Its violence was so extreme that it prompted the creation of the PG-13 rating. Kate Capshaw's annoyance level was so extreme we all hated it her afterwards. And a third one, because you have to use the rule of three if you want to use this sort of paragraph structure in your persuasive writing.
Well, I've watched Temple of Doom for probably the third time overall, but very likely the first since the 1980s. Funny how well I remembered it for having only seen it twice, so maybe I did see it three times back then, or at least caught portions of it on cable in the background. Or maybe it was just so extreme that the parts that resonated with me really resonated with me. Then there was also the fact that I used to play the Temple of Doom video game, which likely increased my familiarity with the material beyond mere viewings.
So you wouldn't be surprised to learn I have a bunch of new thoughts prompted by my latest viewing, starting with these extreme elements and then going from there.
1) It doesn't feel as violent as I remembered. In 1984 I was ten going on 11, and I'm pretty sure I saw Temple of Doom in the theater -- there would have been no reason not to, since I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark in the theater three years earlier (at least twice, in fact). The violence did not make as much of an impact on me at that time as the room full of bugs, particularly that long creepy crawlie that disappears into Capshaw's neckline. (I'm sure in that one particular shot it was a wig attached to a dummy.) But over the years, I've used my memory of the way a new rating was spawned by the movie to indeed think of it as some sort of brutally graphic film.
Well, I didn't really find it that way at all. For my money, there's nothing in this film nearly so horrifying as the face melting of the Nazis at the end of Raiders. The body count seems lower than Raiders, and the sheer physicality of the close quarters fighting is far less bone crunching and flesh smacking. If I just think of the blood that flies in Indy's epic Raiders smackdown with the big bald Nazi -- even before the plane propeller shreds him to pieces -- I can't find any equivalent of that here.
I think instead of the pervasive sense of violence throughout the film, as Raiders has, concerned parent groups were specifically reacting to the scene of human sacrifice and Mola Ram removing the heart from his victim prior to it. Interestingly, although that scene was obviously a main talking point on the playground back in the day, it didn't disturb me the way the bugs did. If it had killed the man, it might have been a lot more traumatizing to me. But instead I thought "Okay! You don't need a heart to live!"
2) Kate Capshaw is not as annoying as I remembered. If you had asked me to characterize Capshaw's performance throughout the film, I would have said that she is literally whining and carrying on in her every single moment on screen. That's how extreme the depiction of her as a brat and a wimp and a coward felt to me back in the day. (A coward who can speculatively reach her arm into a hole filled with bugs to save her two companions, but a coward nonetheless.)
There's a fair bit of that, sure. It didn't offend me as much this time. Maybe I saw more of the Capshaw that Steven Spielberg saw in this film, that prompted him to eventually propose to her. They've just celebrated their 30th anniversary.
The thing that did strike me, though, was that this is never a role they would give to a woman today. Although Willie is not helpless -- she stands up to a few thugs, plus she saves them from the room that was going to spike and squish them -- she's a bit too damsel-y, and way too much of an ass. A performance like the one Capshaw gives, which is actually quite deft in terms of physical comedy, would be singled out as misogynist in 2021. If you want a character to be the butt of every joke in a film, it has to be a man today. That's not a criticism, just an observation of how things have changed.
One thing that's for sure is that Willie has absolutely zero back story. She's a lounge singer working in Shanghai. She's originally from Missouri. That is literally all we learn about her in the whole film. And part of that is because ...
3) The whole movie is basically one epic wrong turn. Whereas Raiders of the Lost Ark involves planned voyages to specific parts of the world for very specific reasons, a la a James Bond movie, Temple of Doom feels like one big episode of improv inspired by escaping from various jams. If I'm not mistaken -- certain exposition might have gotten past me while I was drinking margaritas on Friday night -- the only reason they even end up in India is because they have to use a raft to escape from Lao Che's plane, which its pilots had already abandoned. I can't recall what their actual destination was supposed to be after leaving Shanghai. The whole Mola Ram adventure, then, is just sort of picked up on the fly. (Incidentally, wouldn't it have been easier for the pilots just to kill Indy and company while they slept, rather than having to parachute out and destroy the plane?)
Because of this, the movie has a curious feeling of never giving viewers their bearings. We come in on Indy's Shanghai adventure much as we do with the cold open in Raiders, which is one of the best parts of that film -- and which again likens it to a Bond movie. In that case, though, the opening South American adventure is only there to introduce us to the character, and has nothing to do with his eventual quest for the ark of the covenant, either in terms of the two ambitions being related to one another, or in terms of physically getting from point A to point B in the plot. The Lao Che diamond and the Sankara stones don't have anything do with each other either, but by one adventure bleeding directly into the other, geographically, we never have a chance to pause and receive a heaping dose of exposition that orients us within the plot.
Not only is there the impact on Willie, who is basically just a beautiful and whiny cypher, but there's the impact on Short Round (Ke Huy Quan). We don't know anything about why Short Round is Indy's companion or how that came to be. And because he's not properly introduced, he too can strike us as nattering and annoying, like Willie. If The Goonies hadn't come along a year later, in which I thought Quan was very effectively used and became beloved to me (and I've seen that movie about 15 times), I wonder if I would have always thought of him as nothing more than the annoying pipsqueak from Temple of Doom, who does things like try to avoid blame for causing the ceiling to lower on them rather than figuring out how to get out of those jams.
4) The oddness that this is a prequel. If you happened to be looking away from the screen when the title "Shanghai - 1935" comes up at the beginning, or if you forgot or never knew that Raiders takes place in 1936, you'd watch the whole movie without realizing that this is a prequel to Raiders. It's a curious choice that I never understood, and still don't. (I'm sure I could google it and there would be an answer, but I'm content to leave myself in that state of not knowing.)
