I should say you look rather lost, but hen I can’t imagine where in the world the three of you would look at home.
Umpteenth Screening. Laserdisc. Kino Room. I’m happy to report the laserdisc is at least 25 years old and is still holding up. I saw this during the pandemic on the big screen and was really impressed with it. That was the first time I saw it in the theatre since opening weekend when I caught it on a huge 70mm screen. It left quite the impression. This time I was determined to meet the racism head on and I’m still mostly clueless about much of the criticism of the film. Let's take it one by one, shall we?
Years ago there used to be a podcast called Movie Court which featured a courtroom like environment in which film fans debated the merits of a film. Temple of Doom was Amanda Dobbins, of recent Ringer fame, ripping the hell out of Temple of Doom, while the ‘defense’ basically gave up. Spielberg and Lucas were quoted as saying essentially ‘we screwed up’ by makig the film too dark and too problematic. I talked it over with my son over waffles and coffee.
Point One: The film depicts Indians as a cult (the Thuggee) and inherently evil. My rebuttal to this is fairly passive, but I believe it is correct. The first Indians we meet (dot, not a feather) are humble village people who are farming the land and who have prayed for help from Shiva to alleviate their suffering. The village apparently had a Sankara stone, an ancient magic rock which brought vibrant life to the village. The Thuggee stole the rock, and their children and went back to Pankot Palace. I find it amazing that when people accuse the film of being racist, they always bring up the Thuggee, and they never bring up this village. If I were to live in one or the other, I’d rather the village as they seem like good hard-working people, far away from where Mola Ram is ripping hearts out. Why can’t this stand for the India of 1934 and not Pankot Palace. I think the audience who decides the corrupt Indians should be representative of the (then colony) British Raj are the ones who are racist.
Point Two: The villagers ask Shiva to send someone to help them and boom... Indiana Jones shows up as a white savior to help those poor little brown people get wealth and justice. This is entirely skewed. First, if you know anything about Hinduism, Shiva will bring whoever the fuck he wants to bring, and he won’t give a damn about your opinion. Shiva is a multi-armed ass kicking God and you’ve got it spinned around. If Shiva wants to send Peter Parker to help the village, then thy will be done. So that answer is first a little insulting to the Hindus.
Point Three; Secondly, the previous argument passes up three people. It’s not just Indy. It’s Indy, a clueless lounge singer and a twelve-year-old Chinese Orphan. Ignoring the woman and the Chinese kid is ignoring a more diverse rescue party than the straight white male which we are used to being the enemy as of late. Willie and Short Round are not passive members of this revolution. They fight the bad guys, help Indy steal the stones, and are 66% responsible for the freeing of the children from the slave mines of Pankot. Ignore that, and you're ignoring the facts of the story. It also ignores the Maharaja’s turn as he wakes from his induced trance to give Short Round the needed information to leave the palace alive.
Point Four, thirdly following the same argument, blaming the white savior ignores the fact that you might, just possibly, if you looked at the last five thousand years of Indian history, just might find a hierarchy of Hindus (or Indians, or Sikhs, or Muslims, or whoever) that were not acting 100% with the good intentions of the people they lorded over. Anglo history is full of corrupt white people doing corrupt shit to other people. Pankot was a corrupt cult of rich people that were using their religious power to control their wealth and leverage that power against the surrounding countryside. In America, Pankot is Washington, and the countryside is the rest of the country. It’s not insulting to say there was corruption in India in the 1930’s. There’s corruption everywhere in the 1930’s, not just India. Again, focusing on that as a negative is as strange as it is slightly hypocritical.
