Indiana Jones: The Male Lara Croft
So Indiana Jones. Four movies, 27 years, four female characters, innumerable racial stereotypes. The franchise manages to move from Nepal and Egypt (Raiders, 1981) to India (Temple, 1984) to Germany and Jordan (Last Crusade, 1989) to Peru (Crystal Skull, 2008) and be racist in every location. Though the racism peaks with the horrific treatment of the Indians in Temple of Doom (they eat monkey brains why?) and gets quite a bit better in Last Crusade, it doesn't much improve from there. When Indy moves out of the 80s (30s in his time line) and into the present day (1957 in his world), he brings his archaic (archeological?) thoughts about hocus-pocus "undead" South American natives and their funny religious beliefs and barbarism with him. Making things worse, Crystal Skull doesn't even attempt a major non-white character, with John Rhys-Davies' Sallah (from Raiders and Last Crusade) absent and no native Peruvian character stepping up to help Indy in this adventure. This is a shame, because even though the franchise fails miserably to fight its racism with this latest installment of the adventure, it makes some pretty good gains when it comes to the portrayal of women.
There are four women in Indiana Jones' world. Clearly, this is not enough women for four movies, but given the subject matter (the life and times of a suave and swashbuckling adventurer), it's not really surprising. In Raiders, Indy's female foil is Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), about whom cinematical's Elisabeth Rappe writes, "she was the coolest sidekick of all, the sort of kickass chick who was not only unusual in 1981, but still pretty rare today." Absolutely. We are introduced to Marion when she's winning a drinking contest in her own saloon in Nepal, and she gets cooler from there. Unfortunately, I get the impression with Marion that she's cool not because of her role in the story, but despite it. She is repeatedly used as a bargaining chip or a type of commodity in the film, and she gets rescued more than once. Plus they have her go all maternal over a traitorous monkey. Still, she holds her own about as well as any sidekick/romantic interest ever can, and that's something, especially for 1981.
In Temple of Doom, things take a serious downturn with the introduction of (American, because God forbid we have TWO Chinese characters in the same film) Hong Kong lounge singer Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw). Willie's purpose in the film is to shriek, complain, demand, cry, and generally get in the way. Elisabeth likes her, calling her a throwback to 1930s screwball comedies, and while I can see that, it doesn't work for me. She comes off much less funny and much more weak. Maybe if every other single thing about the movie (especially the racial stereotyping) didn't bother me, I'd be able to give her more of a chance, but it did and I can't. She was just terrible.
In Last Crusade, things get both better and worse. At first we think Dr. Elsa Schneider (Alison Doody) is going to be yet another Indy-sidekick, albeit this time with a Ph.D. and a pretty strong constitution (as Elisabeth points out, she is as tough as Marion, handling neatly all sorts of things--bugs, fire, corpses, etc.--that would have totally freaked Willie out). It's more than a little icky when you realize that both Harrison Ford's Indy and his father (Sean Connery) have slept with her, though. And then you realize that this strong woman isn't a sidekick--she's a villain. For me, this makes her a better character all the way around, but the fact that she turns into an almost pornographic "she-devil of the SS" character as soon as she's unveiled as a bad guy puts a damper on my being too excited about her. Still, she's a woman with her own ambitions, and that puts her quite a bit ahead of most of this genre.
Finally, we come to Crystal Skull. In this film, there are actually TWO female characters, which in and of itself improves things considerably. That one of the two is the return of Marion Ravenwood is fantastic. This older and wiser Marion is just as self-assured and competent as the younger one was, and provides an almost unheard of chance for an action hero like Jones to have a romantic relationship with someone in his own age cohort (big change from The Last Crusade). Beyond that, when Marion reveals that Indy is her son's father, she refuses to apologize for not telling him sooner, or for marrying another man. She points out, rightly, that Jones left her, and that she made another life for herself. This is exactly what Elisabeth writes that she was imagining Marion doing all along when she wasn't in the second and third installments, and I was imagining the same thing.
The second female character is the film's major villain, Colonel Dr. Irina Spalko, played by an accent-wielding Cate Blanchett, carrying a rapier and dressed in a gray Soviet jumpsuit. Though she teeters over the brink of the gag being funny sometimes, and her accent definitely begins to grate by the end of the film, Blanchett's Dr. Spalko is fantastic. Motivated not so much by the quest for power (she's said to have been Stalin's right-hand woman) as the quest for knowledge (she dies chanting "I want to know!"), Spalko is the kind of ruthless, self-driven villain that usually only men get to play. She's also pointedly de-sexualized, wearing a short bob and gender-neutral clothing and not even a little bit charmed by Jones. This would make her the first woman in the franchise not to come under his spell, and it's welcome relief. Plus, Blanchett gets the film's best fight scene, giving a good going over to Shia LaBeouf (Mutt) with her sword on a moving military vehicle. Nice.
