The Life and Times of Indiana Jones
“What if we started out with him as a little boy?” asked George Lucas. He was talking to Steven Spielberg, when the idea of making an Indiana Jones film that introduced the character as a teenager was first brought up. The pair had been trying to develop a story to top off the trilogy of adventures that began with Raiders of the Lost Ark, but couldn’t settle on a premise that lived up to that film’s legacy. A previous attempt at a script had Indy exploring a haunted castle in the Scottish Highlands, shortly before embarking on a wild journey to South Africa in search of the source of immortality. Judging by the details that emerged, much of the focus was placed on ways to upstage the spectacle of earlier movies, and not enough on Indiana himself. At least, until Lucas came up with the possibility of depicting him as a kid. This would be the first time that he allowed his characters to live a life beyond the confines of their own mythos, but it wouldn’t be the last.
We have seen the fall of Darth Vader as a young Jedi, and Luke Skywalker return as a grizzled old man. But Indy paved the way for them. Starting off with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom—set one year before Raiders, rather than after—Lucas played with the chronology of his hero, bringing audiences backward and forward in time in order to explore his exploits throughout the 20th century. Indeed, the young Indy segment in what eventually became Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade gave way to The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, a globe-spanning TV show that recounted the character’s formative years from childhood to college. And over a decade later, Harrison Ford still found himself digging out his old bullwhip to fend off Soviet spies in the post-war world of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Instead of circling through five variations of the same story, the resulting saga turned into the accidental memoir of a living and breathing person, and demonstrated how a creative-driven project can expand organically in ways that the typical made-to-order studio franchises do not.
Over the years, the development process of Indiana Jones has been covered extensively in the form of interviews, companion books, and various behind the scenes footage. It’s possible to find old drafts from each movie, and even the invaluable 125-page transcript of a story conference held by Spielberg, Lucas and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan back in 1978 that essentially summarizes the genesis of an icon. The fedora, the rolling boulder, the truck chase, and the snake-filled Well of Souls. They’re all there, and then some. It was during this conference that not only the majority of Raiders of the Lost Ark took shape, but also key ideas from every sequel that followed. The Shanghai sequence, boy sidekick, plane crash and mine cart chase from Temple of Doom were all once part of Raiders. So were antagonists that would later evolve into Elsa Schneider and Walter Donovan from The Last Crusade. Even the Erich von Däniken ancient astronaut theories that inspired much of the lore behind Kingdom of the Crystal Skull get a mention. By the time Kasdan was contacted, Lucas and Spielberg had mostly figured out the world that Indiana Jones was meant to inhabit. But for every minute they spent talking about deadly traps and mystical treasure, another two were devoted to character.
Indy’s personality was laid out in clear terms: he’s an intellectual, a college professor who lives a parallel life as an adventurer and tomb raider of sorts. Spielberg likened him to Clark Kent, who keeps his heroic persona hidden under a journalist guise. For Lucas, the references ranged from Clint Eastwood’s The Man With No Name to Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. What they were lacking was a solid co-protagonist. They knew the movie needed a female lead, but they had been struggling to find a reason to keep her tagging along in the adventure. To solve this, Lucas considered making her a German agent, but Kasdan suggested a link with Indy’s past. Perhaps she was his old mentor’s daughter, and maybe Jones once crossed a contentious line with her. This quickly became the writer’s most celebrated contribution, giving the story a much needed emotional backbone through the creation of Marion Ravenwood: partner, lover and dramatic keystone that would mark a before and after in Indiana Jones’ eventful lifetime.
Marion’s relationship with Indy is a difficult one. In Raiders, she greets him with a right hook to the jaw. “I learned to hate you in the last ten years!” she cries. He apologizes. She asks him to apologize again. Her anger stems from an old affair that left her emotionally scarred and sparked a decade-long rift between Jones and her father. Story wise, this was meant to build on the idea that Indy is irresistible for young girls—something he wasn’t always going to ignore. Early drafts had him taking a student home after class, and Marion’s age at the time of their first romance was the object of some discussion during development meetings. Ultimately, much of this subplot was dropped, saving Indy from a series of choices that would have made him irredeemable. Instead, the movie tastefully irons out the kinks by keeping him comically oblivious to his students’ dreamy stares and by steering clear of any thorny details concerning Marion’s backstory.
