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Posted: |
Aug 18, 2015 - 6:53 AM
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By: |
Dan Hobgood
(Member)
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The mysticism is not a metaphor; it's treated with utter, literal seriousness (which is laughable).
DH
No.
You're right to say 'laughable' because Indy is not tragedy but comedy. But it's meant that way.
But these films have the same 'seriousness' as, say, a dream, or a myth. Indy is all of us really, but especially Americans, he negotiates the hero's journey with a bit of roguery, and gets himself into the situation where the right moral choice is made. The objets and relics like the Grail, the Ark, the Stone ... all figure prominently in alchemy as symbols of the 'prize', the 'quest'. The Nazis are the dark side. That's metaphor.
It's not that these stories are meant to have 'happened': they're blatantly impossible. They 'represent', they're tall tales. The characters, with the exception of Indy himself, are not people at all really, just, I suppose psychic components, stereotypes, comic book characters. But the DYNAMICS between them have to be the same as the dynamics between various parts of the psyche of the watcher. You could say it's an internal landscape in REAL terms, not in literal ones.
James Bond has no metaphor, he's just a character in the outside world who does things, representing only a sort of style. Indy gets into mythic scrapes, but we all do: except modern man forgets to think that way about his problems (which, by the way, Ayn didn't help with ...), so he never realises it. What Indy does outwardly, we all do inwardly. Maybe it's just to serve entertainment, fun, and a franchise, but you still need those mythic underpinnings with something like this, even to get a story people will plug into.
I wish I could believe all this . . . but I can't. George Lucas, who wrote the film, is a mystic. He believes in mysticism. It surely can't be said that he conceived of Raiders as a farce.
Regardless, it is unwise to provide any encouragement to a population that absolutely does take mysticism seriously. I take the opposite position of you: The Raiders audience needed more of an anchor in reality--not less. Some suspension of disbelief is OK; total suspension . . . not so much.
Dan
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Posted: |
Aug 19, 2015 - 10:14 AM
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By: |
LeHah
(Member)
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Of course, Sheldon is fictitious and, for a supposed genius-off-the-charts, is rather immature and specious most of the time . . .
He also famously stated, "Star Trek I fails across the board: art direction, costuming, music, sound editing."
I think Sheldon, or whoever writes his character, is irrelevant to western civilization.
A former member of this board said it best:
Big Bang Theory is simply a new "black face".
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I wish I could believe all this . . . but I can't. George Lucas, who wrote the film, is a mystic. He believes in mysticism. It surely can't be said that he conceived of Raiders as a farce.
Regardless, it is unwise to provide any encouragement to a population that absolutely does take mysticism seriously. I take the opposite position of you: The Raiders audience needed more of an anchor in reality--not less. Some suspension of disbelief is OK; total suspension . . . not so much.
I didn't say he conceived it as a 'farce'! I did say that it's 'comedy' insofar as it's not Greek 'tragedy', Indy cracks jokes, he gets laughs, he has happy endings, even if they're not quite the ones he planned. That's not 'farce'. Comedy usually isn't farce. It can be 'Mercury', 'Hermes', the resolver of opposites and the exponent of paradox. Most hero-myths involve a trickster element at some point. The hero has to cut cards with the devil.
I don't know if Lucas and Spielberg could really be called 'mystics' or Coppola or Kubrick or any of that 'mythic' school then. But they did respect mysticism. It's not a dirty word, even if greatly misunderstood, and cheapened. Real mysticism isn't rooted in refraction, or illusory escapism, but rather in real experience, and genuine insight of dimensions that people believe are real. We can't pretend our logical egos as yet understand everything.
I do agree that a lot of the modern nerdy post-Star Wars, LOTR crowds could do with stepping back from the comic-book thing for sure, but a lot of that, ironically, came AFTER these guys. Investments can go down as well as up. Kubrick and Coppola preferred their mythic and symbolic to be more 'grounded' and adult for sure.
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Profit is relevant to the outcome?
Too right.
Do you try to change the world, or ride with the current?
