I Hate Indiana Jones: Day 44

Day 44: Indiana Jones and the Idiotic Archaeologist Part Five

I'm wrapping up this week with a relatively short article because today's subject really kind of speaks for itself. In fact, while speaking for itself it goes to the trouble of telling the audience in the clearest possible terms exactly what the filmmakers think of Indiana Jones' intellectual capacity. Once again I treat you to some dialogue from the film:

Scene: Indiana Jones has just arrived inside the temple of the crystal skull's treasure room. Before him he finds a huge repository of items from our world's ancient cultures in showroom condition, suggesting that the aliens had traveled the world throughout history collecting items of artistic and cultural value, then stored them inside the temple, safe from any degradation or wear.

Harrison Ford: My God... they were archaeologists!

Again I'm going to have to point out exactly what the filmmakers are trying to get across with this line. They want you, the audience, to think that Indiana Jones is so stupid that he doesn't even know what his own job is.

Archaeology is defined as exploring the lives of people throughout history by examining what traces remain of those lives. Indiana Jones has spent his entire life both doing this and teaching would-be archaeologists about the rewards and difficulties of attempting to understand the people and cultures that existed before us. That is in no way what the aliens were doing.

The film explicitly shows us the aliens have been here for an incredibly long amount of time. In that time they clearly explored the globe studying the cultures of man and collecting notably representative items. How exactly does that differ from what Indiana Jones does? Well, for one thing, the aliens weren't doing it hundreds of years after these societies ceased to exist. They were picking up the artifacts while the cultures were still producing them. This makes the aliens not archaeologists at all, but rather anthropologists. Although even the term 'anthropologist' suggests a scientific interest in studying the races of man that the aliens in no way demonstrate. Really the best term we can use to describe them is simply 'collector'.

That's how stupid this film's incarnation of Indiana Jones is. He can't understand the difference between someone like him who spent his entire life trying to gain a better understanding of the peoples of history, and the person who travels around the world picking up souvenirs to remind him of his trips.

Looking back on this week's articles I realized something. All this time I've been writing about my hatred for Indiana Jones assumed that the fire in my heart and bile in my gut was somehow unique, and that perhaps I hated Indiana Jones more than anyone else in the world. Observing how little respect the filmmakers had to one of the great fictional creations of the past thirty years I find myself realizing that when it comes to hating Indiana Jones, compared to the filmmakers I'm strictly an amateur.