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May 19, 2023 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
28:42
Movie Night: Raiders of the Lost Ark

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comRichard and Mark delve into Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1980).

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Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.
It was originally titled Raiders of the Lost Ark, but they built a franchise around it and added in the Indiana Jones moniker.
1980.
It was preceded by two films from Spielberg that were wildly successful, Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Which Mark and I have also talked to and are very worth analyzing.
It also included Spielberg's notable flop.
He's had some flops late in life, I guess, but when he was an up-and-coming director, a flop was probably more damaging.
That was 1941, which is kind of a forgotten film.
Hardly ever gets discussed.
I actually have not seen it.
And then he produced this with the characters imagined by George Lucas and the story by George Lucas.
And he was the director.
And then I think the key figure in writing this film was Lawrence Kasdan, who is probably even more famous for writing The Empire Strikes Back.
And he actually deserves a tremendous amount of credit for The Empire Strikes Back.
George Lucas likes to imagine that he had this, I don't know, nine-film saga in his mind or something, and he could only do little parts of it at a time.
And all of that is a delusional or just an outright lie.
Lucas was making it up as he went along.
Kasdan was very important in creating The Empire Strikes Back as it is, with Vader being revealed as Luke's father, with the severing of Luke's hand, with meeting his father in the cave and seeing his own face behind the mask.
That kind of Freudian element, you could say, was definitely added by Kasdan.
I do think that George Lucas came up with the idea of combining different characters and making Darth Vader Luke's father, but I still would almost give Kasdan credit.
He deepened what could have been a kind of comic book serial type film, which Raiders of the Lost Ark is as well.
So Lawrence Kasdan is a brilliant guy, and I think...
Mark would second me in saying that he is extremely REM or JEM aware.
That is racial esoteric moralization or Jewish esoteric moralization.
And this is a deeply symbolic work.
I could imagine George Lucas, because he was such a fan of these Saturday afternoon serials and making films that were You know, immediately accessible to an audience that remind us of comic books or pulp fiction,
or I think it's Republic Pictures films, stuff from his childhood that was pulpy and that he loved and kind of bringing that to an audience in the late 70s and 80s.
I think this could have just been that, and that's, of course, good enough.
It's a very fun film.
It's highly successful, highly watchable.
Everything about it holds up.
Even 40 years on, I don't think there are very many moments that make you cringe or anything like that.
And it's fast.
It's always moving forward.
It's action-packed.
But I do think that Kasdan and Spielberg were...
Probably more important than Lucas in terms of imbuing the work with symbolism and meaning that maybe was dormant in Lucas's mind, but which they really brought out to the fore.
So anyway, that's just a basic introduction.
I would just say I never got to see this film in theaters.
I don't think I've ever seen it in a theater.
I would like to.
I was born in 1978.
This came out when I was very young.
I definitely saw The Last Crusade in theaters, but by the mid to late 80s, this was the time of VHS.
It was also, even before that, there was much more of a routine of replaying classic films in the theater.
And so maybe I did see it in the theater that way, but I certainly would watch it and rewatch it over again on VHS.
And Indiana Jones was hugely important in my childhood when I was, I don't know how old I was, seven or eight or something.
I would always dress up like Indiana Jones for all occasions, not just Halloween.
So it definitely influenced me tremendously in that way.
Mark, you're older than I. Much older, in fact.
Just joking.
Maybe I did.
Yeah, I saw it when I was very young in a theater.
Okay, interesting.
And I loved it, actually, when I was a kid.
My favorite movie.
In fact, it made much more of an impact on me than Star Wars, which I liked.
But I think that...
I think I liked, because I was a kid, I liked more Return of the Jedi.
I liked the bad films of the Star Wars.
Though I guess there's a lot of bad films in the Star Wars.
Yeah, Return of the Jedi is looking like a masterpiece after the last three.
When I was a kid, I really went for the built-in marketing for that.
Film with the Ewoks, right?
Yes.
Which, formerly, the Ewoks were supposed to be these Chewbacca, a race of Chewbacca's.
So, like, a kind of fairly, like, badass race, but instead of turning them into these teddy bears who were killing stormtroopers, kind of making a mockery of the whole...
Though, I mean, I guess there's a lot of...
A lot of the kind of combat in Star Wars has always been kind of ridiculous.
The stormtroopers never...
I liked Raiders of the Lost Ark more, and I think it remains one of the best action films that's ever been made.
Yes.
A lot of it has to do with the pacing of the film.
It has this kind of perfect pace.
It never slows down.
I don't know.
Maybe younger people on the call have a different sense of that because the pacing has accelerated with films in some ways, I suppose.
But it has...
With Radies of the Lost Ark, though, it's more of a kind of...
It's not just the action.
It's the kind of tempo of the plot.
