For Us, El Guapo is a Big Dangerous Man Who Wants to Kill Us

If you haven't an eye for obvious turns and cliches: Spoiler Alert

Remember when Billy Graham wrote that editorial in the NY Times about the My Lai war crimes and Lt. Calley's court martial saying we all know war is ugly so why harp on the mass murders, gang rapes, beatings, and mutilations of civilians and in any case we all have our own My Lai's to deal with whether it's an unkind word or thoughtless act so the actual My Lai isn't worth the divisiveness thinking about it might cause but we should pause and reflect on our own personal My Lai's in anticipation of Easter because what's Easter for if not relieving your conscience? No, you don't remember? M'eh well, there's no need to think about it now.

In any case, Billy did have a point there, sometimes, as they say, it's difficult to see the forest for the trees, or in his case, the war crimes for the individual babies heaved into irrigation canals and shot with machine guns or carved with bayonets.

So speaking of the big picture, did you see Indiana Jones and the Reason Brown People Moved Out of Caves? What a nihilistic abyss of a movie that was.

It would be easy to say only the first act of the last Indiana Jones movie is enjoyable, but then that would suggest there is a coherent whole of which that first act is a part. As it is, it seems the first portion of the movie is a bit of developed narrative and well-imagined world accidentally spliced with a long and boring chase, ending with Indiana Jones in a church. In a church? Yes, a church. But not in the type of churches that exist elsewhere in the world of Indiana Jones- existing externally to Indie as objects of investigation. Here, this church functions only as it can when all meaning has collapsed but one hasn't the decency to end one's life: as a last desperate means and symbol of validation and insular self-preservation.

This means something. Treasure isn't the real treasure, knowledge is the real treasure, except that real or pure knowledge isn't suitable to our dimensionally-fixed monkey brains, so friends and family are the real treasure, except friends and family aren't treasure at all, they're just what's left standing when the rugs been pulled from under you and if that's all that's left you'd best cling to it as tenaciously, if not as bitterly, as you can because treasure or not, it's better than nothing.

What?

If you're a baby, don't continue...

So, things start out as they ought, carefree youth speeds away as Indie is bound and wrapped up with a fascism indistinguishable from American militarism. We learn soon enough that Indie is alone in the world- communists and erstwhile comrades threaten his life. His own government finds him suspect. He's no family, no friends, no world of academia. In the most fitting tableau, wholesome Americana is revealed as a world of artifice and death, Indie can't choose death, still he climbs into a coffin- well, a state of the art, lead-lined refrigerator, clearly representing the death that waits at the end of the line for capitalism- so, a coffin. So he climbs in in an attempt to preserve his life, but he is cast out of that world by the agent of mid-century capitalism's savior (an atomic bomb) so he becomes worse than dead.

He is a man without a world.

Then there're some indigenous Meso-American helpers, some Meso-American baddies, a chase, a reunion, some sword fighting, ants, not aliens, and then nothing. If it had ended there it would have been The Graduate. But this is a different world. There can't be nothing. So we get to see the not nothing he chooses.

Indie marries the woman he abandoned years ago, becomes a father to the son he didn't know he had (even though he'd undermined the possibility of fatherhood and is unable to make it more than a performance of fatherhood) and props it all up with a church- THE CHURCH.

And to prove that it saved him, Indie puts his hat back on at the end.

Or it didn't save him and all that's left is this form of Indie that can't really exist, the unexamined Indie he is forced to compulsively play because he is unwilling to actively choose anything out of concern or passion- he settle only for what is left- even of himself. Is Indie really Indie if he's not being Indie all the time?

I knew you weren't a baby. Of course, we all have our own inter-dimensional aliens to face. We must climb into our own lead-lined refrigerators-coffins and journey along the perfectly licensable thrill rides that is our choosing existence.

M'eh.

Oh but more than "M'eh" stay tuned for something big. Rules and regulations are a'comin'.