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Posted: |
Aug 19, 2015 - 3:51 PM
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By: |
Grecchus
(Member)
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Indiana Jones pales into insignificance when compared to the actual height of the staff of Ra. Nobody knows exactly how high it is, but if you put it in a certain place, at a certain time of morning mounted with the headpiece, the sun shines through it and makes a beam on the floor of the Map Room, indicating the precise location of the Well Of Souls.
You and I paid good money in return for such baloney. As Napoleon said of Wellington: "his hat is worth 50,000 men." I would suggest Dr. Jones' hat is worth a lot more than 50,000,000 bums on seats. Quite incredible, when you think about it.
Hey, aren't you just a little curious to know what Dr Jones' Midi-chlorian count is?
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Indiana Jones pales into insignificance when compared to the actual height of the staff of Ra. Nobody knows exactly how high it is, but if you put it in a certain place, at a certain time of morning mounted with the headpiece, the sun shines through it and makes a beam on the floor of the Map Room, indicating the precise location of the Well Of Souls.
You and I paid good money in return for such baloney. As Napoleon said of Wellington: "his hat is worth 50,000 men." I would suggest Dr. Jones' hat is worth a lot more than 50,000,000 bums on seats. Quite incredible, when you think about it.
Hey, aren't you just a little curious to know what Dr Jones' Midi-chlorian count is?
But that's why Luc and Spiel are top directors and other people aren't.
Indy is the ego-hero, the conscious mind. The quest is to find the 'Ark', the 'Grail', the 'Stone' of the philosophers, the seat of the Divine. What Jung called the 'nuclear Self'. On the way, the negative self must be negotiated (the Nazis) the estranged feminine must be reclaimed (Marion) and, in later films, the negative mother complex (Kali) and the lost father (Connery). It requires a dangerous journey and moral effort and discovery (only the penitent man shall pass), and right choices (the grail) as well as humility and the 'leap of faith'. Jung 101. Alchemy, which you've been told is bunkum, but which, before science was differentiated out, was philosophy.
That's not baloney really, though to modern comfort it might seem so. Not when you're on the edge. Little parables, told with humour and some thrills. You can watch Lawrence of Arabia and see a historical figure who blew up trains and defended Arab culture, or you can see a metaphor about neurosis and political exploitation, which is what REALLY interested Bolt. You can watch the 'Man with X-RAY Eyes' and see a cheap sci-fi thriller, or a powerful metaphor about the transcendent and infinity and how we cope with seeing it ... the same with 'The Incredible Shrinking Man'. You know this Grecchus, you're into quantum and the like.
Yeats said truth builds her tent in the place of excrement. 'The stone the builders reject ...' There's some fun to be found in the fact that some film-makers, no matter what their financial aims may be, like to put great truths into mundane or even 'trivial' pop packages.
But they do. That's how to write films. History alone does not a picture make, nor a producer attract.
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Seriously, I'd say that when the ark falls into the hands of "top men" Indiana Jones would, at the very least, have been down-graded in relative importance. Insulted, even. What is the outcome, anyway? There appears to be no real outcome, even decades later. The ark is perpetually retained as a sealed valuable that must never see the light of day because, as a source of unspeakable power, it can never be truly understood in any shape or form no matter how much research is done on it. The ark merely passes from one long-term storage space to another - it remains in limbo - a mythical object requiring yet another secret code no one can ever see in order to reveal it's whereabouts.
You're not playing 3D chess yet. You're treating it like a factual story instead of a mythological tall tale. You're staring at the finger and missing the moon.
(a) On the mythic level, the 'Ark' (we do know it doesn't exist, right? It was destroyed long ago) represents the sacred throne of the God. Within. It has to be hidden, not inaccessible, but not just lying around. Eastern mystics'll talk better about this. It's also DANGEROUS, as all the mystics and myths testify. Most people don't go there. Various people try to APPROPRIATE or hijack this 'spirituality', organised religions, capitalism, politicians ... they want to control it, but of course it's not controllable.
(b) On the basic source plot level, the film's finale is deliberately (and comically) referencing Roswell etc., and the various conspiracy theories about the governments 'sitting on' various big secrets that are too dangerous to unleash. That's the fun: the government men who try to keep the wraps on these things. Most US folk would get that and laugh, it's comedy.
