Dreaming Identities

Class, Gender, And Generation In 1980s Hollywood Movies

Elizabeth G. Traube

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429719332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book Elizabeth Traube argues that over the course of the 1980s, Hollywood participated in a wider move by mainstream political and social forces that attempted to absorb and contain critical cultural currents by rehabilitating images of masculine authority. At the movies we saw parallel construetions of wild, antibureaucratic warrior-heroes and smooth, seemingly rebellious tricksters adapted to the corporate order. We saw the demonization of the independent woman and the complementary formation of the nurturing father as her adversary. The author relates these representations to two cultural narratives of long duration—the American frontier myth and the myth of success, or the American dream, both of which also figured prominently in the rhetorical themes of Reagan-era politics. Utilizing structuralism, Marxism, feminist object relations psychoanalysis, and neoformalist film criticism, Traube emphasizes specific aspects of cinematic representations of gender and authority to explore the relationships between culture and politics. Unlike other feminist critics of "patriarchal Hollywood, †she stresses the multiple, competing versions of masculinity and femininity constructed in Hollywood movies and the different class positions of their primary, intended audiences. Attention to particular forms that cultural narratives assume in changing circumstances gives Traube's film analyses a unique sociohistorical dimension, while her focus on narratives used by political elites as well as by moviemakers reveals significant variations in ideology production in different sites.

1
The Return of the Repressed: Lucas and Spielberg’s Temple of Doom

Moishe Postone & Elizabeth G. Traube

GEORGE LUCAS and Steven Spielberg have emerged in recent years as masters of Hollywood entertainment cinema. They specialize in slick, technically sophisticated science fiction and adventure films that are modeled on the popular culture of the 1930s and 1940s and that promise a way to recover the innocent pleasures of childhood movie viewing. Yet Lucas and Spielberg’s hightech, traditionalist mythology is not innocent, and this is nowhere so apparent as in their latest blockbuster, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Although much of the critical debate on this film revolved around its entertainment value and its suitability for children, some critics observed that the film projects a world view. For instance, David Denby noted that “it is clear that Lucas and Spielberg do not intend any ‘commentary’ on the pop junk of their youth. On the contrary, they have simply found the world they want to live in” (New Tork Magazine, June 4, 1984). Denby, however, did not proceed to examine the parameters of that world. J. Hoberman went further and scathingly characterized the film’s assumption as racist and sexist (The Village Voice, June 5, 1984). Yet he stopped short of examining the process by which those ideologies are produced and transmitted in the film. Our purpose in this chapter is to examine that process of ideology production in Indiana Jones.

Serious analysis of “entertainment” films encounters widespread resistance in the United States today. Such a stance is itself ideological, for it obscures the political significance of mass entertainment and hinders processes of social and cultural self-reflection. By turning to the popular culture of the 1930s and 1940s, Lucas and Spielberg are expressing and helping to shape a widespread American yearning, ascendant since the mid-1970s and embodied in the Reagan presidency. It is a longing to return to earlier, presumably simpler, times, a longing provoked by an increasingly complex world in which the very basis of U.S. self-understanding—the upward political, social, and economic trajectory of the United States relative to the rest of the world—began to crumble. The resultant cultural disorientation has led to a desire to escape the complexities of the present, reinforced by a reluctance to understand social problems in social terms that is deeply embedded in American popular consciousness. This desire to avoid life’s complexities is a basic motif in the Lucas/Spielberg films. Hollywood’s young superbards take no delight in any heroism that operates within society or in mastering life’s ordinary and extraordinary trials. Rather, they celebrate a desire to flee from all such complications and disguise their avoidance of society as manly adventure.

It is not simply the desire to escape into the past, however, that marks Indiana Jones; it is also the content of that return. Under cover of a playful nostalgia for earlier exotic adventure films, comics, and movie serials, Lucas and Spielberg have magnified and given new power to two major themes of earlier mass culture, namely, imperialist domination and patriarchal domination. These themes are drawn together in Indiana Jones through what appear to be loosely connected plot lines: the adventure story and the love story. Both plot lines unfold to structurally similar resolutions in which a lighthearted reaffirmation of old-fashioned sexism and racism appears as the necessary alternative to the forces of darkness.

Not only the film’s ideological project but also its latent mode of operation need to be analyzed, for it is by arousing and playing upon deeply rooted fears that the film solicits our acquiescence to the “rightness” of the order depicted in the resolution. The adventure story and the love story are integrated by projecting onto a cultural Other a fantasy of female sexuality as an evil, destructive, archaic power of death. The subordination of this power then becomes the precondition of civilization.