Point Five, Willie Scott is a poor excuse for a feminist message. To this I only ask: when you bought your ticket to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, were you expecting a stong statement from the chorus girl on the politics of Andrea Dworkin? Kate Capshaw is a light in this film. She opens it by coming out of the mouth of a dragon, sings phonetic Cantonese, balances out Indy’s machismo and provides an endless amount of comedy. Feminists may groan at Willie complaining about breaking a nail in a tunnel filled with insects while Indy and Short Round are about to be crushed to death, but if they do then I take it they’re in the wrong film. Ford is the straight man. He's Laurel. He’s Costello. Willie is the funny girl and (it just so happens ) the sexually adventurous type. The word play between Willie and Indy in her room (while she eats an apple and talks about what cream she uses on her face) is fantastic writing and better acting. If she’s annoying in certain parts, it’s because that’s her character. If you don’t like it, maybe you’ve never played hard to get. Get off Capshaw’s back. She’s great in this.
Point Six, the British show up at the end, led by a bunch of white officers, and save the day, which is just a white supremacist message. I have to really take a breath when I read criticism like this. First, this ignores the factual circumstances of the British Raj. Yes, the Brits ruled India with an iron fist. Yes, they were oppressive beyond the space where such evils can find space here. It is a fact they were in India and it was a fact that white officers led Hindu, Sikhs, and Gurkha troops to suppress inner rebellions and the like. It is also true that those same troops protected India from invasion from Japan, China, and helped the British Empire win the Second World War. I, for one, have no problem admitting that a native Indian army defeated a small but powerful cult and saved not just the one village that Indy ran across, but the entire province around Pankot. Empires are messy and nuanced. For four hundred years, Ireland was a conquered nation that recruited and forced Irish men to join the British Imperial Army. These Irish troops were deployed and loyally served conflicts all over the globe on behalf of the British Crown. They served against Napoleon at Waterloo, and they served against the Russians in Crimea. No one wants to talk about this now because most of the island of Eire liberated themselves and became the Republic of Ireland. It serves no one but itself, but it cannot change the past. India is the same. Get over it.
Point Seven, India is portrayed as barbaric and the feast scene in particular negatively showcases Indian food. Well, I don’t know what movie you thought you were going to see. I purchased a ticket to an adventure comedy. I didn’t see Indian society as barbaric. I saw Thuggee society as barbaric. Just like I see Branch Davidian society, or the incestuous Morman society, or Jim Jones’ Kool-Aid cult, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. The feast does not reflect Indian cuisine. It was not meant to. It was meant to make Willie pass out. It was a joke, not a dick. Don’t take it so hard. And as far as the barbaric side of it. The dinner time conversation between Chattar Lal is a perfect example of putting Indy in his place.
The whole attitude behind this is pretty strange. It's like people who went to see Attack of the Clones and said the speeder chase in the first act was too unbelievable. Oh. Okay. But a planet full of oversized Muppets taking on a biker gang on a forest moon, that was totally believable, right? Amrish Puri, who played Mola Ram, is quoted as saying something like this takes place in the Temple of Doom. Indy, Willie, and Short Round escape Chinese gangsters, jump out of a plane using a raft, and ride the raft down a mountain, a river, and are rescued by a village holy man. At what point did you recognize you were in a fantasy? Was it before or after you decided this film was sexist or barbaric? This also travels to the “we can do this but you can’t” argument which is also problematic. How many films do Indians make that either misrepresent themselves or cast them in a different light that may be not so kind? I’m betting a lot. Americans do it all the time. Look at the Godfather. That’s a film that BREATHES American barbarity. But a showgirl passing out at Monkey Brains... well that’s an insult to Indian culture (or so the argument goes).
I reject this. I think there is a margin of error with every audience, but supposing all Americans will derive the same meaning out of one film is not fair. Likewise, thinking Indian audiences won’t understand the threat of the thuggee or the idea that not all Italian Americans are Tony Soprano is insulting. At the end of this film, the children run back to the village, which now is alive and thriving thanks to the life the sankara stone brings to it. How anyone could see this ending and derive a white savior storyline is as dismissive as it is ignorant. It reminds me of the article in The Guardian that said Black Hawk Down was a racist film because there were no black American soldiers and no white Somalis.