Yeah, I think that it's true that movies are more complicated.
But I maybe don't have the right words to describe this, but the just push forward in the pacing is really remarkable.
And it's created some kind of, I guess you could say, mysteries or just continuity errors.
Like, how does he get to the island of Crete on the submarine after when they've been captured by pirates?
How did he do that?
There actually is a cut scene.
I looked this up that explains it.
But I think it just works.
You just kind of sit back and take it in.
And there is very fast tempo and just this linear push towards one goal, which just makes it a very exciting and really well-crafted movie.
I'm just going to play this scene because it's not the most action-packed scene, but I think it brings up a lot of...
important things worth talking about.
I had it, Marcus.
I had it in my hand.
What happened?
Yes.
Good luck.
You want to hear about it?
Not at all.
I'm sure everything you do for the museum conforms to the International Treaty for the Protection of Antiquities.
It's beautiful, Marcus.
I can get it.
I got it all figured out.
There's nothing place you can sell it, Marrakesh.
I need $2,000.
Listen to me, I brought some people to see you.
Look, I got these pieces.
They're good pieces, Marcus.
Look, Indiana.
Yes, the museum will buy them as usual.
No questions asked.
Yes, they are nice.
They're worth at least the price of a ticket to Marrakesh.
But the people I brought are important and they're waiting.
What people?
The Army Intelligence.
They knew you were coming before I did.
Seemed to know everything.
They couldn't tell me what they want.
What do I want to see them for?
What am I, in trouble?
Yes, Dr. Jones, we've heard a great deal about you.
Have you?
Professor of archaeology, expert on the occult, and, uh, I just want to say it, obtainer of rare antiquities.
One way of saying it.
Why don't you sit down?
You'll be more comfortable.
Thank you.
Yes, you're a man of many talents.
You studied under Professor Ravenwood at the University of Chicago.
Yes, I did.
You have no idea of his present whereabouts?
Just rumors, really.
Somewhere in Asia, I think.
I hadn't really spoken to him for ten years.
We were friends, but a little bit of a falling out, I'm afraid.
Dr. Jones, now, you must understand that this is all strictly confidential, right?
I understand.
Yesterday afternoon, our European sections intercepted a German communique that was sent from Cairo to Berlin.
You see, over the last two years, the Nazis have had teams of archaeologists running around the world looking for all kinds of religious artifacts.
Hitler's a nut on the subject.
He's crazy.
He's obsessed with the occult.
And right now, apparently, there's some kind of German archaeological dig going on in the desert outside of Cairo.
Now, we've got some information here, but we can't make anything out of it, and maybe you can.
Tannis, development, proceeding.
Acquire, headpiece, staff of Ra, Abner, Ravenwood, U.S. Nazis have discovered Tannis.
So what does that mean to you, Tannis?
Well, the city of Tannis is one of the possible resting places of the Lost Ark.
The Lost Ark?
Yeah, the Ark of the Covenant, the chest the Hebrews used to carry around the Ten Commandments.
What do you mean Ten Commandments?
You're talking about THE Ten Commandments?
Yes, the actual Ten Commandments, the original stone tablets that Moses brought down out of Mont Harab and smashed, if you believe in that sort of thing.
Any of you guys ever go to Sunday school?
Well, I...
Oh, look.
The Hebrews took the broken pieces and put them in the Ark.
When they settled in Canaan...
They put the Ark in a place called the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, where it stayed for many years until all of a sudden, Woosh is gone.
Where?
Well, nobody knows where or when.
However, an Egyptian pharaoh...
Shishak.
Yes, invaded the city of Jerusalem around about 980 B.C., and he may have taken the Ark back to the city of Tannis and hidden it in a secret chamber called the Well of Souls.
Secret chamber.
However, about a year after the pharaoh had returned to Egypt, the city of Tannis was consumed by the desert in a sandstorm which lasted a whole year, wiped clean by the wrath of God.
Obviously, we've come to the right man.
Now, you seem to know all about this, Tannis.
No, no, not really.
Ravenwood is the real expert.
Abner did the first serious work on Tannis, collected some of its relics.
It was his obsession, really.
But I never found the city.
Frankly, we're somewhat suspicious of Mr. Ravenwood, an American being mentioned so prominently in a secret Nazi cable.
Oh, rubbish.
Ravenwood's no Nazi.
Well, what are the Nazis wanting for, then?
Well, obviously, the Nazis are looking for the headpiece to the staff of Ra, and they think Abner's got it.
What exactly is a headpiece to the staff of Ra?
Well, the staff is just a stick.
I don't know, about this big.
Nobody really knows for sure how high it is.
It's a cap with an elaborate headpiece in the shape of the sun with a crystal in the center.
And what you did was you take the staff to a special room in Tadness, a map room with a miniature of the city all laid out on the floor.
