The Treasure Was Knowledge - Indiana Jones

How Indiana Jones inherited his father's only real lesson, carried it across five films and forty years, and very nearly forgot it in the dust of an ancient siege.

A deep reading of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Dial of Destiny, by way of a Boy Scout, a Cairo tent, a Venetian library, and a knight who waited nine hundred years.

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981): where the saga's moral physics were first written in fire.

Utah, 1912. A teenage Boy Scout on horseback stumbles onto a band of grave robbers prising the Cross of Coronado out of a desert cave, and decides, with no plan and no chance, that he is going to take it back. "It belongs in a museum," the boy says, and the line is not bravado. It is a creed being born. The chase that follows is the single most consequential sequence in the franchise, because it builds Indiana Jones in real time: the whip, snatched off a circus wagon, which lays his chin open and gives him the scar Harrison Ford carried for the next four decades; the terror of snakes, after a carriage of them breaks his fall; and, finally, the hat. The robber the credits call Fedora corners the boy, takes the Cross back, and then, instead of gloating, lifts his own brown felt hat onto the kid's head and offers something close to respect: you lost today, but you do not have to like it. Indiana Jones is assembled out of fear, improvisation, defeat, and a thief's grudging admiration. He will spend a lifetime trying to live up to a creed he announced before he could grow a beard.

Hold onto that creed, because the whole saga turns on it. "It belongs in a museum" is the curator's vow: knowledge is a public trust, held in common, sought for its own sake and given back to everyone. Its shadow is the line Indy growls in a Shanghai nightclub a generation later, when the job is grubbier and the company worse: "Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory." Inside one man live both the guardian and the looter, the scholar and the mercenary. Every villain Indiana Jones ever faces is the looter let off the leash, the grasp without the vow. (For the full chronological span of those adventures, from that desert chase to a moon-landing parade, see the chronological order of the Indiana Jones films.)

René Belloq says it to Indy's face in a Cairo tent, turning a cheap pocket watch in his fingers. Worthless today, he muses, but bury it a thousand years and it becomes priceless, and so will the Ark, and so, by implication, will the two of them: rival archaeologists, identical hunger, divided only by which way they let it point. "I am a shadowy reflection of you," Belloq tells him. It would take only a nudge to make you like me. This is the thesis of the entire series, spoken aloud in the first film. The villains are not Indy's opposites. They are Indy without the vow, the same passion turned to appetite.

And the artefacts know the difference. This is the saga's strange, consistent theology: the sacred object is a judge, and it weighs the seeker by the shape of his wanting. Belloq pulls on the high priest's breastplate, opens the Ark of the Covenant to commune with God as an equal, and is obliterated for the presumption, his face running like candle wax, while Indy and Marion, who refuse even to look, are spared by the discipline of not grasping. The rule is set in the very first adventure: reach for the divine to possess it and it unmakes you; lower your eyes and live. Indy survives Raiders of the Lost Ark not by winning but by knowing what not to touch.

Temple of Doom, the darkest chapter, simply swaps the faith and keeps the physics. Mola Ram and his Thuggee cult have torn the worship of Kali out of shape, ripping living hearts from chests and chaining children in the mines beneath Pankot Palace, all to hoard the sacred Sankara stones as engines of power. When Indy invokes the true name of Shiva on the rope bridge, the stones turn to fire in Mola Ram's grip and burn through his hands, and the man who tried to own the sacred falls to the crocodiles below. "You betray Shiva," Indy tells him, and in this universe that is a capital offence. The stones go home to the village that revered them rightly. The sacred is a trust, never a possession. (These are the themes that run through every Indiana Jones adventure, refracted through a different religion each time.)

So by the time the saga reaches the two films this essay is really about, the machine is fully built. A sacred object. A seeker. A judgement keyed to humility. What the last two films do is take that machine and aim it, at last, squarely at the family at the centre of the story: a father, a son, and the lesson that passes between them.

The Last Crusade is where the saga stops being about Indy and the sacred and becomes about Indy and his father, and it turns out those were always the same story. Henry Jones Senior has chased the Holy Grail his entire life, and the chase has cost him his son. Indy grew up so far down his father's list of priorities that he answers, even as a grown man, to the name of the family dog. The Grail diary Henry posts to him is more real to the old man than the boy ever was. The wound between them is the quest, and the film's quiet genius is to argue that the quest, read correctly, is also the cure.

The villains read it the way villains always do, as a machine. Drink from the Grail and live forever: power over death, the oldest appetite of all. Walter Donovan and Elsa Schneider want exactly that, and the Grail Knight, nine hundred years old and weary at his post, gives them the test the saga always gives the grasping. Elsa, dazzled, selects a cup of gold fit for a king. Donovan drinks, and withers into dust in the space of a breath. "He chose poorly." Indy reasons that a carpenter from Galilee would have owned a carpenter's cup, plain fired clay, and chooses the humble one, and is told he has chosen wisely. The Grail does not reward the grandest claimant. It rewards the one who understands that the sacred wears no gold.