Not to say that any of this turned Indiana into a gentleman. He still walks unannounced into Marion’s Nepalese bar after years of absence, showing little to no concern about her personal circumstances, asking for a golden medallion that he needs to retrieve the lost Ark of the Covenant. It’s not until later in the film, when Marion is seemingly killed during a kidnapping attempt, that Indy realizes how much he actually cared about her. He had just taken her for granted, treating her as nothing but a material reward not so different from the artifacts he plunders from around the world. But once he discovers she’s alive, everything changes. By the second time she is taken by Belloq and the Nazis, he goes as far as threatening to blow up the ark—all he cared about in the first place—in order to save her.
The scene is a turning point in the movie. Indy surprises the German troops transporting the ark by pointing a rocket launcher at them. He demands Marion to be released, or he’ll blow up their prize. “Blow it up! Blow it back to God!” challenges Belloq. “You want to see it open as well as I.” For a moment, it seems so. Yet minutes later, when the ark is finally opened, Indy looks the other way. This is significant not just because it shields him and Marion from the wrath of God, but also because it completes an implicit arc that has him go from skeptic to believer. Earlier in the film, he laughs off warnings about the ark from his closest allies. However, it is at the very end, as the Nazis desecrate it by doing everything the scriptures forbid man from doing, that Jones considers the potential risk of doubting the religious tradition.
Thus, the opening of the ark marks the point where the film’s two main narrative threads finally intersect and crystalize in harmony. Having underestimated the ark’s power, Indy comes to acknowledge it. And despite having failed Marion in the past, he learns to value her the hard way. This isn’t so much the familiar trope of love being the greatest treasure, but rather a character overcoming his own shortsightedness as both an academic and a person instead. It is as simple as it gets in terms of subtext—a kind of play between the material quest and the personal one common in many adventure stories, but one utilized to great effect in all the Indiana Jones films. Because of this, no matter how openly formulaic the approach to story following Raiders of the Lost Ark, the series still found ways to say something new about its protagonist at every chance.
Temple of Doom never had it easy. As the first follow-up act, it faced the daunting task of having to keep the flame alive after the resounding success of its predecessor. American Graffiti writers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz put together a preliminary draft for the movie in just four months, recycling many ideas left over from the making of Raiders. As the story goes, George Lucas wanted a film that contrasted directly with the first one, which meant no supporting characters coming back and a new antagonist force to take over from the Nazis. The quickest solution to justify this change of course was to set the action one year before the last adventure, which made Temple of Doom a prequel far before that term became commonplace in movie lingo. But it also prompted several implications for the characterization of Indiana Jones in the plot.
If Indy showed some questionable qualities at the beginning of Raiders, the opening of Temple of Doom introduces him at a whole new career low. Sitting comfortably in a tuxedo while attending a meeting with the Chinese mafia, he’s soon revealed to be trading the remains of the first Manchu emperor for a big fat diamond. Long gone are the days of the idealistic teen from The Last Crusade who claimed that precious artifacts belong in a museum, and many months still separate him from the man that would confront Belloq for having the stomach to sell himself out to Nazi Germany. Here and now, Indiana is portrayed as nothing but a grave robber. And things only get worse as the film goes on.
After a close call parachuting on an inflatable raft over the Himalayas, Indy winds up in a small Hindu village that has fallen victim to a local death cult. According to its elder, hosts from a nearby palace have stolen a sacred stone from their shrine and then taken all their children as slaves. Later on, one of these children turns up at the village, famished and barely able to walk, babbling about the legend of Sankara—a priest of Shiva who was gifted five magic stones to combat evil. When asked what this means, Indiana does not trouble himself with disturbing thoughts about enslaved children or pernicious pillaging. Instead, he proudly replies “fortune and glory,” making it abundantly clear where his priorities lie.
