Indiana Jones and the Meaningless Void

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This is the Indy problem. For all the attention, the icon never says much beyond his lines and endures little beyond his near misses, and he imparts only a fraction of the depth we've absorbed from Batman and Darth Vader and Humphrey Bogart. Wile E. Coyote has lived through more scrapes, and taught us more. Fans of big-budget summer blockbuster sequel franchises have always found plenty to discuss passionately -- going too far, too deep on theories and ideas the creators may or may not have intended. Some of the subtext and irony in popcorn movies is plain to both the casual viewer and the devotee. Some of it they've had to work hard to extrapolate, but the franchises somehow keep giving. The best franchise movies never stop giving -- more to debate, more to ponder.

"Star Wars," "Star Trek," the combined narratives of Marvel Comics superheroes -- Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men and now Iron Man; Harry Potter, Superman. You can go to conventions and sit in seminars and talk about any of these stories and heroes forever, or get a doctorate in semiotics thanks to them. In the Indiana Jones panel discussion (usually held in a faraway ballroom at a "Star Wars" convention, because of the Lucasfilm/Han Solo pedigree), you mostly talk about collectible porcelain Indiana Jones figurines, or camera angles in "Temple of Doom."

Financially, the "Indiana Jones" movies have earned $1.2 billion in ticket sales so far. Surely there must be something to say about him, something he symbolizes. But what do we get back from Dr. Jones, besides stray bits of archaeological legend? Although the main character is a tenured professor, there was never anything to learn, because there is only fun. ( Only!? Isn't fun plenty?)

This is why "roller coaster" appears so often in critics' reviews of Indiana's past adventures, because they recognize just that -- steel and track and loop-de-loops.

In 1935, Indiana Jones crash-lands in India and discovers a blood cult worshiping Sankara stones, which he returns to the village that reveres them as holy objects. In 1936, he discovers the ark of the covenant, and then rescues it from the Nazis, only to have the U.S. government hide it away. ("Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" is actually a prequel to "Raiders of the Lost Ark," a never-explained flip in the time line, even though "Raiders" came out first, in 1981, and "Doom" was released in 1984.)

In 1938 (which is to say 1989, "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade"), Jones outwits the Nazis one last time and discovers the Holy Grail, the legendary chalice from which the Apostles drank at the Last Supper, but it is lost in a sudden earthquake. Lost treasure is a recurring motif -- things that are best left undiscovered fall out of Indy's reach. In the end, Indy retrieves something lost: the attention of his father, played by Sean Connery, who is also an archaeologist. It seemed like we might get someplace the last time around, even as "Crusade" dragged to a finish:

Professor Henry Jones: Did I ever tell you to eat up? Go to bed? Wash your ears? Do your homework? No. I respected your privacy and I taught you self-reliance.

Indiana Jones: What you taught me was that I was less important to you than people who had been dead for 500 years in another country. And I learned it so well that we've hardly spoken for 20 years.

This exchange occurs on a German passenger dirigible, and soon enough the Joneses are under Stuka attack, sidestepping character development, avoiding thought, back on the ride. (Even actual roller coasters inspire greater thinking than an "Indiana Jones" movie; writers and devotees of roller coasters travel great distances to discover and ride them, and continually find new, poetic ways to describe them.) In "Indiana Jones" there is no theme, no take-away. He is a great turn-on, but a lousy companion. The message, as clearly stated over and over again by executive producer and writer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg, is this: Keep your arms and feet inside the car at all times.

In the 1990s, "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles," a short-lived television series bankrolled by Lucas, unleashed more back story, but without much of a ride, and audiences yawned. The deeper and more cerebral they went (and without Harrison Ford), the less Indy seemed like Indy.

For these are movies about making movies. More important, they are movies about making money by making movies. The Los Angeles Times, reporting worsening U.S. economic woes a few weeks ago, drew an ominously plunging red arrow down its front page to represent a 50-point drop in U.S. consumer confidence from where we were last summer. The arrow ends at a headline for a companion story, about how movie ticket sales go up in recession-like doldrums, when people can no longer afford vacations to amusement parks, and the multiplex becomes the only idealized escape.