All you ever need to know about Indiana Jones, you can learn from his first 15 or so minutes on celluloid. There is not much dialogue in those first few moments. There’s the infamous rolling boulder, yes, but there’s also everything just prior.
There is his stone-faced expression as he passes by dead bodies in various states of decay. One is filled with poison darts. The next is impaled on a booby trap. There is the way he firmly brushes creepy-crawlies off his own back and then his partner’s with his trademark whip. With not much more than a stern glance, he tells a young, terrified Alfred Molina to get on with it.
In the single most telling moment, he scampers his way to the altar of the golden idol he is pursuing. He has avoided death 10 or 20 times already. There it is. He crouches in front of the idold, wipes his brow, and strokes his chin, poised to swap a bag of weighted sand for the prize, mistakenly calculating that it will keep all the booby traps unsprung. The idol glows back on to his face. We get one of those trademark Steven Spielberg faces. Sometimes, those looks tell us to expect something awesome or horrible. Here, it’s pure character development. This is our moment to pause, catch our breath, and, maybe, begin to understand why we’ve already fallen for Indy. Then, he’s off to the races again, on his way out of a collapsing temple. He’s still barely said a thing, but it doesn’t matter. We’ll follow this man anywhere.
Indiana Jones is a complicated person. Belloq, his nemesis in this film, played by Paul Freeman, refers to himself as a “shadowy reflection of [Indy].”
And he’s right. Belloq is more morally compromised than our hero. He resorts to dirty tricks to pluck the idol from Indy’s grasp in the film’s opening sequence, then casts his lot with real, actual Nazis in pursuit of, of all things, a Jewish religious relic.
But Indy leaves behind his own wreckage. The antiquities he brings back to his museum are received “as usual, no questions asked,” as Dr. Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott) puts it. Upon their reunion, Marion Ravenwood is so furious at him for their failed romance, she seems almost ambivalent about the choice between helping him or helping those real, actual Nazis. Later entries in the series detail other failed romances, an unhappy childhood, and personal tragedy. Armchair psychologists among us might fairly wonder if he’s using his work to escape from personal demons.
Complicated as Indy might be as a person, his appeal is simple and self-evident. We’re not here to strike up a lifelong friendship with Dr. Jones. We’re here to live vicariously through him. There are the adventures in exotic locations and the promise of glory, of course, but there is, mostly, just him, his approach to life and his pursuit of very, very challenging targets.
Indiana Jones has remarkable nerve, for starters. You don’t go to the places he goes and take on the people he takes on without serious gumption. His nerve is put-upon, but real. He’s afraid of snakes, but he’ll get down in a literal viper pit if he has to. He is determined. He has his own code.
He often makes his own trouble. It’s hard not to notice that if Indy had just stayed home or heeded any of the many ominous warnings about the power of the Ark, it probably never would have ended up in the hands of Belloq or Hitler’s henchmen. But he’s a remarkable improviser. He demonstrates over and over that he can think on his feet and do it quickly. He outlasts his foes more than he beats them, and determination and improvisation are precisely why. His relentlessness isn’t accompanied by tunnel vision. Indiana Jones is perpetually aware of his surroundings, which is probably why he’s such a great escape artist.
Marion, the daughter of Indy’s mentor, tells him in one of those early fits of rage that her father called him “the most gifted bum he ever trained.” And here, I would propose, is one way to summarize a particular ideal of American masculinity. Indiana Jones is, as a government bureaucrat tells him, a “man of many talents,” and yet he is also a man of mystery and a bit of a scoundrel. His knowledge of ancient relics is apparently encyclopedic, but he’ll also shoot a foe point blank and in cold blood when he just doesn’t have the time for a fair fight. He’s a vessel for our better angels and our worst tendencies. He and his fictional contemporary Rick Blaine share the same outlook on life and sarcastic wit, and they’re both utterly irresistible.
The credit for all of this belongs to Spielberg and to the great Harrison Ford. Spielberg dreamed up these adventures and accompanying action sequences, and put considerable craft in to making Indy’s world worthy of those vicarious impulses. Who wouldn’t want to spend an hour in Marion’s bar in Nepal - all wood and soot and drafty gusts and whiskey - or carouse with Salah in Cairo or drink with the crew of the Bantu Wind Tramp Steamer? Ford’s ability to switch between snarls and ironic detachment and annoyance and perfect comedic timing make it totally impossible to imagine anyone else playing this role. He’s just too perfect. And, most remarkably, the connection to this character is almost instant, far more reptilian than intellectual
Movies can unlock many things for us, the viewers. Escape is just one of those things, and you could see Raiders of the Lost Ark as merely one of the finest examples in this category of cinematic services. But I think Indiana Jones also teaches us about charisma and irresistibility and what we can see clearly and move past in spite of that clarity.
Not one of Indy’s many flaws is a secret. We see him for who he is and love him anyway, right away, because of all the other good things about him - because his heart and spirit are in the exact right place.