Temple of Doom pulls no punches when it comes to depicting the flawed nature of its characters. Sometimes labeled as superficial and cartoony, Willie Scott and Short Round tend to meet much of the criticism directed at the film, when in reality they just service the story as reflections of some of Indy’s worst traits. Willie enters the picture as an associate of the very same gangsters Jones himself was getting mixed up with, and she shares his same selfish thirst for fame and money. The conversations between the two always devolve into verbal matches where they mostly project their own image onto each other, a pattern that reaches its peak during a flirting session that gets promptly thwarted by a sensational explosion of arrogance. Some of this behavior even seeps to Short Round, who having Indy as his paternal role model, spends half the movie blurting out entirely inappropriate comments that he likely picked up from him.
All this amorality eventually leads to a narrative midpoint that shows Indy breaking into the dreaded Temple of Doom and stealing the sacred Sankara Stones, effectively ending his adventure. But the distant cries of the enslaved children grab his attention, enough of a distraction to get him captured by the pesky Thuggee cultists that run the place. Jones is then forced to drink the Blood of Kali, a cursed potion that turns him into another temple devotee, and for a while this threatens to cap off the story on an uncomfortably dark note. Of course, that doesn’t last, but it briefly takes Indy to the very extreme he had been leaning towards throughout the entire movie: a miserable life of greed, corruption and death. Once free of the spell, he abandons his pursuit of the Sankara Stones and instead focuses on getting everybody out of harm’s way—starting with the children imprisoned by the Thuggee cult. It is at this moment that the character we know from Raiders of the Lost Ark truly returns, completing his journey from scoundrel to hero and giving Temple of Doom its whole raison d’être.
As in Raiders, Indy’s transformation is fixed to a single climatic event and fairly clean-cut, but it’s integral to the film’s thematic foundation. The ideas of choice and fate echo throughout the narrative, from the turntable shots in the Shanghai club prologue scene to the characters’ decision of making a detour to Pankot Palace, and from the alluring power of the Sankara Stones to the perilous dilemma at the rope bridge that closes the film. I often say that audiences may have met Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but he wasn’t really born as a fully-fledged hero until Temple of Doom. These two movies solidify his archetype so effectively that, in fact, they almost made it look like it was all said and done by then. Moving forward, Indy could only hope to become another variant of James Bond, popping in and out of similarly themed adventures where only the background changes while he remains the same. This, however, was not to be. And the workaround was to have him lend much of his screen-time to someone else in his next film.
Legend says that Spielberg wanted to leave the Indiana Jones series on a high note, and he took the opportunity to direct another entry after Temple of Doom with the intention of making it feel more personal. The result was The Last Crusade, a story about the reunion between a son and his estranged father in the midst of an international conspiracy involving foreign armies, murderous spies and at least one clandestine society tasked with protecting the secret of the Holy Grail. Certainly, the sort of element combination you would expect from a personal story starring Indiana Jones.
Out of all the movies in the franchise, The Last Crusade experienced the most drastic plot changes. First tackled by The Goonies writer and Harry Potter director Chris Columbus, the script was eventually reworked by Jeffrey Boam and Tom Stoppard, based on a treatment by Lucas and Menno Meyjes. The father plot line did not always exist, and at one point the film revolved around a quest for the Fountain of Youth in Mozambique. This later became a magical peach tree guarded by pygmies, taking many cues from the Chinese literature classic Journey to the West. Topping off the bizarre mix of ingredients, the story also kicked off with Indy solving a ghost mystery while on a fishing holiday, and in at least one draft he spent half the adventure shaking off a suicidally lovestruck student that stowed along to Africa. Obviously, none of this made it past the exploratory writing stage. For a while, the movie was aimless and hollow, in dire need of something of substance to say. And that’s when the idea of introducing Henry Jones Sr. came along.
The Last Crusade is as much Indy’s movie as it is his father Henry’s. It is a unique take in the series in the sense it subverts the formula, switching the MacGuffin and main supporting character around. In all the other films, Indiana discovers the ark, sacred stones or crystal skull somewhere around the narrative midpoint, after which a constant back-and- forth usually ensues where the object swaps hands between heroes and villains all the way to the story’s ending. The Holy Grail, however, is of little consequence to Indy, who embarks on the adventure with the sole purpose of rescuing his dad. It is Henry who is found halfway through the movie, and the one who the Nazis capture back as we inch closer to the conclusion.
