Indiana Jones and the Meaningless Void

When a 46-year-old Harrison Ford and his then-wife attended a big dinner at the National Museum of American History in May 1989 to donate Indiana Jones's jacket and fedora to the Smithsonian, the museum's director applauded Indiana's adventures as an "escape from the bureaucratization of American life. . . . He has a kind of redemptive diffidence."

Redemptive diffidence! Finally, a scholar speaks! The jacket and fedora have remained on display, becoming more and more mundane, like objects in a SkyMall catalogue. They are no ruby slippers, and will likely be shelved someday, confused with other blockbuster ephemera; ignored, like the ark of the covenant stashed away in that federal warehouse at the end of "Raiders."

Spielberg and Lucas have said it since 1981: All we wanted to do was have fun. There is no other point. There is nothing to get. We entertain ourselves by entertaining you.

The biggest Indiana fans do the same. At considerable expense and with varying degrees of believability, they make their own movies and post them online (or sell them to one another), the further adventures of Indiana Jones, in which they cast themselves in the lead. They evaluate one another's efforts based on how "real" (i.e., like the original) the fan film seems. Men love to dress up as Indiana Jones: Don't shave. Drag a pair of Old Navy khakis through the dirt. Get out your leather jacket. Get out the fedora.

Three boys (now men) in suburban Bay St. Louis, Miss., will live forever in fanboy lore for spending the summers between 1981 and 1989 making their own version of "Raiders of the Lost Ark," frame for frame, in their back yard, with video cameras. Copies of their film surfaced when they were adults and they became a little bit famous for it. The result is eerily earnest and adolescently adorable, as their Indiana goes through puberty from scene to scene. Now there's a studio deal to do a movie about the boys doing Indiana. (Movies about making movies of movies.) Everyone wanted to know what compelled the boys to do it, and why they kept with it so long. Why did Indy call out so strongly to them?

In an interview on TheRaider.net, an Indy fan site, the boys' ringleader, Chris Strompolos, said, "When I saw the movie, the character of Indiana Jones completely changed my world." He cast himself in the role.

"I tended to live in a fantasy world anyway and was coming off my 'Star Wars' fascination. I wanted nothing more than to be Indiana Jones, inhabit his world and be able to have the same chances and choices he did. So I set out on doing that. In retrospect, I guess I made a good choice, as 'Raiders' is still to this day one of the most perfect adventure films ever created. It changed the face of cinema forever."

It did? You get all the way down to the bottom of the cave, and find no treasure, and a skeleton who hisses It changed the face of cinema forever. It is the Meaningless Void. But Indy's down here with you, and so are the snakes, and it feels okay.

It didn't change people, it changed cinema. And maybe that changes people? Indiana Jones was meant to be seen for the rest of our lives in Best Buy and Circuit City, on a hundred different high-definition screens, with the volume way up. Look at that picture. Look at the color, the sharpness. This is where you find him. This is what he means.