In Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones
transforms from a mercenary to an indentured knight through a journey that
takes all movie. At the beginning of the movie, Indy is closing a deal with the
Chinese mob in Shanghai until it goes south. Once he escapes he finds himself
in a tight situation trying to survive a plane crash. When he survives the
crash, he encounters a village and gets intertwined in their problems. He is
mostly indifferent until they tell him about the theft of the sacred stone that
brings peace to the town. Indiana enters the quest only because of the
historical significance of the stone. Until this point, Indy’s actions are
mandated through a reward and glory standpoint. Entering this retrieval journey
will bring no material reward to Indy thus he skeptically takes on the
challenge. After he retrieves the stone from the Thuggees, the village is
transformed from a dessert wasteland to a thriving green setting. When Willy
asks him why he returned the stone and not sold it for money, he said that if
he did the stone would just be collecting dust in a museum, in the village it
was helping people. Here, Indiana realizes how much the stone meant to the
village and makes the transformation from mercenary to indenture knight.
In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indy goes
through a similar journey where at the beginning he embarks on the journey for
the glory and reward aspect. Indy is very excited about making a discovery of a
lifetime. To find the lost Arc containing the Ten Commandments and being able
to study through the government leaves Indy with a sense of enthusiasm when he
leaves for India. Indy feels as he has found an authoritative figure (the
government) that takes him seriously and wants to use his talents for the
greater good of humanity. When he is able to bring the arc out of its hiding
place, Belloq wins once more and is able to acquire what Indy has recovered.
Belloq tells Indy that the arc is history and that they are just witnessing
history. This makes Indy reflect on why he is after the arc. He comes to the
conclusion that his any finding he does on the arc surpass Indy and affects
humanity as a whole. Indy acknowledges that the arc must be retrieved at any costs;
he realizes that knowledge is more rewarding than money and fame. Thus when the
journey is over and the United States has the arc under their power Indy is
upset that the “top people are working on it” because he knows that is not
true. Indy knows that the government has sized the Arc and hid it away. Here he
loses hope on the government that set him abroad to find the arc and finds a
new authoritative figure, knowledge. Knowledge is the only one that won’t
betray him. As Pfeiffer writes, Indiana is a “kind of swashbuckling hero”,
always raging an inner battle between good and evil or in this case glory and
righteousness. Indy is human with human frailties, fears, and money
problems but overall a famous anthropologist.
You make a lot of good points, and though it's easy to tell that Indy acts as a mercenary in the beginning of these films, there is always that decidedly Hollywood transition that he decides he has to make, regardless of the consequences. Temple of Doom is good because at some point, we as an audience start thinking," Aw Indy has to save all those poor slave children", and while that may be a low blow to the audience's emotions, it works nonetheless. But in that vein, if Indy becomes the indentured knight to make everything right, that means that he loses a bit of the "swashbuckling hero" swag that he has before. Either way though, Indiana Jones and the series as a whole follow the simple formula of make Harrison Ford look like a dirt bag just a little bit and then make him act selfless and gentlemanly, like a noble knight, Anyway though, I think that you hit all the right points in this blog post.
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