The opening episode in a Shanghai nightclub in 1935 brings together the archaeologist-adventurer Indiana Jones, a showgirl and singer named Willie Scott, and Jones’s sidekick, Short Round. The latter is a Chinese orphan boy, rescued by Jones from a life of small-time urban crime, who worships his surrogate father and at first treats Willie as a potential rival. Following a rapid series of adventures, the three of them end up in an impoverished village somewhere in northern India. The villagers are starving, and their dignified headman links his people’s plight to the “power of dark night,” which has once more arisen in the palace of Pankot. This evil power is embodied in the nefarious Thugs, historically a group of professional assassins. The Thugs have stolen the magic stone of the village, the Shivalinga, which is a phallic-shaped ritual object representing the god Shiva. The loss of this stone has brought famine upon the village and, to complete the attack on the life-principle, the villagers’ children have been kidnapped and enslaved in the palace. Jones agrees to recover the ritual stone for the villagers. He and his companions proceed to the palace, where foul shrines and vampire bats foreshadow sinister activities. This premonition is swiftly fulfilled at a repulsive banquet attended by various Hindu dignitaries and a visiting British colonial officer.

That same night, immediately after an interrupted sexual encounter with Willie, Jones discovers a secret passageway that leads to a chamber deep below the palace. There they watch the evil priest perform a human sacrifice to the goddess Kali, who represents the destructive manifestations of the Mother Goddess and consort to Shiva. After the sacrifice, Jones seizes the villagers’ stone and discovers the abducted village children, who are toiling in the palace mines. But Jones and his companions are captured. He is forced to drink the “blood of Kali,” which robs him of his soul and enslaves him to the goddess. As a test of his loyalty, Jones is ordered to sacrifice Willie, but in the very nick of time Short Round breaks the evil spell by burning Jones with a flaming torch. Restored to himself, Jones rescues Willie from the pit of lava over which she is dangling, liberates the children, and leads his companions out of the mines. The final victory over the Thugs takes place high up on a bridge.

The film has the narrative structure of a quest romance, in this case, a journey to hell and back again, a move from light into darkness, followed by a return to light. The story as a whole thus consists of a bracket around a central part, which is the quest proper. Rhythm and tone together reflect and express the sequential structure of the narrative. As many reviewers have noted, the energetic, action-packed pace and playful humor of the framing sequences contrast sharply with the increasingly oppressive, constricted atmosphere and total absence of comic relief that characterize the film’s central sequence. For many reviewers, the film “goes wrong” when it abandons its breakneck, cunningly crafted pacing and loses its sense of humor. Where it is that the film goes remains to be seen.

It is not difficult to detect the film’s overt ideological implications. Like one of its models, Gun¿fa Din, Indiana Jones is a cinematic variant on the theme of the “white man’s burden.” The film seeks to represent imperialism as a civilizing, socially progressive force and so to legitimize Western domination of others. Its strategy is to identify oppression with the indigenous system of rule; for if the suffering of indigenous peoples is the product of their own institutions, then those institutions may be rightfully supplanted. Hence the film does not present a blanket condemnation of Indian otherness but rather divides that otherness into two categories that correspond to an oppressed peasantry and an oppressive, exploitative ruling class.

At the same time, the film constructs imperialist and indigenous forms of domination as polar opposites, thereby denying the possibility that these forms might have anything in common. One way in which it effects this split is by using the gender categories of male and female to express the difference between the “legitimate” Western rulers and their “illegitimate” Indian counterparts. This strategy implicitly weds the film’s political content to its psychosexual content, and it powerfully reinforces the depiction of the white man as the paternalistic defender of justice against oppression and of the civilized order against primordial female chaos.

The film’s gender model of political domination places the villagers in the position of children, dependent on the paternal West for protection. Within this framework, the villagers are sympathetically represented, and indeed, a sign of Jones’s status is his interest in their affairs. Jones treats the simple, downtrodden villagers with great courtesy. He is portrayed here as an enlightened man, with a healthy, relativistic respect for alternative cultural traditions. He lectures Willie (and indirectly the audience) for recoiling from the unappetizing guest-food, which is all that the starving villagers have to offer. He provides a model of manly conduct for Short Round, who politely accepts the food. In these scenes Jones acts as all-knowing scientist, ego ideal for little boys, and champion of helpless villagers, all rolled into one. The paternalistic relation of the white scientist to his object of research underscores the more general paternalism of Jones’s relation to his needy charges.

