‘When there was wonder in the world’: why Raiders of the Lost Ark is my feelgood movie

2 hours ago 8

The ancient Greek philosopher Lucretius writes in his epic poem On the Nature of Things: “It is comforting, when winds are whipping up the waters of the vast sea, to watch from land the severe trials of another person … it is comforting to see from what troubles you yourself are exempt.”

This feeling of living dangerously by proxy is exactly why I find it so relaxing to watch Indiana Jones in 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark go through an endless stream of trials and tribulations: trekking through the hot, sticky jungle. Avoiding venomous spiders and snakes. Being betrayed by not one, but two of his colleagues. Jumping over bottomless chasms and outrunning giant boulders, only to be thwarted by his arch-rival and chased by a tribe of bow-and-arrow-toting Amazonians. And that’s just the first 15 minutes of the film.

While there might have been some sense of danger and concern for Indy’s life when I first watched the movie as a kid, I think some part of me knew even then that everything was going to be OK in the end. And certainly now, after watching the film dozens of times, I just sit back and enjoy the ride. Because Raiders is just plain fun. A globe-trotting adventure film with thrills, chills, but also a lot of laughs and even a little romance to balance it all out.

But the true essence of the movie – what really makes it such a feelgood, comforting watch – is a pervasive sense of nostalgia: a romanticized recollection of a bygone era, when there was wonder in the world, the good guys fought the bad guys and came out on top. Better yet, it’s set in a bygone era that never really even existed, when handsome professors jumped out from behind their desks to crack open ancient Egyptian tombs, battling Nazis along the way, or bored bartenders escaped dead-end jobs in the middle of nowhere, suddenly transported to the hustle and bustle of Cairo’s great bazaars.

This nostalgic escapism was key to the movie’s conception; an homage to the 1930s and 1940s serial B-movies that creator George Lucas – and his later collaborators, co-writer Philip Kaufman and director Steven Spielberg – watched as a kid growing up in postwar America, like Buck Rogers and Zorro’s Fighting Legion. These movies were broken down into roughly 15-minute chunks and shown at the cinema before feature presentations, and thus when taken as a whole, these films were packed with action and intrigue, much like Raiders.

More than just wanting to relive their childhoods, I think the film’s creators wanted to give the early 1980s American audience a break after the tumult of late 1960s, the Vietnam war and Watergate. An escape from the sadness and disillusionment, back to a simpler time when America was clearly on the right side of history.

The Greatest Generation – persevering through the Great Depression and the second world war – is still the moral lodestar for America, so watching Harrison Ford stick it to the Nazis resonated for me growing up in the 2000s – another time of great moral obscurity as we battled over elections, recessions and what George W Bush was calling a war on terror. And on the home front, my parents were doing battle as well, fighting constantly on the road to divorce. Movies were a necessary refuge from it all.

Looking back at those years now, the nostalgia is twofold. Beyond the film itself, I now yearn for how I watched that movie, and countless others. Sitting on the couch on a lazy, carefree Sunday, flipping through the channels, Raiders of the Lost Ark and its sequels seemed to be on one network or another every weekend – in the TV syndication hall of fame, to be played on cable until the end of time, or so it seemed back then. Again, simpler times.

It was a bit like watching those old movie serials – popping into some old familiar action or sci-fi movie for a few scenes, only to flip away at the next commercial break. Maybe you caught Indy and his soon-to-be “goddamn partner” Marion in a Himalayan bar brawl for the ages, or Indy chasing down a heavily armed Nazi caravan with just his two fists and a horse.

There was something relaxing about channel surfing: the movie options were out of your control, you put your trust in the hands of the all-knowing cable programming gods.

Divine intervention saves Indy and Marion at the end of Raiders, and perhaps that’s the ultimate peace of mind – knowing that someone up there in the sky is looking out for you. Whether that’s rescuing you from a gang of murderous Nazis, or simply handling some of the movie watching decision-making and saying, just sit back and relax. We got this.