In a way, the film plays very much like a version of Raiders of the Lost Ark in reverse, where Henry takes on the role Indy had in that movie and Indy takes Marion’s. Once again, the story deals with two characters who drifted apart rejoining under exceptional circumstances, eventually restoring their bond and learning to cherish each other. In the end, this becomes more of a practical lesson for Henry than Indy, as he is the one obsessed with the Grail. To drive the idea home, the script even revisits the same plot point that had Marion seemingly killed in Raiders, only this time it’s Indy the one that appears to die in the eyes of his father. This makes Henry reassess his whole relationship with his son, and come the end of the film, he is willing to give up the Holy Grail in order to save Indiana’s life.
Placing Henry at the forefront of the narrative made for a stronger reading of the story’s central meaning. In Arthurian legend, the Grail symbolizes a lifelong search for the divine, and common wisdom has adopted it as shorthand to signify anyone’s most profound needs and aspirations. After countless years of daring adventure and solitary study, all Indy and Henry were really missing in their lives were each other. This is perhaps not the most involved message to decipher, but a moving message nonetheless. It’s part of what makes The Last Crusade not just a worthy sequel to the Raiders of the Lost Ark, but also the most touching, wittiest entry in the series and the closest Indiana Jones ever got to becoming a character piece. It also turned it into that fitting end to a beloved trilogy that Spielberg set out to make from start, but as fate would have it, Indy still rode again in the future and not quite to everyone’s satisfaction.
As with other late sequels born in the post-internet era, it’s nearly impossible to speak about Kingdom of the Crystal Skull without mentioning its lukewarm reception. Initially conceived sometime in the mid 90s, the film went through multiple rewrites and iterations with titles ranging from pulpy solemnity to the utterly eccentric, such as City of the Gods, Saucermen from Mars and The Atomic Ants. Hollywood A-listers like Jeb Stuart, Frank Darabont and Jeff Nathanson all had a go at it, until their ideas coalesced into a final script by David Koepp, a frequent Spielberg collaborator. From the beginning, George Lucas’ angle for the movie was more sci-fi than conventional adventure. However, this was a bold move that soon proved to be a hard sell for an audience far too accustomed to a decades-long subjective notion of what an Indiana Jones movie should be like.
Looking at the original film trilogy, it seems natural to understand the elements that best define Indy as exotic locales, pulsing action, fleeting romances and the quest for a Judeo-Christian relic, or alternatively, some other object of mystical flavor. A piece of alien skeleton does not seem to fit well in that equation, but neither does a 58 year old Indiana Jones. Following the trend started by the prologue of The Last Crusade—and to an extent, continued by his own Star Wars prequels—Lucas decided to let his character live a life not limited by the bounds of the screen, which required him to experience a world where the familiar would necessarily yield to the new. To make up for the twenty-year gap since the previous movie, Indy would now live in the 1950s. The World Wars are over, the Sputnik satellite soars the firmament and the Red Scare is a thing, with hard-working capitalists fearing for the well-being of their children should the shadow of communism penetrate their feeble minds. An aging Jones finds himself thrown into this strange new reality like an out-of-place artifact, now walking the Earth as a sad remnant of his own past.
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull would have not made sense any other way. As much as people would like to think otherwise, Indiana Jones movies do not have the thematic means to continue in perpetuity, and coming off The Last Crusade, Lucas and Spielberg had extinguished nearly everything a middle-aged Indy had to say. Bringing him forward in time was the best way to keep exploring his character, and Crystal Skull arrived to bookend a story that had enjoyed a beautiful send-off yet still felt like missing a piece ever since Marion walked off Raiders of the Lost Ark, never to return again.