All in all, I give the Indiana Jones films two stars. Given the racism, it's probably a star more than they deserve, but I really liked both of the female characters in this last film, and I have to give the franchise props for matching Ford with women his own age in 2/3 cases (Kate Capshaw is also in his age bracket). It's a sad state of things when I'm marking that as unusual, but there you have it.
More commentary:
- Raiders of the Source Material on Sloganeering.org
- Danger Gal Friday: Marion Ravenwood by Lisa Paitz Spindler
- Indy's Women: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull at The Feminist Spectator
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I just rewatched Raiders and was struck by the fact that Marion doesn't actually go maternal over the monkey. She *says* it's cute and sweet but she looks really unconvinced and as if all she wants is to get the animal off her, and when Sallah says it can stay since she likes it, she's starting to look really unimpressed. Just one more reason to like Marion, really - that and the red trousers.
My main problem with Cate Blanchett's character was that she was set up as the villain and never really seemed villainous. She didn't seem ambitious enough to me, by the end - just rather pitiful, wanting to know something that was too overpowering for her mind.
I need to go and rewatch the middle two, now, and see if inopportune monkeys are in fact a recurring theme.
I protest!
If someone were to say about us Icelanders, that we eat burned sheep-heads, sour ram testicles, or rotted shark, then I would not consider it 'racist' because it is all true. People out in the world do eat things that people in American cities may find disgusting. All the time. It's not racist to think so, whereas it is ignorant to think otherwise. I also add that the eyes are generally regarded as the nicest part of the burnt sheep-heads.
I also refer to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain#As_food
I wasn't clear, then--it wasn't the fact that they ate monkey brains in Temple of Doom that offended me, exactly. It was the fact that it was clearly included as a gross out, ew look how weird these people are thing.
Just a small point of fact- Marion was probably not spending all of her time pining away for Indy (as Elizabeth Rappe might have thought) in the second and third movies, since The "Temple of Doom" is actually a prequel to the events of "Raiders". So really what happened is that Indy ditches Willie Scott sometime after the events of "Temple", then gets back together again with Marion in "Raiders"(the film implies that Indy and Marion had a thing back when Indy was a student of Marion's father), and then ditches Marion AGAIN sometime after "Raiders" for Elsa in "Last Crusade", only to finally get back together with Marion a second time in "Crystal Skull".
So I guess if anyone would have been pining away for Indy over the course of ALL of the movies, it would have been Willie, not Marion. Not sure if that makes things better or worse, just wanted to clarify for the record. :-)
Duly noted. I somehow totally missed that Raiders was supposed to have been after Temple of Doom.
I doubt Willie spent any time pining for Indy.
thanks for a really great critique. I've been lurking at your sight for a while now and I really enjoy what you have to say. This post was esp. interesting to me because I really really like your analysis--but it also pointed to something I've been really struggling with (because of the elections)--why is it not considered racist that indy never has a woc girlfriend? Or sexist?
I ask because I've really been contemplating lately how racism is designated as "male" and sexist is designated as "white." Where does that leave me, as a woman of color? What does racism that plays out on the bodies of women of color look like? What does sexism look like?
Is it sexism or racism (or both) that women of color are never the girlfriend--and most times, we're never the villan either? I think that the only time *I* personally can think of a woman of color in the Indy films is in the second one at the village when all the village surrounds Indy and willy and beg to them to "save" them. Maybe there are also women workers in the mines of that movie as well? i can't remember it's been a while...How do you define and label an 'ism' if the person experiencing it is perpetually invisible? What is invisibility? Sexism, racism, or both?
Anyway--thanks again for the really great food for thought!!
The point you bring up is an excellent one, and I believe you are right and the only WOC we see in the films are the Indian village women in Temple of Doom (maybe the waitresses and stuff in Hong Kong at the beginning of that film, too, but no real characters). My hunch is that the invisibility and exclusion of women of color is both racism and sexism. Seems particularly poignant in the case of Willie, who Indy meets in a club in Hong Kong, but she's for some reason a white American woman. Why? Why would he not have a Chinese female counterpart in this movie? That has always bothered me.