an octogenarian to play an action hero? Do we live anchored in nostalgia? The film closes the pentalogy of the adventurer with the fedora hat and the whip, so it’s a good time to review what this character has meant culturally.
INDIANA SMITH. Its origin dates back to 1973. George Lucas had just finished shooting American graffiti and thought of recycling old popular materials – serials, comics, B-movies, genre pulp novels – and giving them new life. This is how Star Wars and Indiana Jones were born, who in the first sketches was called Smith and had some vices, such as gambling and alcohol. The adventurous archaeologist project was parked due to the development of the galactic saga, until Lucas coincided on a vacation in Hawaii with Spielberg, who wanted to direct a James Bond. The first proposed the old idea from Indiana, which happened to be called Jones.
IRONY AGAINST TESTOSTERONE. Sketched in the seventies, the character hits the screens in 1981 with Raiders of the Lost Ark and will reign with the initial trilogy throughout the eighties. He is an unusual hero in the decade of Reagan’s moral rearmament. Militarist apologies such as Officer and Gentleman and Top Gun are sweeping the box office, and John Rambo rewrites the Vietnam War with shots and fights – with the Taliban! – against the Soviets. Indiana Jones is set in the more distant past and eschews environmental jingoism. Harrison Ford brings a touch of glamor and irony – straight from Cary Grant – to a hero who emerges from the pastiche of serials and comics and doesn’t pompously take himself seriously. However, Ford was not the first choice: the candidate was Tom Selleck, who quit because he was shooting the Magnum series.
NAZIS, SOVIETS AND COLONIALISM. The Nazis are very handy villains not to get involved in ideological complexities. Lucas and Spielberg use them in the first and third installments (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), set in 1936 and 1938. The second (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) works as a prequel to the first and is set in 1935. , because Lucas did not want to repeat Nazis. It is the one that plays the exoticism card more openly. In fact, it’s a rehash of Gunga Din, with a sect of Kali-worshipping stranglers and monkey-brain-tasting maharajas. Both this installment and the first, set in North Africa, will delight any brainy professor of postcolonial studies willing to denounce colonialist clichés. By the way: put to be offended, the guild of archaeologists could also put the cry in the sky for the methods of Professor Jones. In the fourth installment – ??Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the last one directed by Spielberg and which arrives in 2008, twenty years after the third – we jump to the cold war and the bad guys are the Soviets. And in the fifth, directed by James Mangold, we find ourselves in 1969, with the space race at its peak and a retired Indiana Jones –and who is raising his elbow– forced to get into trouble again.
SUPERNATURAL ‘MACGUFFINS’. Each installment of the saga begins with the search for a valuable object, almost always with a supernatural dimension. In this case it is a dial capable of altering time, and before it was the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail or an object of extraterrestrial origin. It’s not that crazy: the Nazis were fascinated by the esoteric, remember that Hitler visited Montserrat in search of the Holy Grail. These magical objects are, in Hitchcockian terminology, macguffins, excuses that allow the development of the plot and the emotional tensions between the characters.
LITTLE SEX AND A LOT OF FUCKING. In initial sketches the character was much more sexualised, Bond-esque, but this aspect was replaced by the narratively unerring clash of personalities with his partners. These can be female (in the first two installments) or male (the father in the third, a young biker in the fourth). In the latter, she is his goddaughter, played by actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who brings intelligence and humor in abundance. At times, the tension between them is reminiscent of the great moments of the classic war of the sexes between Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn.
THE NOSTALGIA AND THE FANS. Indiana Jones and the dial of fate is full of old acquaintances and winks for fans; there is a nostalgic residue. In the film, Indiana himself is a hero from another time who doesn’t quite fit in the 1960s. The same thing happens, perhaps, to his films in a present taken over by superheroes and the implausible action of Fast and Furious. Digital effects have cornered the old adventurers. We only have Tom Cruise left as the last hero with an analog spirit; His new installment of Mission Impossible is coming soon.