The Indian aristocrats, however, are represented as radically alien and monstrously evil. Lucas and Spielberg seek to show how what appears beautiful and gracefully opulent is really hideous and depraved. This tactic partly accounts for the film’s loss of pace. Many films use a convention of maintaining a tension between the enemy’s refined exterior and his or her true inner nature, thereby increasing a suspenseful sense of foreboding. Lucas and Spielberg only briefly acknowledge that convention. The maharaja’s minister who greets Jones and company as they enter the palace seems a cultivated, knowledgeable, Oxford-educated man. Before the assembled guests and dignitaries are seated at the luxuriously appointed table, we get a quick glimpse of an indigenous courtly culture, practically the last aesthetically pleasing images that the film offers us. There are musicians, dancers, and singers, not to mention Willie herself, who appears bedecked in Indian finery, so radiant that Jones verbally acknowledges her attractiveness for the first time. What is emphasized in this scene is the seductive, alluring, sensual character of Indian court culture with its beauty, charm, and graceful opulence. But these images of the seductive, alluring Other are hastily and permanently reversed in the banquet scene. At the table, Jones, the child maharaja, his minister, and a visiting British colonel discuss the palace’s political history. It had been a center of the murderous Thugee cult, which was later suppressed by the British. Jones is assured that despite what the villagers may have told him, the cult no longer exists. Yet in counterpoint to all this talk, we have before us the visual evidence that the bad past has indeed returned. We are bombarded by culinary images of snakes, live eels, beetles, eyeball soup, and monkey brains on the halfskull. Lucas and Spielberg evidently enjoy playing with their food, but the game is not innocent. It evokes our disgust, not only for the feast but also for the lascivious pleasure with which the Indians consume the loathsome food. The banquet scene does not so much reveal to us the depravity behind exotic sensuality as it impresses upon us that sensuality is depraved.

Although the scene may have been designed to be grossly humorous, that “humor” serves to displace the viewer’s attention from the content of the conversation to the vile feast. It had been a conversation that provided at least shreds of material for an historical understanding of the present conflict as a moment in a political struggle. That sort of understanding is implicitly negated by the scene’s emphasis on the culinary representation of Otherness. This displacement suggests that the bad past that has returned is not to be understood through discourse and is not interpretable in sociohistorical terms. Rather the badness is inherent in the very nature of the Other, a nature that is graphically embodied in the food the Other consumes. Such a depiction implies that historical circumstances are ultimately irrelevant to an understanding of the world. The film presents culturally different forms of resistance and rebellion as if they were not socially rooted, intelligible responses to concrete forms of exploitation and injustice. Instead, consistent with a strong tendency in the United States today, the film seeks to explain the world in terms of the Other’s evil nature rather than in historical terms.

The film subsequently treats depraved sensuality as the sign of the evil emanating from Kali. The bloodthirsty Mother Goddess is depicted as lusting after human flesh and being worshiped by adoring throngs of entranced, arm-waving, dehumanized followers. We see the living heart torn from a sacrificial victim who, mysteriously still alive, is then lowered into a whirling pool of lava, accompanied by a crescendo of drumbeats and chants. What we suspected at the dinner scene is confirmed by the scene of human sacrifice. Indian aristocratic culture is not merely decadent but savagely regressive. And within the Western tradition, an unmistakable sign of that regression is the triumph of the female principle over the male: Shiva, the Lord, has been laid low by the Mother, at whose feet the linga, now sits.

The scene that unfolds within the Temple of Doom is a lavish amalgamation of countless Hollywood renditions of sinister primitive cults. But this film unmasks the enemy’s true nature in a specific way. From sensual depravity it moves to depicting savage evil, and then it reveals how savagery is manipulated by a brutally oppressive class. The cult leaders have not only impoverished the villages, but they also exploit child labor. The abducted children must toil endlessly in the mines in search of two sacred stones that were hidden from the British. What the children’s evil masters hope to obtain from this labor is not natural riches but pure power, as the missing stones will supposedly enable the forces of Kali to dominate the world.

The narrative construction of the Indian rulers evokes in the viewer a strong desire for their destruction. As the rulers’ evil nature is revealed in ever more hideous terms, expectations arise to see such absolute evil absolutely eradicated. This longed-for resolution, moreover, would serve social justice by saving the peasants from the tyranny of their lords. Yet the film’s representation of that tyranny inadvertently calls attention to another mechanism of ideology production. The images of children laboring in the mines indicate that the film not only represents the Indian ruling classes as negatively alien and other but also projects onto them attributes of the Western ruling classes. Forced child labor on a massive scale has far more to do with nineteenth-century capitalism domestically and twentieth-century capitalism abroad than with traditional India. Moreover, there is indeed a form of production where the real goal is not the things produced but the abstract social power they embody. Yet that form, the production of surplus value, is not to be found in the mysterious darkness of other cultures but in the light of our own. The film transposes a critique of the capitalist ruling class onto the Indian ruling classes and fuses the critique with a depiction of the cultural alien’s depravity and evil. Its project is to deflect onto the Other frustration and anger that are domestically engendered. Such projection has an ideological intent: to legitimate imperialism as apparently progressive, a channel of action and a civilizing mission for the white man who cannot change things at home.

