 The latest Indiana Jones movie a disturbing reflection on being
incapacitated by age, self abasement and coming to some sort of a
tempestuous, bitter truce with people you used to love.
Indiana Jones is a boring professor of medieval south american history,
who is growing dreadfully aware of how irrelevant his specialty is in a
post-modern world in the throes of the cold war.
Over two decades have
passed since the time his students considered him an object of lust;
and those women, now old cantankerous hags embittered by the excesses
of World War II, please him not.
Now, not even the promise of a generous grading can get any of his
current set of female students to give him time of day. The classrooms
where he's spent so many of his years lend themselves to an easy
metaphor for his life - a multiple failure, stuck in the same class as
the decades roll on and the people around him and the clothes they wear
and things they say change. Leaving him trapped, incapable of finding
the right answers that will let him move on to the next grade of life.
He finds himself increasingly taking refuge in a perhaps imaginary
world of old school adventuring but realises the hollowness at its core
- unless someone else believes in these stories, they didn't happen. It
doesn't help that the tales are extremely improbable - built around
ludicrous premises like him having escaped an atom bomb by hiding in a
lead refrigerator while fleeing from Russian agents on the hunt for
mummified aliens.
In a last attempt at asserting his masculinity, he embarks on a
disastrous sexual liaison with one of his young students; one where he
takes the girl's consent for granted. The FBI instantly puts him on its
most wanted list and he's brutally interrogated and indicted as a child
abuser. One of the films most poignant and heartbreaking moments finds
Jones unwilling or unable to comprehend the magnitude of his crime.
Even as he's being tortured by the overzealous Feds, Jones believes
this is a consequence of his run-in with the Russians and
extra-terrestrial artifacts; believing his sexual transgressions are
too 'silly' to merit such serious punishment.
Fired from his university job, due to his lack of a formal apology
and his persistent delusions about the Red Peril, Jones is at a loose
end, planning on spending the rest of his days in pastoral Africa or
South America, the sites of his greatest imagined triumphs when he's
kidnapped by a young aggressive homosexual.
 After several scenes of
torture involving spiders, monkeys, and improbably enough, spider
monkeys, Jones, now in a state of almost total insanity is taken to the
young man's hovel where his brain flickers back to life and he comes to
a horrifying realisation. That the hideous white trash CHUD of a mother
of the boy is an ex-flame and that his rapist and captor could possibly
be his own son!
The rest of the film lapses into a weird almost parodic take on the
sentimental family drama where the various characters come to terms
with each other's failings and misgivings and learn to accept one
another, though the bleak subtext is that the only option is suicide or
an orgy of murder. Towards the end, Jones stuck in a deadbeat job
caring for terminally ill animals muses on his long slippery slide down
from the comforting womb of middle class respectability, even as UFOs
manifest on the horizon, casting a shadow on all the viewer's
conclusions and preconceptions about the film, its enigmatic central
character and his experiences.
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