As the most gifted and
congenial by far of the New Hollywood tyros, Steven Spielberg may be the only
consummate master of the post-television movie spectacular-the blockbuster that’s
diced out into bite-size narrative units like Chicken McNuggets (every structural
hint of bone or body part processed out of existence, every juicy piece a
separate unique experience, designed to vanish without a trace). Aspiring to
the condition of continuous action as if that were a delirious state of
grace-borne aloft by superbly timed jolts and impossibly narrow escapes,
usually in three-to five-minute setpiece doses-
RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK all but bypasses character and logic for a string of
stunning rides through separate portions of Disneyland, one right after the
other, each one a visceral treat.
Valuing speed over sense,
the movie is too energetically rushed to allow it) self any detours into
lyricism. It’s a surprising turn of events for the director of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
OF THE THIRD KIND, but the box office blues of 1941 must have led Spielberg to
some second thoughts about how to bring an audience to its knees—back to the
lessons of JAWS, in other words, with the additional commercial support of
George Lucas (who produced and collaborated with Philip Kaufman on the original
story). Consequently, even when God puts in an appearance toward the end of
this globetrotting adventure—a fiery, vengeful Old Testament God playing yang
to the yin of the benign aliens in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS—He doesn’t get to stick
around any longer than a television commercial.
I’ll never forget the
queasy experience I had one Sunday afternoon last year, in the front row of a
crowded midtown theater, watching the grisly elevator murder in DRESSED TO KILL
at the same time that the man who created it, Brian De Palma, was a couple of
seats away, watching me and others react to it (and leaving the theater as soon
as the sequence was over). The curious thing about his gaze, as I recall it,
was that it conveyed a lot of pride and satisfaction, yet none of it was
directed at the screen.
It’s a gaze I remembered
more than once while responding in a similarly helpless way to the merciless
mechanics of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK—and not merely because Spielberg and Lucas
are also decadent disciples of Hitchcockian storyboard construction in which
The Sequence becomes the whole raison d’être of filmmaking. It was also related
to the dawning realization that the real continuity and characters of their
movies can be truly located only in their audience responses-not in any
autonomous evidence up on the screen, which is bound to be relatively uneven
and riddled with gaps (e.g., how does the hero get to the Mediterranean Island
on a Nazi submarine?)
Consider Karen Allen here,
a likable, resourceful actress who gets used like one of those convertible
stage units in a play full of short scenes First she’s established (in a
drinking bout) as one of the boys, then as some perfunctory variant of the
mannish woman (Joan Crawford as Vienna in JOHNNY GUITAR) running a Nepalese saloon,
then as a fluttery sort of captive heroine who clearly isn’t one of the boys,
then as a background prop; whatever a given scene requires, she dutifully
becomes The same principle holds (more or less) for everyone and everything
else in the movie, from hero Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) to villain Beloq
(Pau1 Freeman) to the Ark of the Covenant to somebody’s pet monkey. Try to
summon up a composite image anywhere, a feeling or idea that you can salvage
when the movie’s over, and you’re mainly stuck with an arsenal of disconnected
poses and disposable functions.
There’s a lot of confusion
around-most of it to the advantage of banks—about the status of this
blunderbuss approach in relation to art. Its effectiveness as dazzling
entertainment is harder to quarrel with; I was glued to my seat, and even the
monotonous lack of variation in the pacing (as in 1941) has something soothing
about it. But the creepy presumption of most criticism nowadays is not only
that it’s possible to be a Serious Artist while wielding megabucks, but that it’s
often necessary to wield these lofty budgets in order to be considered “seriously”
at all. Around the time of the release of STAR WARS, it was widely reported
that Lucas Intended to make only avant-garde films in
the future. Such a story seemed preposterous then, and I find it even harder to
swallow it now. Lucas lacks the freedom
to make avant-garde films—assuming that freedom is ultimately a matter of
mental space more than budget. Most people, I know, assume the reverse of this—such
is the myth that keeps those Industry wheels turning—but few highly budgeted
directors have ever seemed like exceptionally free individuals to me.
So maybe the real auteur of
RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK is neither Spielberg nor Lucas-however brilliant each
may be in his separate functions-but the money that plays with them and us, the
money that calls all the shots.
Combining the dogged desire
of Lucas to be pulpier than Sax Rohmer in this 1936 white supremacist
archeological romp (while combining all the world’s most important religious
myths on the head of a pin and simultaneously whistling
How deeply are we expected
to get involved in a plot about the fabled Ark of the Covenant which doesn’t
feature a single Jew, with Arab (i.e., proto-Iranian) and Nazi villains galore?
RAIDERS somehow contrives to convert the Great Whatsit of KISS ME DEADLY
(nuclear death In Pandora’s Box) into the 10 Commandments of Cecil B. De Mille,
without ever convincing us that either has the moral weight of Cheech &
Chong’s roach clip, or the 15 Commandments of Mel Brooks in HISTORY OF THE WORLD,
PART 1.* It mainly locates its few tokens of crunchy transcendence
in its audience’s unconscious and its promo campaign On the screen, it sticks
more practically and nihilistically to the short-range task of being a “rattling
good yarn”—one, indeed, that rattles and hisses at you in sensuous Dolby while
boldly slinging you from one outrageously suspenseful snake pit to another
Before the movie’s scarcely begun, Indiana Jones is being chased by a giant
bowling ball of a boulder through a Penman cave that’s otherwise characterized
by tarantulas, treasures. diverse death-traps, and
cave-ins.
“I am a shadow reflection
of you,” Freeman says coolly to Ford at one point, alerting those academics who
night want to brood seriously over this enjoyable nonsense The Ark Itself is a
McGuffin-prop lifted from DAVID AND BATHSHEBA, a Gregory Peck vehicle of thirty
simmers ago. As I see it, the Great Whatsit here is really nothing more than
the proverbial Magic of Movies-the only subject Spielberg/Lucas seem equipped
to tackle head-on, in tandem with the usual dull concentration on the nature of
power traps (which is what turned APOCALYPSE NOW from a film about Vietnam into
a film about being a director, and what makes the last shot of RAIDERS a clear
steal from CITIZEN KANE).
In a way, the opening
dissolve from the Paramount logo to an actual mountain peak tells us all we
need to know By the time we arrive at the c11mactic narrative striptease on a
mountaintop, we see death pour out of the Ark like a lethal dose of projector
light, spelling out hologram-like figures which emerge from the emulsion only
to turn ugly and start zapping the Nazis dead. Faces melt fabulously (in the
snazziest of all the flashy special effects) as the Nazis are being cremated;
the heavens part to suck up all the cinders and then neatly close shut again,
like a zipper.
But the most thrilling
moment of sexual release for the audience I saw RAIDERS with was the humorously
delayed decision of Jones, much earlier, to shoot a fancy sword-swishing Arab
with his gun rather than bother with his whip. Its offhand genocidal message
comes very close to being the only one that New Hollywood (from TAXI DRIVER to
STAR WARS to APOCALYPSE NOW to DRESSED To KILL) can find beyond its own pretty,
bejeweled navel—a pithy suggestion, derived from Conrad’s Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, that simply says, “Exterminate
the brutes.”
*I was originally reviewing UP IN SMOKE (a
Cheech & Chong comedy) as well as the Brooks movie—and Andrew Noren’s
CHARMED PARTICLES—in the same column. (1993)
—