FlamingText

Hindsight of the Lost Ark

   On Christmas Eve I ate pastrami and bagels with some friends and then we watched Raiders of the Lost Ark. It had been awhile so I was happy to find that I still liked it. That isn't always the case when I come back to a movie that was a favorite at some earlier moment in my life. But Raiders holds up.

   I did notice one thing that had never occurred to me on previous viewings, namely that Indiana Jones is 100% ineffective at achieving his objectives in this movie. The whole opening sequence with him outwitting or outrunning all the deadly traps and giant rolling boulders and blow-darts and spiders and what-have-you culminates with him handing over the idol he has just purloined from its ancient resting place * to his arch-rival Belloq, who evidently just follows Indy around the globe waiting for him to retrieve priceless antiquities at great personal peril so he can take them from him after all the hard, dangerous work is over.

   As for the Ark of the Covenant, Indy is sent by the U.S. government to find it for one reason: To prevent the Nazis from obtaining it. All the life-threatening swashbuckling he does, all the getting dragged behind cars and getting shot and getting punched out by enormous mustachioed fist-fighting musclemen and having to crawl through the stygian darkness of the tomb with only a torch to keep the writhing mass of deadly asps at bay ("Snakes. Why'd it have to be snakes?"), all the sneaking aboard submarines and getting captured by evil nazis and menaced by that treacherous monkey -- all of that pretty much amounts to nothing because the Nazis end up getting exactly what they're after in the first place. In fact, if anything he helps them. They were digging in the wrong place before Indy came along! He not only figures out where the Ark is, he goes into the snake-filled tomb and recovers it. Right before his arch-rival takes it from him.

   The only reason the Nazis don't end up taking over the world with the enormous unstoppable power contained within the Ark is because it apparently never occurs to their top occult expert (the aforementioned Belloq, who we come to learn is not merely French, but also a Nazi collaborator -- that's two reasons to dislike him!) that trying to harness the power of the God of Judaism to aid the cause of Nazi world domination is a bad idea. As a response to this rather egregious mystical faux pas, Jehovah melts everybody's face, sparing only our heroes. * A classic Deus Ex Machina. Jones' great accomplishment is merely in surviving. From a big-picture perspective, everything would have worked out more or less the same if he'd stayed home.

  None of this diminishes my enjoyment of the movie. If anything, it makes me appreciate the character more. All that effort for so little payoff. Who can't relate to that?