A couple odd things result from this choice. One is that you can't really worry about whether Indiana Jones will make it out of any of the scrapes he gets in. A worry for the fate of the protagonist is key to the tension any film tries to create, even if most savvy viewers know that the hero is not going to die, or at least not at this juncture of the movie. Because this is a prequel, we know for sure that Indy is going to survive all the scrapes.
We don't know that about Short Round or Willie, though we probably have our suspicions, knowing that Steven Spielberg tends to be a populist filmmaker. However, it does raise a couple interesting questions about their fates. Presumably Indy got too annoyed by Willie or fell out of love with her, if he ever was in love -- this looks more like a relationship based on intense circumstances, the kind Sandra Bullock talks about in Speed. In any case, she's certainly not around when he connects up again with Marion Ravenwood in Raiders.
That's not too surprising, James Bond goes through women quickly and easily enough. (There, that's the third Bond reference in this piece.) Since relationships are supposed to be monogamous, you have to end them if they aren't going well, unlike with friends where you can just see them less.
But whither Short Round? Even the most perverse of us would not suspect he was killed between Indy's adventures in 1935 and his adventures in 1936, and for the sake of Indy's health, let's just hope that was a quiet year. But he was jettisoned at some point because he certainly does not accompany Indy on his trip to South America to find the idol.
I suppose the most likely explanation is that Short Round was a China-based companion, who happened to get dislocated to India for their remaining adventures while they were escaping Lao Che's thugs. (This even though the actor is of Vietnamese heritage. Still today we don't properly distinguish Asians from each other in casting.) So when they defeated Mola Ram he just went home again, ready to assist should Indy return to that part of the world.
5) Flying heart is ool kavort. The gibberish I just wrote is what I always thought Mola Ram was saying in the Temple of Doom video game when he starts throwing flaming hearts at you on one board. It was one of those young person jokes that took on a life of its own, such that I still remember it today.
Why I would have thought it was "flying" and not "flaming" is good question, though the hearts are both airborne and on fire, so I guess either would work. How I came up with the imaginary words "ool" and "kavort" is also a mystery.
Even at the time I remember friends saying the line was really "Soon Mola Ram will rule the world," which certainly makes more sense. In watching the movie last night I realized, when the line is actually spoken by Mola Ram, that it's really "Soon Kali Maa will rule the world," Kali Maa being the large statue that presides over the fiery human sacrifice pit.
6) Dan Aykroyd? I had no idea Dan Aykroyd was in Temple of Doom until I noticed his name in the credits. Naturally then I had to go back to the start of the movie and find his scene, which is about 15 seconds long and occurs when our trio of heroes are boarding Lao Che's plane to escape Shanghai. He's kind of like one of the men Bond (fourth reference) always has planted in exotic locales to help him with logistics, like Q. It's easy to miss Aykroyd because you never get a close-up of his face, though his voice is certainly recognizable once you realize who it is you're actually watching.
Because he helps them get on the plane of a man who means to kill them, it made me wonder if Aykroyd's character is supposed to be betraying them all along, or if he has also been duped by Lao Che. Since his character appears so briefly and is given such little narrative consequence, Spielberg et al may never have even asked that question. The characters might as well have just gotten on the plane without any help.
7) The Obi-Wan Club. Again something I never knew, unless I knew and forgot, was that the name of the club in Shanghai is inspired by Obi-Wan Kenobi from Star Wars. (I laugh at myself for having written "from Star Wars." What other Obi-Wan Kenobi is there?)
For half a second, when I googled it, I thought this was a real club, and that made me wonder if the inspiration was the other way around, the Star Wars character taking his name from the club. Then later I realized I had landed on an Indiana Jones Wiki page, which discusses parts of the movies as though they are real parts of world history rather than cinematic inventions.
And speaking of that club ...
8) The Busby Berkeley opening. I had forgotten about the cheeky way this opens in Willie's performance of the lead song from the musical Anything Goes, which I actually acted in as a thespian in my younger years. I mean, I certainly remembered that the movie opened in the club, but just how much of the musical number plays out before we see our hero gave me a sense of how delightfully unexpected the choice was. Audiences must have thought they stepped into the wrong movie, as suddenly a Busby Berkeley-esque song and dance has supplanted the expected opening moments of an escapist adventure about a swashbuckling archeologist. The fact that the title for the movie they're supposed to be seeing does appear -- in the same Raiders font, bisected by the blonde lounge singer singing the song -- must have just made the effect all the more weird.
Incidentally, the set piece that follows -- Indy and Willie going after the antidote and diamond, respectively, as fleeing club patrons unwittingly kick them across the floor -- is still a triumph of execution. Temple of Doom may have some things going against it, but its set pieces are not one of them.
9) Speed round. Monkey brains! Indy taking down a whole rope bridge with just a few hacks from a sword! The world's longest and most serpentine mine cart track! Touching someone's skin with a flaming torch as a way for breaking their hypnotic state! There's a lot in this movie.
And how did someone manage to fill an entire room with bugs and get them to stay there, anyway?
I should have a tenth, just how I should have had a third in that paragraph near the start. Nobody's perfect.
I enjoyed my viewing quite a bit, even though I have never totally "liked" this movie, especially when contrasted with the two movies around it. Though it's light years better than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, so it's got that going for it.
And I think I'm now going to watch those other two movies -- The Last Crusade and Crystal Skull -- as each are movies I've seen only once. How could I have seen The Last Crusade only once? I'm not sure but it's true. I'll look to correct that in the coming months, as well as reevaluate just how bad Crystal Skull really is.
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