INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (1984)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

Not only do they not make 'em like this any more, they CAN'T-- which makes me like TEMPLE OF DOOM more than I did back in 1984. (Of course, back then I didn't have CRYSTAL SKULL as an example of a really mishandled Indy Jones effort.)

Two aspects of TEMPLE's overall structure mitigate against it from Square One. First, George Lucas and his co-writers made the film coat-tail on  the previous entry by recycling two of the set-pieces intended for RAIDERS: the big battle in the Hong Kong night-club and the mining-car race. (Director Steven Spielberg also claimed that they wanted to use the mine sequence to mock the critics who called RAIDERS a "theme park ride," long before the rise of the big superhero franchises.) Second, TEMPLE eschewed the Nazi villains in which audiences were already invested. Even in 1984, no one in the U.S, remembered the iniquity of the Indian Thuggee cult, except for film-buffs who remembered the 1939 GUNGA DIN film (as I imagine both Lucas and Spielberg did). 

Of course the filmmakers also circumvented the risks of honking off Marion Ravenwood fans by setting the movie prior to RAIDERS. This allowed Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford, of course) to emulate his partial model James Bond by having a romantic fling with a different leading lady, nightclub singer Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw). I didn't originally care for the shrill humor of Willie , who took almost as many silly pratfalls as Oliver Hardy. Still, Willie does show moments of gumption and/or intelligence, so she's not totally a pampered princess. She gets a better character arc than does Short Round (Ke Huy Quan), who's mainly a shout-out to pop-culture artifacts like the comic strip TERRY AND THE PIRATES, wherein kid-adventurers got to traipse around the globe endangering their lives.

After the overly long Hong Kong fracas, Indy, Short Round and Willie get stranded in India. A poor village takes them in, and an old sage informs the foreigners that they have been drafted in the service of their god Siva. The local maharajah has confiscated from the village the sacred "Sivalingam," which results in the village's poverty and their loss of their children to unnamed abductors. Later Indy will call upon his archaeological knowledge to claim that the Sivalingam is one of five lost Sankara stones, which in theory can give their owner ultimate power. (Indy doesn't mention that in Hindi "Sivalingam" carried the connotation "Siva's penis.") 

Indy follows the sage's sage advice, not so much because he believes he's been chosen by Siva as because he thinks the stones could be a great archaeological find. He and his entourage seek out the Maharajah's palace, but at first there's nothing more threatening there than a dining-table laden with foods too gross for Willie's spoiled palate. Indy does mention that the palace was once host to a Thuggee cult, one that killed victims for the glory of bloodthirsty Kali, before the cult was wiped out decades ago by the British, whose forces still occupy India. But if the Thuggee are really gone, who's that nasty fellow who sneaks into Indy's bedroom and tries to strangle him?

In no time, the foreigners are propelled into a world of subterranean darkness, full of evil magic and creepy-crawly things. On a DVD extra Lucas commented that he wanted the "middle part" of the planned Indiana trilogy to be the darkest part, presumably like THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, even though the Indiana films were meant to stand alone. In one respect, the greatest darkness is that for a time the Thuggee make the hero one of them with their dark magic, which gives poor little Short Round some bad moments. As for  vicious vermin and dessicated corpses, RAIDERS had a fair share of these elements too, so TEMPLE could be seen as just upping the horror-house ante. But Lucas and Spielberg upped the ante a little too much. After the head priest of Kali, one-dimensional fiend Mola Ram (Amrish Puri), tears a man's heart from his chest cavity, public outcry prompted the formation of the "PG-13" rating. I've noticed that Lucas and Spielberg indulged in no further in gross-out stunts either in LAST CRUSADE or in CRYSTAL SKULL.

While I knew that RAIDERS was just as full of thrill-ride set-pieces as was TEMPLE, the use of the Ark centered Indy's struggle in the history of the Final Solution. The Siva-stones are a more superficial creation, and even in 1984 I knew that it was a little fatuous to oppose Siva to Kali, given that in Hindu myth Kali is just one of the names given to the wife of Siva. If our friendly neighborhood tomb raider knows this, he doesn't mention it in the course of the film.

The threat of the Sankara stones remains vague, though if they have anything to do with Mola Ram's ability to perform literal magic in the world of Indiana Jones, they're at least a lot more formidable as a menace than anything in LAST CRUSADE. I liked some ambiguous lines suggesting that Indy is briefly possessed by Siva, thus confirming the prophecies of the village sage. The theft of the village children, stolen to work the mines under the palace, provides an ample substitute for the sort of human slaughter the real Thuggee practiced.

The mine-car ride never grabbed me all that much, except for one part: when a Thuggee jumps into the car with the three good guys, Willie finally gets her act together and punches him right out of the vehicle. I take away a point for the curious scene in which the Indian Maharajah uses a voodoo doll. Let's keep our pulp-menaces straight, shall we?

Though I'm sure Lucas and Spielberg had no political agenda, in a sense TEMPLE ends up being a farewell to the blood-and-thunder of American pulp magazines, which traded frequently (though never exclusively) on xenophobic fantasies. TEMPLE is as modern a take as one could produce on such fantasias without venturing into deconstruction territory, given that one of the heroes saving the Hindu children is a non-white child and another is a white guy arguably manipulated by a Hindu god. One might occasionally see other movies with ties to pulps and serials, like the 1991 ROCKETEER-- but that was all thunder and no blood, which seems to be all that Hollywood can produce these days.