The idea of homecoming is, in truth, very much at the core of the narrative. This time, Indy begins his adventure already having been outsmarted by his enemies—a far cry from his youthful deftness in the opening of Raiders—and facing a dreadful predicament. Soviet agents have taken him prisoner to an isolated government facility in the Nevada desert, and even after he manages to break free, there aren’t that many places to take cover other than a nearby suburban town of eerily quiet streets. Here, Jones realizes that he has actually just walked into a nuclear test site within minutes of an atomic bomb detonation—an inescapable death sentence that he nevertheless cheats his way out of by climbing into a lead-lined refrigerator right before the blast.
For all the complaints about the fridge scene, the opening of Crystal Skull manages to encapsulate the whole point of the film better than any previous entry since Raiders. It presents Indy alone, defeated, and running into a nightmarish representation of domestic life in the context of an impending death. When he climbs into that fridge to take shelter, he’s hiding from the bomb as much as from a future he never had—the type of inconsequential family routine that someone like him would never settle for. But when we get a glimpse of his ordinary life, we find him still working the same menial job, having survived friends and relatives in an increasingly lonely existence. As college dean Charles Stanforth eloquently points out to him, he has simply reached an age when “life stops giving things and starts taking them away.” Yet that’s the very notion the movie sets out to dispute right afterwards, as Indy’s long lost son Mutt makes his entrance and sends him on one last expedition after the fabled Crystal Skull of Akator.
Keeping with the tradition, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’s mysterious artifact mirrors Indy’s internal arc of rediscovery and redemption. For once, the adventure is not about raiding some old temple, but about bringing something back to where it belongs. As it turns out, the Crystal Skull is only one of many, the last step in a ritual meant to take an ancient alien crew back to the skies in their spaceship. In the process of returning it, Indy completes a similar journey of restitution: first discovering that Marion Ravenwood is Mutt’s mother after all, and second embracing them as his new family. Despite some quirky tonal choices and muddy motivations, the movie does tell a story whose ideas are all in the right place. Because Crystal Skull may not be the most balanced of the Indiana Jones films, but it’s more accomplished than audiences give it credit for. It’s still very much a Spielberg film, dotted with playful character moments and some of the most inventive visual takes in the series. But above all, its greatest feat may be to remain faithful to George Lucas’ original wish of making Indiana Jones feel human.
A retrospective look at a forty year old film series may come off as little else than a nostalgic exercise. But at a time when the might of brand recognition has all but substituted given names in studio filmmaking, it feels relevant to remember that large-scale, crowd-pleasing movies do not necessarily have to be removed from the distinctiveness of originality and a personal vision. The Indiana Jones films may be fantastically successful, but they remain a passion project conceived by two friends at heart. And there’s an authenticity to this that money can’t buy. They came to be at the tail end of the New Hollywood wave, when a younger generation of directors took control away from the system, and this idiosyncrasy can be felt throughout the series.
It’s not really important that their internal consistency isn’t always perfect—should Indy be so dismissive of the ark’s power in Raiders when just a year earlier he had experienced the madness of Temple of Doom? Why does he tell that one student in Crystal Skull to get out of the library when he emphasized research and reading above everything in The Last Crusade?—what matters is that every one of them still ring true to the singular voices that made them happen. Jones’ appearance and demeanor may be inspired by classic leading men from Curtiz, Huston and Leone. His world may reflect the sensibilities of Lean and Kurosawa. But his experiences run parallel to those of his creators. Indy’s profession owes much to Lucas’ interest in history and anthropology. And he was once a Boy Scout because Spielberg himself was one. His adventures simply echo the childhood fantasies of both.
It is because of this that Indiana matures on screen alongside his creators. Despite working largely as stand-alone stories, his films build on each other through a genuine need to reflect an evolving reality behind them. And they don’t just exist for the sake of having some good, honest fun — they also manage to convey something. They excel as action pieces, but there’s more to craft than expertly shot vistas and sharply edited chase scenes. They feel sincere, injecting the very same enthusiasm that those who made them felt in the moment of putting it all together. They’re a window into someone else’s imagination, their fears and passions. A direct look into their soul.
And this, if nothing else, is cinema.
• Header art by Drew Struzan.