Then comes the seal. The Knight has warned them: the Grail cannot be carried beyond the Great Seal of the temple. Cross that line and the world falls. Elsa, who cannot stop wanting, takes it across anyway; the floor splits, and she ends up dangling over the chasm, her free hand reaching not for Indy but for the cup, until the reaching kills her. Moments later it is Indy hanging over the same void, stretching for the same Grail as the temple tears itself apart, and Henry, the man who gave his life to finding it, says the only words that matter: "Indiana. Indiana, let it go." And Indy, who has never once let his father reach him, lets it go. Outside, asked what he found after a lifetime of searching, Henry does not say eternal life and does not say the cup. He says, "Illumination." The treasure was never the object. It was the seeking, the faith required to take the leap of the third trial, and a father and son standing on the same ground for the first time. Note the direction the lesson travels here, parent to child. The saga is going to reverse it.

Nineteen years pass on screen and in life. When Indiana Jones returns in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull it is 1957, the world has turned atomic and paranoid, and the man is suddenly out of step with it: surviving a nuclear blast in a lead-lined refrigerator, hauled before suspicious federal agents, watching the certainties of his prime curdle into the Red Scare. Time, the saga's true antagonist, has begun to win. And the film takes Henry's buried lesson and writes it across the sky in letters too big to miss.

The treasure of Akator is not gold. It is a chamber stacked with artefacts from every culture on earth, the hoard of beings the film frames as archaeologists themselves, collectors of knowing across worlds. The closing line that draws the laughs, that the treasure was not gold but knowledge, is Henry Jones Senior's "illumination" reincarnated in extraterrestrial form. Oxley, the colleague driven mad by contact with the skull, becomes the saga's holy fool, a mouth through which the lesson speaks in riddles and dead languages.

Against this stands Irina Spalko, the cleanest statement of the grasp the franchise has ever drawn. She introduces herself by her appetite: she knows things, she knows them before anyone else, and what she does not know, she finds out. Knowledge, to Spalko, is a weapon for the State, a road to telepathic dominion, power over the mind of man. She is Belloq in jodhpurs, Donovan in a Soviet uniform, the same hunger wearing the century's newest coat.

And here the reading that prompted this essay is exactly right, and worth pushing harder. Spalko cannot read Indy's mind. The film offers a reason that is easy to skim past: she fundamentally cannot comprehend him. A mind that wants knowledge for nothing beyond the knowing is, to her, unreadable, alien. She has more in common with the cold and the calculating than she could ever share with the museum man. It is Indy who rhymes with the creature on the crystal throne, the patient collector who gathers knowledge and gives it away freely; and it is Indy's old ally Mac, snatching fistfuls of alien treasure even as the chamber comes apart, who shows what the grasp looks like in a minor key. Mac is dragged into the closing portal with his hands full. He grasped. He went.

The judgement that falls on Spalko is the Ark all over again, only now the wrath is made of pure information. She demands to be told everything, and the alien intelligence obliges her precisely, knowing she cannot bear it. Everything pours in at once, her mind cannot hold the flood, her eyes catch light, and she is drawn shrieking into the vortex, destroyed not by being refused but by being granted exactly what she reached for. Indy, beside her, declines. He closes his eyes before the Ark one more time. He chooses the carpenter's cup one more time. He lives. (The franchise loves this trick, where the prize and the punishment turn out to be the same object: more on the plot-twist ending of the Indiana Jones films.)

And quietly, underneath the spectacle, the relay begins to turn. Crystal Skull makes Indy a father. Mutt is his son with Marion Ravenwood, a switchblade-carrying rebel who is young Indy in a leather jacket, and the film notes, in framed photographs on Indy's desk, that Henry Senior and Marcus Brody are both gone now. Indy has become the older generation, the keeper of the diary rather than the boy who ignored it. At the wedding the hat lifts in the breeze and drifts toward the son, and for one beat it looks as though the torch will pass, before Indy reaches out and takes it back. Not yet. What it will cost him to keep holding it is a bill the next film presents in full.

Dial of Destiny picks up that bill and hands it to the audience. It is 1969. The whole planet is looking up at men walking on the moon, and Indiana Jones is a fossil among fossils, a retiring professor banging a broom on his ceiling because the neighbours are celebrating a future that has no use for him. The saga's oldest enemy, time, has finally run him down.

The film charges him the cruellest price it has ever named. His son Mutt, the boy from the previous film, is dead, killed in Vietnam, and the grief has broken his marriage to Marion clean in two. The man who learned over a chasm to let go has become a man who can let go of nothing. Here is the move the whole franchise had been setting up for forty years: the cautionary figure, the one stuck in the past, is now the hero. For four films the man who could not stop reaching was the villain, and the artefact punished him for it. Now the one who cannot stop reaching backward is Indy himself.

His dark mirror is Jürgen Voller, and the doubling is the most pointed in the series. Voller is the rocket scientist laundered out of the Reich and into NASA, the man who put Americans on the moon and privately despises that he won the wrong war under the wrong flag. His prize is the Antikythera mechanism, the Dial that Archimedes built to find the fissures in time. Where Donovan wanted power over death and Spalko wanted power over the mind, Voller reaches for the largest power any of them has dared: power over history itself. He intends to fly back to 1939, kill the Führer he regards as an incompetent, and run the war correctly. He is the looter's appetite scaled up to the proportions of a god.