As exploitative rulers, the Indians bear a mystified resemblance to the Western ruling classes. The film, however, goes to great lengths to associate the Indian enemy with femaleness, which is fleetingly depicted as seductive opulence and then, in greater detail, as sensual depravity and primordial chaos. Constituted in opposition to a savage, corrupt, female evil, imperialism appears as a civilizing, purifying, male force. Jones and the British function in the film as bestowers of law, order, and reason upon a helpless peasantry, who are as childlike in their dependency on Western paternalism as in their vulnerability to the evil Mother’s forces.

Altogether absent from these representations is any mention of the darker side of imperialist domination. Yet whatever “gifts of civilization” colonial rulers may have bestowed, the motivating force behind imperialist expansion was to exploit colonized societies of their labor, material products, and needs. On such matters, the film remains significantly silent.

But then, the film would hardly represent Western exploitation, since the film is itself a form of exploitation. Its vivid portrayal of the Other as a violent and dangerous enemy constitutes a violent and dangerous act. Such a portrayal both reflects and produces conceptions of the world “out there” as the place of evil.

Specific characteristics of the film’s self-validating condemnation of the Other point toward a psychosexual dimension of ideological processes. Not unlike many British colonial officers, to judge by their reports, the film seems fixated on the sensual depravity of the feminized Indian rulers, whereas it presents the contrasting masculinity of the Western “civilizers” in a sublimated form. Jones and the British reject perverse sensual pleasure and seek gratification in the moral exercise of power. The psychosexual dynamics here emerge more clearly in the context of the love story. In many of the older exotic adventure films, the “love interest” is manifestly subsidiary and peripheral to the adventure story. Indiana Jones brings the latent structure of adventure-romance very close to its surface and so discloses the psychosexual desires and fears that lie at the very core of the genre.

Other reviewers have called attention to the film’s sexist characterization of the heroine. Willie is portrayed as a brainless, whining, incompetent gold digger, a dumb blond who contrasts sharply with the spunky heroine of Raiders of the Lost Ark. In our reading, however, the film inadvertently reveals its sexist portrayal of the woman as superficial, a defense against a deeply rooted fear of female sexuality. We have already noted that the temple episode breaks in rhythm and tone with the surrounding sequences and elicits a pervasive sense of horror. That horror, we argue below, is structurally conditioned; its force derives from the thinly masked nature of the quest as a flight from sexuality that becomes a fantasized encounter with primeval femaleness.

This trajectory is implied at the very beginning of the film, in an apparently trivial exchange. When Willie first hears that Jones is an archaeologist, she says, “Archaeologists—I thought they were funny little men searching for their Mommies.” “Tha’s ‘mummies’,” Jones snaps and thinks that he has corrected her. Shortly thereafter, he is poisoned, and the vial with the antidote winds up in Willie’s bosom. Jones, understandably enough, has no time to waste in supplication, and when Willie delays in handing over the precious antidote, he takes it from her by force. Mistaking his state of desperation for passion, she protests that she’s not that kind of girl. The scene is playful, yet it sets up the tension between male and female that organizes the entire film. Underlying that tension is a deep ambivalence toward the female. Either the woman appears to the man, as she does in this scene, as a desirable, life-giving figure who, however, must be forcibly subjugated; or, embodied in Kali, she manifests herself as a deadly threat.

This threat informs the love story, with its stereotyped progression from initial antagonism to desire. Jones and Willie do not openly acknowledge their mutual attraction until they have come into the palace, where Willie (whom we first saw emerging from a paper dragon’s mouth) is metamorphosed back into an exotic seductress. After the banquet scene, Jones parts company with Short Round and solicitously offers Willie an apple, from which he takes the first bite. Predictably, this initiates a sexual encounter, which subsequently founders over the issue of control. She insists that her aphrodisiac charms will make him forget all other women; he demurs, characterizing himself as a scientific investigator of female sexuality who will not prejudge the results of his research. The outcome is that their mutual desire goes unsatisfied, and he returns to his bedroom. She has a temper tantrum, whereas he discharges his frustrated arousal by other means—by engaging in a struggle to the death with an enormous Thug who suddenly appears out of nowhere. Upon disposing of his assailant, Jones rushes into Willie’s chamber, apparently to see if any Thugs are molesting her. She betrays the l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Credits
• Introduction
• 1 The Return of the Repressed: Lucas and Spielberg’s Temple of Doom
• 2 Redeeming Images: The Wild Man Comes Home
• 3 Secrets of Success in Postmodern Society
• 4 Transforming Heroes: Hollywood and the Demonization of Women
• 5 Who Will Do the Caring? Domestic Men and Independent Women in the Movies
• Notes
• References
• About the Book and Author
• Index