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Home Broadcasting Film

Listen — Indiana Jones’s last ride: A legacy to celebrate or bury?

The final Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is out, 42 years after the first was released.

by Vinita Srivastava & Christopher Heaney
July 7, 2023
in Film
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Listen — Indiana Jones’s last ride: A legacy to celebrate or bury?

‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ comes out in theatres on June 30. The fifth in a series over 42 years, many of its originating ideas are taken from 19th-century racist archaeology. Will this iteration be different? (Walt Disney Pictures)

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The final Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is out, 42 years after the first movie was released. Will this new movie be full of highly problematic stories? Or a guilty pleasure? Or, can it be both?

I love watching a good adventure movie, especially at the start of summer. I have some great memories of eating popcorn in the local suburban movie theatre while we watched aliens take over a spaceship or a group of kids hunt for long-lost treasure in an underground cave.At the same time, even as a kid, I remember thinking how awful some of the racial and gender stereotypes were.

I specifically remember watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and cringing at the representations onscreen, especially, the ruthless and flat-dimensioned South Asian characters and the ridiculous idea that Indians ate monkey brains — and then there was little Short Round, Indy’s child guide and sidekick played by the young Ke Huy Quan.

The late Amrish Puri played the critically acclaimed villain in ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.’ (Lucas Films)

With the series, filmmakers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg showcased nostalgia for the early mid-century with Indiana Jones, the humanitarian Hunter College professor turned adventurer at the centre. Indy outran all kinds of harrows to ensure the ancient artifacts he chased ended up where he thought they belonged: “in a museum.”

(Another now famous line is from Black Panther when Erik Killmonger asks a museum curator: “How do you think your ancestor’s got these?”)

Guilty pleasure or irredeemable Orientalism?

Well, the final Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is out, 42 years after the first movie was released.

As the series comes to an end, we explore Indy’s complicated legacy — and his famous line: “it belongs in a museum.”

Will Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny reflect the changes in anthropology departments and the growing movements from Indigenous and Global South communities to return stolen objects and ancestors from western museums? Will it consider that Eurocentric notions of what holds heritage has finally expanded beyond the artifact?

Will this new movie be full of highly problematic stories? Or a guilty pleasure? Or, can it be both?

Historian Christopher Heaney has spent a lot of time thinking about this. He’s written a book about the “original” Indiana Jones and wrote “Burying Indiana Jones” for The New Yorker. He’s a professor of Latin American History at Penn State University and he joined me on Don’t Call Me Resilient — our last episode of the season, and just in time for summer blockbuster season — to unpack everything Indiana Jones.

‘How do you think your ancestors got these?’ ‘Black Panther’ offers a response to ‘it belongs in a museum.’

Read more

  • Indiana Jones, Hollywood’s chief colonial pilferer, is back (Monthly Review)
  • Empires of the Dead by Christopher Heaney (Oxford University Press)
  • “The Racism Behind Alien Mummy Hoaxes” (The Atlantic)
  • “It does not belong in a museum” (Black Girl Nerds)
  • “Can Indiana Jones overcome its Orientalist past?” (The New Arab)
  • Decolonizing Museums by Amy Lonetree (UNC Press)The Conversation

Our recs: Kids adventure movies/shows

  • Dora the Explorer and the Lost City of Gold
  • Pachamama
  • Finding Ohana
  • National Treasure: Edge of History
Trailer of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (Lucas Films) ‘You’ve taken your chances, made your mistakes, and now, a final triump,’ Phoebe Walter-Bridge says to Jones.

Vinita Srivastava, Host + Producer, Don’t Call Me Resilient | Senior Editor, Culture + Society, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.


 

Tags: Christopher HeaneycolonialfilmIndiana JonesIndiana Jones and the Dial of DestinymovieracismseriesstereotypesVinita Strivastava

Vinita Srivastava & Christopher Heaney

Vinita is a journalist, educator and media innovator. She's reported internationally from places like New York, Mumbai and Johannesburg and has worked in both big and community media, including: the New York Times Magazine, Savoy, VIBE, the Village Voice and WBAI and CKLN Radio. She's a leader and a mentor both in the newsroom and the classroom and has taught journalism at TMU's School of Journalism, the National University of Rwanda and the Asian American Writer's Workshop in NYC. Christopher Heaney is an Assistant Professor of History at Penn State and a writer, with bylines in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the New York Times. He researches and teaches on the history and culture of the Andes, Indigenous knowledges, science, museums, and empire. His first book, Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones, and the Search for Machu Picchu (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), was a history of the media discovery of Machu Picchu, and the fight that ensued between Yale University and Peru over the ownership of Machu Picchu's tombs. It was used by Peruvian officials and Yale alumni to assist in that collection's return.

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