And if you put the staff in a certain place at a certain time of day, the sun shone through here and made a beam that came down on the floor here and gave you the exact location of the Well of the Souls.
Where the Ark of the Covenant was kept, right?
Which is exactly what the Nazis are looking for.
What does this Ark look like?
There's a picture of it right here.
That's it.
Thank you.
Good God.
Yes, that's just what the Hebrews thought.
Now, what's that supposed to be coming out of there?
Lightning.
Fire.
Power of God or something.
You need to understand Hitler's interest in this.
Oh, yes.
The Bible speaks of the Ark leveling mountains and laying waste to entire regions.
An army which carries the Ark before it is invincible.
Okay.
That is an exposition scene.
It's not the most exciting one.
We will watch some more exciting ones together.
But I thought this was good because it laid out a number of important things and it would just kind of remind you of the film.
So it is very true that Hitler was obsessed with the occult.
I think Himmler might have been more obsessed.
From what we know, and I'm by no means an expert in these matters, but what we know, there was interesting, there was serious interest by the National Socialist in ICE theory, searching for Thor's hammer and the Holy Grail.
Now, they never searched for the Ark of the Covenant.
But they were searching for artifacts.
And I'm sure reports about that.
There have been some recent books written on this.
I'm sure they're actually fun reads.
But by the time this movie is being written, I'm sure there was some discussion that's going on.
There might have been some books as well.
And this got the minds working of Lucas and Kasdan and Spielberg.
And they created something rather...
Interesting and unusual.
And it's even referenced in the film itself.
There's one point where one of the German soldiers said, you know, I am very uncomfortable with these Jewish rituals.
And there is something, there's this thing in Indiana Jones where, you know, Indiana Jones, he's a scholar and he doesn't believe in hocus pocus, but then you kind of, the supernatural enters.
The world of the film, and you in some ways believe in what's happening.
But there's also this interesting aspect of why would the Nazis want to get their hands on the Ark of the Covenant if we believe that they are anti-Semites, to say the least, or kind of crypto-pagans, the very least conversos, but to Catholicism in Hitler's case and German
Protestantism and others, but people who are a regime that's much more interested in paganism, if anything, much like the Soviet Union was, I guess, kind of esoterically atheistic, but in many cases, exoterically Why would it...
Is this going to be an invincible army?
The image is really provocative, and it gets the plot going.
It raises the stakes for the film.
But the notion of Nazis marching around with the Ark of the Covenant, shooting light beams from the Ten Commandments, destroying armies, it's a rather ridiculous image when you think about it.
And it seems to get at a basic level.
Discontinuity or maybe that's not the right word, a basic kind of conflation of very different things going on here.
But the stakes are, as set out in the scene, that we don't want to allow the Nazis to get their hands on Judaism.
And that's important to the plot, but I think it's also extremely important in how we understand this film.
Mark, do you want to jump in in terms of anything that I just said, or also Tannis, the staff of Ra, which is Egyptian, they're going to be in Cairo for a third of the film, etc.
You can pick up on anything.
Yeah, no, I mean, there's a lot that's kind of revealing about the film that I think says a lot about the screenwriter and the director of the film, and kind of an understanding of...
You know, I think some things that Gentile audiences may not pick up on as readily or as quickly, like there's, you know, basically we have these Jewish filmmakers and it seems like there is a kind of, they're revealing a kind of deeper sense of history, essentially held by Jews than Gentiles.
And I mean, this is sort of, I think that Jones, at least in his original conception, is a kind of Intended as a crypto-Jewish figure.
And there's a number of reasons to believe that.
But in someone, I think Kurt actually was making the observation, it's like part of the esotericism of the film is the fact that Indiana Jones kind of knows more than everyone else, right?
He understands the topic better than everyone else.
And that almost is itself a kind of esoteric dimension of the film, where if we understand him as a crypto-Jewish figure, he has more sort of Gnostic wisdom, as it were, or just has a better instinct for understanding the archaeology.
And the metaphor of archaeology equaling religion is kind of made explicitly in the film.
He has a rival.
Named Belloc, his French sort of antagonist in the film, who's his kind of rival as an archaeologist.
But he even says explicitly in the film, archaeology is our religion, right?
So we have an understanding that archaeology in the film becomes a metaphor, I would argue, for religion.
Even sort of stated somewhat explicitly in the film as a kind of clue to that subtext.
And the character Belloc is, in my mind, he's evidently a reference to Hilar Belloc, right?
Who was a French, English-French historian, writer, who was, you know, he essentially had some, Anti-Semitic tracks or what would be considered anti-Semitic tracks in his writing, in his thinking.
Certainly they would be considered that now.
But I think at the time when he was writing, he was more of an ambivalent figure.
