TIME TO SAY GOODBYE
Racist literary origins of Indiana Jones continue to tarnish franchise
To the contemporary viewer, the Indiana Jones franchise feels like a genre unto itself. Our whip-wielding hero's adventures have inspired countless others, including the tomb-raiding Lara Croft, and the Mummy franchise.
Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and their Indiana Jones collaborators drew heavily on the adventure stories of their childhoods, and those of generations before them, when they created the character. The most direct antecedents of Indiana Jones are the Flash Gordon and Zorro serials from the 1930s and '40s, which famously thrilled Lucas as a boy. Organized around cycles of cliffhangers and daring escapes, they featured a style of storytelling that was already old-fashioned when Lucas was devouring it in the 1950s.
Adventure novels from around the turn of the 20th century, a genre coded as “boys' entertainment,” are another important antecedent for Indiana Jones. Most notable among them may be the H. Rider Haggard cycle of Allan Quatermain novels (1885-1927), that began with King Solomon's Mines (1885). These books saw their swashbuckling hero, a master hunter, seeking lost treasures across Africa, Asia and South America, eventually uncovering over the series a hidden world of mystery, magic and danger far exceeding the rationalist, scientistic expectations of mainland Europe. Quatermain's first-person narration is funny and gripping, especially coupled with the footnotes from an “Editor” issuing their own corrections and commentary — but it's very hard to ignore the story's racism, beginning with an extended commentary on racial slurs in the novel's first chapter. Ngugi wa Thiong'o singles out Haggard for special scorn in decolonizing the Mind, as one of the “geniuses of racism,” and the award is not undeserved.
The basic outlines of the adventure genre will be familiar to Indy fans, though its structure is heavily beholden to the colonialist politics of Haggard's era: A brilliant white man, often a professor, deploys personal reserves of cleverness, resilience and unrelenting determination in the service of exploration, discovery and resource extraction. That narrative template guides these stories even when the author attempts to push back on their ideological implications. Think, for example, about how the Indiana Jones films use the Nazi menace to distract from the fact that our hero is almost always appropriating the treasures of Indigenous or pre-colonial peoples.
As the adventure genre developed, it grew to incorporate what we now call science fiction — and Indiana Jones's escapades have plenty of overlap with that genre, too. Indy frequently encounters improbably intricate traps built by pre-industrial cultures that apparently require no maintenance over millennia — and, of course, he once saw a UFO. That also speaks to some of the material in the franchise's DNA: Similar stories can be found in such novels as Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912), Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan novels (1912-1966), and Edward Bulwer-lytton's Vril, The Power of the Coming Race (1871).
If these influential texts are haunted today by their unavoidable racism, it's not as if Indy's creators — who grew up loving these stories — were wholly unaware of the problems with them. “You and I are very much alike,” taunts his first major doppelgänger, Belloq (Paul Freeman), in Raiders of the Lost Ark, in a speech that has been plagiarized by movie villains ever since. Even the original '80s films know, on some level, that Jones is a villain in his story. The climax of every Indiana Jones movie, after all, comes only when Indy finally decides to relinquish whatever it was he was trying to get, rather than follow his obsession over a cliff (or down a chasm, or into space); the happy ending is when he gives up and just goes home.
Here, we find the traces of another weird antecedent of the Indiana Jones franchise, distinct from all the others: the religious conversion narrative. A self-obsessed and lonely skeptic, a man of science who has let his career crowd out all other aspects of his life and induced him to make morally questionable decisions in pursuit of fortune and glory, is granted a momentary gift of grace, a glimpse of the divine (or, once, aliens), which changes his life forever. In this way, every Indiana Jones film is just a genre-swapped version of A Christmas Carol.
Five movies and 42 years in, we might start to wonder if Indiana Jones belongs in a museum. In Dial of Destiny, especially, we find Indy exhausted and bitter as he retires from his tenured professorship at Marshall College, with the advertising for the film loudly promising this time it really is his last adventure (really). Today, the figure of the Great White Hero feels almost completely used up. Even those of us who love the character can do so now only by winding back the years.