(c) This is not history, or documentary, or basic drama, it's MYTH. And fun too. It's becoming more and more mainstream nowadays to treat symbolic stuff as though a sort of Aspergers perspective is the best one. You can do nothing with that.
Indy= conscious ego on a journey or quest
Ark, Stone, Grail = the goal .... the inner nuclear 'divine', the place of the God, the spiritual power
Nazis = the 'negative self', that dark side that tries to appropriate the power, the sorceror, for material greed
Kali ... the seducer negative aspect of the 'mother' who smothers and demands sacrifice and enslaves the child (gee, that one's obvious)
Look in the New Testament about that guy who found the buried treasure hidden in the field ...
Indy negotiates his journeys (like the various movie Sinbads) much like Perseus and Jason.
Just dig out Joseph Campbell's 'Masks of God' and Carl Jung's 'Man and his Symbols' and try the thing out. These films are dream territory, not straight-up drama. But dream territory, properly done, isn't just nonsense, in the right hands.
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I don't know if this has been brought up - because this thread is so dense it's making my head spin - but I always took the finale as the triumph of knowledge over greed (for power, for control). Indy and Marian survive because Indy knows better than Belloq and the Nazi thugs that the one thing you don't do with the Ark is OPEN it.
Going back to the thread title, Indiana is NOT irrelevant to the outcome, because Indy is the one who rescues the Ark from the Nazis and gives it to the U.S. (and so on - for infinite ramifications, scroll up). He rescues it by surviving - last man standing. That's relevancy for you.
Again, sorry if these points have been made already, William's heady discourse has me lost in the wilderness here....(not that there's anything wrong with that)
This thread reminds me of a crack I made to my girlfriend when we saw this in the theater way back when. When the lid flew down from the heavens and crashed into place, I leaned over and whispered:
"That's Hebrew for 'Do not open until Christmas'."
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I see where you're coming from, William. My previous post was only trying to establish a form of logical reasoning that could excise the underlying "party challenge" that seems to be at the root of the poster's question. Yes, Indy shifts the ark about in earthly space, yet no suggestion he ever physically touches it is ever made. He pulls it out from one dark corner only for it to disappear in another - therefore no matter how energetic his actions, the lost ark at the start of the movie is still the lost ark at it's conclusion.
Yes, but it's now in the hands of a more benign power. The Americans may not know any more than the Nazis what to DO with it, but they know what NOT to do with it, they believe in ethics. It's like saying, as many organised religions etc. do, 'At least if I let sleeping dogs lie, then it's safer than risking all'. The same happens to the Grail in episode 3: he finds it, but relinquishes it again, because it's too dangerous. And he relinquishes the stone by putting it in its 'proper place' in episode 2.
You can't hold onto it. Organised set-ups try to put it in a box of course.
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In "The World's Highest-Paid TV Actors, 2015," by Maggie McGrath, Forbes Staff. I just learned that Jim Parsons' annual earnings equal $29 million. (This article measures earnings before subtracting management fees and taxes; figures are based on data from Nielsen as well as interviews with agents, managers, lawyers and syndication experts. It only examines men– a separate list of highest-paid TV actresses will be published in the coming weeks, while the highest-paid film actors and actresses have already been ranked.)
BAZINGA!
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Posted: |
Aug 27, 2015 - 11:31 AM
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By: |
CinemaScope
(Member)
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In "The World's Highest-Paid TV Actors, 2015," by Maggie McGrath, Forbes Staff. I just learned that Jim Parsons' annual earnings equal $29 million. (This article measures earnings before subtracting management fees and taxes; figures are based on data from Nielsen as well as interviews with agents, managers, lawyers and syndication experts. It only examines men– a separate list of highest-paid TV actresses will be published in the coming weeks, while the highest-paid film actors and actresses have already been ranked.)
BAZINGA!
Oh well, if other successful sitcoms are anything to go by, you won't see much of the actors after it's cancelled, but at least they'll be rich.
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