40th anniversary of Indiana Jones and Temple of Doom - 5/23

It’s my impression that almost invariably the media stir up a fuss about the wrong movies. If you take a child to Disney’s Dumbo, this is what the child sees: Dumbo’s mother—a circus elephant—is so angry at kids who taunt Dumbo and pull his ears that she attacks them, and as a result she is beaten and locked in a cage for mad elephants. Dumbo is left on his own, and the other elephants humiliate him constantly. He’s made into an elephant clown, and during a routine he’s left at the top of a fireman’s ladder in a burning house, crying elephant tears, because the human clowns fail to rescue him. His only friend is another outcast—the mouse Timothy. Each sequence is brought up to its maximum psychological resonance, and when a child projects himself into this vat of bathos and moroseness it’s agony: the situations on the screen have immediate correlations with his own terrors. But what correlatives could there be in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom? It doesn’t take advantage of childhood traumas. With its Road to Morocco sensibility, it constantly makes fun of itself, and it’s as remote from children’s real-life fears as Sabu’s escapades in The Thief of Bagdad. The emotional mechanism of Dumbo is to make what happens to the cartoon animals real to kids; the emotional mechanism in Indiana Jones is to make what happens to the human characters unreal. And the hero carries you through—you know Indy won’t die. Grownups who are upset by the menu at the banquet must be forgetting how cheerfully kids have traditionally sung such macabre ditties as “The worms crawl in, The worms crawl out, The worms play pinochle on your snout, And one little worm, Who’s not too shy, Climbs into your ear, And out your eye” and “Great green globs of greasy grimy gophers’ guts, Mutilated monkeys’ meat, Little birdies’ dirty feet, Great green globs of greasy grimy go­phers’ guts, And I forgot my spoon, Aw shucks.”