Temple of Doom is a great film that mixes serial adventure films with elements of Busby Berkeley, Universal Horror films, with interesting characters like Lau Che, Willie Scott, Chatter Lal, Mola Ram, and Short Round. Key Huy Quan was so good in this film it boggles the mind. And... It makes much more sense that he’s the one conning Indy out of the Dial of Destiny to sell it on the black market than Phoebe Waller- Bridge – as wonderful as she was in the role. I’m not against “woke” thinking. I think there is room for calling out racism in Hollywood film. But torpedoing this film because the audience can’t understand nuance is overboard. It’s the reason people are getting too wild about existing culture and changes in our culture.
Covering these topics also takes space away from the elements of the film that make it such a success. In effect, you are spending all your (my) time defending the film rather than promoting it. The Club Obi Wan intro is shockingly good. It is only exceeded by the fight leading to one of the craziest exits in an action film. Look closely and you’ll see the bullet holes from the Tommy gun create new holes in the gong as the gong is traveling towards the window. The car chase is more than an introduction to Short Round, which is gold, but also gives you more insight into Willie when she says, to comedic effect: “I’m not that kind of girl,” when Indy is searching her... body... for the potion. The Lao Che Air revelation leads to the plane crash to the village to Pankot. Before you can breathe, the film hits 45 minutes. The dinner table scene is the crux of the film when Indy risks upsetting Lal and Lal takes the bait. If Lal had not sent the assassins to kill Indy in the middle of the night, he would have had no reason to stay in Pankot any longer than he had to. Lal’s mistake thus led to Indy investigating further. The Temple of Doom itself is cited as being the reason why the film worried the MPAA and led to the PG-13 craze. Parents bemoaned the beating heart on fire and if you look carefully, flayed skins on the walls. This seems crazy to me. Have you fucking seen Jaws? A PG film in which a child is swallowed whole on screen, with a blood spurt into the water. Jaws has a man bit in half by a shark who with his last bit of strength tries to stab the shark with a machete. How this is any ‘better’ than ripping a heart out I’m not sure. And remember when Hooper is cutting open the shark, he is looking for... pieces... of the boy’s body. Yes, he only finds a license plate, but in my view, Jaws is bloodier and darker.
This diverts from Quan’s ability to illicit sympathy from the audience when Indy is put into a trance. The trance itself, in which Spielberg plays with light, is an acting tour de force by Ford, better than most his other films. Amrish Puri, an amazing actor with over three hundred credits to his name, must go down as one of the greatest villains of all time. He ranks right up there with Philip Seymour Hoffman in Mission: Impossible 3, Gert Frobe in Goldfinger, and Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. Puri bottles up everything that is wrong with India in the 1930’s when he maniacally laughs after slipping Indy the blood of Kali Ma. "The British in India will be slaughtered, then we will overrun the Muslims. Then the Hebrew God will fall! And then the Christian God will be cast down and forgotten. Soon, Kali Ma will rule the world!” I have to say... objectively, if you replaced the nouns in this speech, it doesn’t sound that far from Fox News on a weeknight. As good Americans, we’re not going to argue that we slaughtered Brits here are we? And what red-blooded American wants Muslims here? Surely those are the same people who want the Jews out. The only one that sticks out is the Christian God, which is kind of strange because most theologians see Jehovah, God, and Allah as the same being. This being the case, all we have to do is swap Kali Ma and God, and we’ve got a case for Trump / Mola Ram ‘24. This speech isn’t insensitive, it’s telling, and it is damn near universal. That is because evil is universal, and everyone has a Temple of Doom whether it’s underneath a Pizzaria basement in D.C. or a cell in Guantanamo.
The best part of Temple of Doom is the ending, when everyone returns to the village and the women see their children returned. A thousand screams of joy and laughter, repeated with a John Williams score blaring over them and an Elephant trumpeting the victory over Pankot. Indy gets the girl, Short Round goes back to being a kid, and Willie finds contentment if only until shortly before the next adventure. Hating this film doesn’t make someone a bunch of killjoys, but it does mean they are focusing not on the nuance of understanding, but on simple concepts, because they have simple minds.