The judgement, as ever, is built into the artefact, and this time the trap was laid two thousand years in advance. Archimedes understood that the heavens and the continents would drift across the centuries, so the Dial does not open onto the Germany Voller has charted. It opens onto 212 BC and the Roman siege of Syracuse. Voller flies his aircraft straight through the fissure into an antiquity he was far too arrogant to imagine, and dies in the very siege he was trying to leap clean over. He chose poorly. The object outwitted the man who seized it, exactly as a carpenter's cup once did. (The mechanics of how the Dial actually works are their own knot worth untangling: see the time-travel paradox in Dial of Destiny.)

And then the film commits its great heresy. Wounded, sitting in the dust of the ancient world with Archimedes himself a few feet away, having touched at last the deep past he chased his whole life, his son dead and his wife gone and 1969 holding nothing for him, Indiana Jones says he wants to stay. The hero fails the saga's central test. For the first time in five films, the man at the centre is the one grasping the sacred and refusing to release it, the one who should, by the franchise's own iron rule, be consumed.

He is saved the only way he could be, by the lesson coming back around the line of generations, reversed. In The Last Crusade the father told the son to let go, over the edge of a chasm. In Dial of Destiny the surrogate child, Helena Shaw, daughter of Indy's late friend Basil, refuses to let him stay, and when words fail she knocks him out cold and drags him home to 1969 because he will not go willingly. The torch the wedding declined to pass has finally passed, and it travels upstream: the man once ordered by his father to let go now has to be made to let go by the next one down the line, by force, because grief has burned the lesson out of him.

Helena matters for a second reason the franchise has been quietly preparing since 1912. She begins the film as a grasper, an artefact-hunter who sells history to the highest bidder at auction, drowning in debt, all fortune and glory and no museum. She is young Indy's looting impulse and Belloq's mercenary cool wearing one face. The film hands her the saga's permanent choice, the one a Boy Scout announced in a Utah desert, guardian or looter, and lets her choose the vow. She becomes the keeper of the man rather than the merchant of the object. That is the entire moral of the series enacted inside a single character arc.

And then the grace note, which is itself a piece of deep franchise lore. Indy wakes in his apartment and Marion comes to him. She crosses to the bed, asks where it hurts, and counts off his wounds one by one. The scene is a deliberate resurrection of a tender beat written for Raiders of the Lost Ark nearly forty-three years earlier and never filmed, the lovers cataloguing each other's scars. The saga closes the loop it opened. Sallah is there, the Egyptian friend who has been turning up to dig Indy out of trouble since the Well of Souls, the connective tissue of the whole found family. The hat, that hat, the one a defeated boy was handed by a grave robber in 1912, hangs on the line where he can reach it. He is allowed to live, in the present, among the people who love him, for the single reason that one of them loved him enough to deny him the past.

Set the five films in a row and the same engine hums beneath each one. A sacred object. A seeker. A judgement weighed against humility. The Ark of the Covenant. The Sankara stones of Shiva. The Holy Grail. The crystal skull of the interdimensional collectors. The Dial of Archimedes. Five artefacts, drawn from five faiths and five ways of knowing, Hebrew and Hindu and Christian and the cosmic and the coldly rational Greek, and every one of them poses the same question: what is the shape of your wanting.

Five seekers, one verdict: you are given precisely what you grasp for.

Read down that manifest and the pattern is total. The villains reach for power, a different flavour each time, power over death, over the gods, over the mind, over history, and they are each handed precisely the thing they grasped, and the handing destroys them. Belloq looks. Mola Ram clutches. Donovan drinks. Spalko knows. Voller travels. Each is devoured by the very object of his appetite. The hero survives by the opposite discipline every single time: he lowers his eyes before the Ark, he names Shiva truly, he chooses the carpenter's cup, he declines the alien's gift, and at the last, brought nearer to failure than ever before, he is hauled back from the edge by a child who will not let him grasp.

So the late films are not the saga running out of road. They are the saga finishing its sentence. Crystal Skull turns the lesson outward and stages it as a clash: the scholar against the weapon, the collector against the conqueror, knowledge sought for itself against knowledge seized for power. Dial of Destiny turns the lesson inward, points the test at the hero's own heart, finds him failing it, and lets the next generation save him the way his father once did.

And beneath all of it, holding the whole structure up, stands Henry Jones Senior and one sentence spoken over a void. The entire arc of late Indiana Jones is the slow working-out of "Indiana, let it go." Indy spends the back half of his saga proving he learned it, then very nearly proving that grief made him forget. The treasure was never the Ark or the stones or the Grail or the skull or the Dial. The treasure was always knowing what to release, and when. That was their treasure. It was the one thing the old man left his son worth keeping, and in the end it was the only thing that saved his life.

The Astromech · Long-form film analysis since 2009.