Sunday, June 01, 2008

Indiana Jones and the Excess of Seriousness (spoilers)

People are complaining about the implausibility of Indiana Jones' latest adventure. Those people, I'm guessing, are not in the target audience. Which is folks who can have a little fun.

Movies are a free-time activity for most people, not a job, not something they have to take seriously. They can take it seriously, the same way a World of Warcraft fan takes their world seriously, but even then, what these movies are, for the most part, is the human being at play with their imaginations. Some don't feel comfortable with movies that are not built on complex, pre-realized worlds, and others think it's too much work to get involved with such a movie if it's not their cup of tea.

Folks, though, can and often are comfortable with both, they just have to be willing to switch gears, which is a problem for those obsessed with the canons of high art. Some folks look for the ultimate theory of art, and are suspicious of anything that doesn't fit their vision of that.

In reality, different people play different ways, and nobody has to take playing, surprisingly enough, entirely seriously.

Even the most hoity-toity drama or art film is an exercise in play, like the ancient greek recreations of myths that spawned drama and comedy in the first place. The play at work here is the use of symbols and chunks of human experience to mean something, to create additional meaning between the "lines" of those terms.

Film is an exercise in audiovisual logic, books an exercise in verbal logic and reference to imagery. Neither is superior to another inherently, though you might enjoy one over the other on the basis of personal preference.

Getting back to Henry Walton Jones, Jr. ("We called the DOG Indiana." sayeth the wise Sean Connery in the preceding episode) Anybody making the plausibility argument has to get past a number of issues in the preceding movies. Like could Indiana let himself be drug on a dirt road for a few hundred feet and not end up with a back looking like something out of a Clive Barker film? How about a chest full of beautiful angels that then turn to skeletons and melt your face off? Or a guy yanking out a living guy's heart, without him dying on the spot? How about all the funky contraptions, death traps, booby traps that are set up. Where did these ancient civilizations get their engineers, the antiquities protection department of Texas A+M? There are feats of derring-do that probably have no place in actual reality, even in the movies before. I mean, good heavens that Minecar chase? Does anybody seriously believe that some mine exists where there are miles of track set up like roller coaster?

Folks aren't considering where this all fits in to pop culture. That is to say, we're not faced with material here which was grounded in today's accuracy-obsessed style of realism. Which is to further say that realism in storytelling itself is just a style. Indiana Jones gently dropkicks such a theory of storytelling out the door. It's based on the adventure stories and movies of the thirties, forties and fifties, which is to say, a whole bunch of stuff where the enjoyment of the film as escapist adventure was more highly valued than the technical realism of the production design.

When Indiana Jones gets blasted for miles out of a nuclear test site by a detonated A-Bomb in a lead-lined refrigerator, the filmmakers are not trying to convince you the physics are sound, either subatomically or on a Newtonian level. They're trying to get the hero of a movie serial out of the cliffhanger in a way that's fun and makes some sense. I had absolutely no problem with it. It was a brazenly nutty solution to the problem, and it was fun to watch.

Which gets to my point. Some people are worried about culture when they see a film where there's a lot of dumb or just intellectually agnostic fun. They get worried that people might not be properly edified. Which means they beat them over the head with Serious Movies That Are Good For You. Oh, how dare Spielberg send his hero rocketing out of a nuclear test-site in a frigidaire! Somebody might actually believe it!

Truth of the matter is, though, there's room, both vertically within the movie and horizontal between them for movies of all types to play in all kinds of areas. The Eighties saw their share of not-so-realistic adventure films, and so have the subsequent decades. And then there are movies that are good, serious and compelling, movies which are tragic and tug at your heartstrings, and none of them represent the limits of imagination.

Go see the movie, or a movie, and go to enjoy yourself, however you like. And let yourself enjoy it. It's only a movie. Perhaps the filmmaker alienates you in ways you can't help, but don't spoil it too much by overthinking your experience.