So he wouldn't be like a pro-Nazi figure and he would be against the sort of racialism of...
You know, Nazism, we know the type, but he's basically a Catholic anti-Semite.
And that was, now again, was he an anti-Semite?
It becomes, some of the things he said were kind of philo-Semitic, so we could understand him as a kind of ambivalent figure.
And I think that that sort of intended with this, his standing in the film, I think his name is Emil Bellac.
Let's actually just watch that scene since you brought it up, because it's a good scene.
It's one of those where the villain goes, the protagonist says, we're not so different to you and I. I think he literally says that, actually.
You can think of Austin Powers.
But there's actually much more in there, because it's also revealed that both Belloc and Indiana Jones are atheists on some level.
Let me play it.
I don't want to take words out of its mouth.
How odd that it should end this way for us after so many stimulating encounters.
I almost regret it.
Where shall I find a new adversary so close to my own level?
Try the local sewer.
You and I are very much alike.
Archaeology is our religion.
Yet we have both fallen from the pure faith.
Our methods have not differed as much as you pretend.
I'm a shadowy reflection of you.
Don't take only a nudge to make you like me.
To push you out of the light.
Now you're getting nasty.
You know it's true.
How nice.
Look at this.
It's worthless.
Ten dollars from a vendor in the street.
But I take it, I bury it in the sand for a thousand years, it becomes priceless.
Like the Ark.
Men will kill for it.
Men like you and me.
What about your boss, Der Fuhrer?
I thought he was waiting to take possession.
All in good time.
When I'm finished with it.
Jones, do you realize what the Ark is?
It's a transmitter.
It's a radio for speaking to God.
And it's within my reach.
You want to talk to God?
Let's go see him together.
All right.
Yeah, so I mean, I guess just to further my point, so, and Belloc is evidently, you know, he also, I guess, he's considered as well a reference to another figure who was a kind of more explicitly a pro-Nazi of the period, Jacques de Mailloux, I think it's the pronunciation.
I'll put his name in the chat after I'm done speaking.
But Jacques de Mailloux, I think is the name.
But he was a Catholic nationalist, but he was also an esotericist.
And he was interested in the idea that, you know, one of the reasons it's argued that, you know, that early scene takes place.
Uh, in South America is because he was interested in arguments suggesting, for example, um, you know, that, uh, the Nordic races founded, uh, the Aztec civilization and this sort of thing.
Um, or that the, or that the Vikings had traveled to South America at an early period.
Um, you know, so it was that, so he's a reference to that sort of figure, a kind of esotericist in a.
An occultist.
But also, evidently in my mind, a reference to Hillar Belloc, who again is one of these, you could say he's ambivalent, he was ambivalent for his period, but we can class him, you know, from Spielberg's perspective as a kind of Catholic anti-Semite, essentially.
And I think that's probably a kind of fair characterization of the guy, actually.
But, so he, Is represented in this film by this archaeologist.
Or he, you know, the archaeologist we can understand is a kind of composite character who includes a kind of reference to this real historical figure.
But what does that real historical figure represent?
He represents the Catholic, ultimately.
So what I would argue is that what we're seeing is a kind of rivalry between a Jew And a Catholic in that scene.
Now, as far as, well, why is Indiana Jones a Jew?
I mean, I think there are clues in the film that point to this.
You know, one is, I guess you could say, one...
You could argue is his sort of better understanding of the archaeology, right?
So he's understood kind of implicitly as a better archaeologist than his Catholic rival, who has a poor understanding of, you know, the archaeology specific to the Ark.
And also, you know, in the famous scene at the end, Indiana Jones.
Is familiar with the lore, so he knows that you don't look into the ark or you'll be killed, for example.
This is information that Belok is lacking, right?
So that might be one clue.
You know, again, in gem, names are of massive significance.
So names are a kind of important symbol that's used to convey meaning.
And often names indicate ethnicity.
But here, the trick here is that often I mean, Jones is obviously a kind of English name, a kind of WASP-y name, so we wouldn't suspect Indiana Jones to be a Jewish character based on his name if we were just basing it on sort of the origin or the seeming origin of the name, which appears to be WASP-English.
But the name Jones means son of John and son of John the Baptist in particular.
And there's reasons to believe, you know, looking at the symbolism of the New Testament, he's the son of Elizabeth.
And he might also be the son, I argue, of the angel through a kind of visitation she has with an angel.
I argue that he's essentially a kind of Jewish character, and this is the character that baptizes Jesus Christ.
And so that that name might be a Jewish identifier.
But there are other kind of aspects to the film where it seems like there's a kind of bride competition going on between a clearly Gentile figure in Belloc.
And Indiana Jones.
They're vying for Marion Ravenwood, right?
So that would be another indication.
And there are also indications in the names, you know, with Marion Ravenwood.
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