Top 20: Raiders of the Lost Ark

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“I'm making this up as I go along.”

-Indiana Jones

Here I am, first movie in and already breaking my word. I had previously said that the first film I would tackle would be Rio Bravo, which turns out to not be the case. Elements beyond my control brought Steven Spielberg's and George Lucas' 1981 bag of joy Raiders of the Lost Ark to a theatre here in Winnipeg, and for the first time ever (I'm not really counting the unfortunate Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) I got to watch Indy battle the forces of Nazidom on the big screen. I, along with three other souls, were transported back to a time when men solved their issues with fists, ruggedness meant carrying a whip and wearing a fedora, women are constantly in need of some rescuing (though thankfully without the incessant screaming of Kate Capshaw as seen in Temple of Doom) and God teaches the lesson of leaving things be by melting peoples faces off.

It is difficult to watch certain elements of Raiders of the Lost Ark at this stage in my life. The gender politics are not stellar, though Marion is one of the stronger female characters in such adventure movies. There isn't so much a myth of redemptive violence as wholesale support that killing the bad people for the right reasons will make everything OK. Indy's constant catchphrase of, “It belongs in a museum,” brings up some disturbing questions of colonization and Eurocentrism. And the fact that all the bad guys have an accent of some sort points to a certain level of xenophobia. Though, in all fairness, one of the best characters, Sallah, is an Arab from Cairo.

With all this in mind I still count Raiders as one of my all time favourite films. We should not ignore these issues, but for today I will be. When creating the list I tried to not ignore my emotional reactions to films, whatever they might be, and Raiders (along with the other films in the series, save Crystal Skull) comes with a profound sense of nostalgia.

I distinctly remember my parents renting the VHS when I was a child, likely far to young to be watching a movie with such a surprising amount of grotesquerie on display. I was convinced that archeology was the absolute coolest job ever, easily trumping scientist and martial artist, my two previous coolest jobs ever.

I remember receiving Temple of Doom for my birthday one year. I was not allowed to watch certain heart extracting scenes so any time I wanted to watch it a parent had to be present, who would tell me to close my eyes and fast forward over the naughty bits.

I remember being fascinated by the thick cloud of mist Allison Doody falls through at the end of the Last Crusade. I wanted desperately to have done that stunt, falling through an unknown space to a crash mat just below.

More than anything I wanted a whip.

These were films I absorbed as a child, becoming part of my psyche and in their way forming some of what I love in a film.

One of Spielberg's and Lucas' great skills is the ability to create iconic images. Indy is the platonic ideal of the adventuring grave robber. The perfect combination of bravado, intelligence and ridiculousness. Indy does not take himself too seriously so we do not hate him for his arrogance, and his plans fail as often as they succeed. More than this though are the sequences that have stayed in the cultural consciousness. Boulders, bad dates, and being dragged behind trucks are all images that people know today, even if they've never seen the film. When I was young I was enraptured by these scenes, pulled into their excitement. Now I am impressed by the skill behind them, how effortlessly they seemed to print the form of Indiana Jones on the minds of popular culture.

The irony is that the film was originally conceived as a homage to the movie serials of the 1930's and 1940's and has completely eclipsed those influences and the adventure movie prototype. I have never seen any of the serials that Indy was based on, and to my 9 year mind, they did not exist. Raiders was not homage, it was a new idea. In all the bitching and moaning about remakes, reboots and prequels many of us forget that some of our favourite films are barely original rifts on existing properties. Art is often self-reflecting, and film as a medium has embraced this wholeheartedly.

However, if Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is any indication this self reflecting has it's limits. Crystial Skull is mostly a homage to previous Indiana Jones movies. It collapses on it's homage to a homage, creating a pretty surface with very little core. What is amazing about Raiders is that it did contain a core, one of pure jubilation. It feels like watching the result of ten year old Spielberg and Lucas telling their families about their favourite scenes from the Saturday matinee they just came back from. It is excitement through and through, as it was created to be.

Raiders fist squarely in the, “10 problems every minute” vein of films common today. Some have pointed to Raiders as helping to usher in this structure as the standard format for modern blockbusters. I do not have the film knowledge to say how prominent this structure was in films before Raiders, but I first really noticed it while re watching Back to the Future last year. Marty McFly did have one grand problem to be overcome, namely getting back to the future, but within that were a hundred little problems. Every time he bested one of these obstacles another would appear, and another and another to what almost felt like infinity. The finale of Doc brown attempting to attach a chord to a clock tower about to be hit by lightening while Marty tries to get his parents to kiss so he won't be erased from existence is worthy of Tati in the absurdity of it's level of catastrophe. Raiders is of a similar ilk, though tends to get the balance better.

Raiders comes by this structure honestly as the homage that it is. I know little of the adventure serials of the 30's and 40's but I do know that they always ended on a cliffhanger. The heroes would always be put in some perilous, seemingly hopeless situation only to escape the next week. Raiders apes this format by structuring it's story as small, 10 minute chunks of film, each with it's own arch that services the larger story. When done well (Raiders, The Avengers, Time Bandits) this results in an exciting, propulsive film. When done poorly (Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, Transformers films, anything by Paul W.S. Anderson) it's exhausting, though often fascinating in it's spectacle.

In the end my choice of this film is the result of the shear amount of hours I spent in my backyard trying to swing from tree branch to trampoline on a piece of rope I desperately wished was a whip.