ABSTRACT
George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have emerged in masters of Hollywood entertainment cinema. Hollywood’s young superbards take no delight in any heroism that operates within society or in mastering life’s ordinary and extraordinary trials. The opening episode in a Shanghai nightclub in 1935 brings together the archaeologist-adventurer Indiana Jones, a showgirl and singer named Willie Scott, and Jones’s sidekick, Short Round. The maharaja’s minister who greets Jones and company as they enter the palace seems a cultivated, knowledgeable, Oxford-educated man. Indiana Jones brings the latent structure of adventure-romance very close to its surface and so discloses the psychosexual desires and fears that lie at the very core of the genre. The paternalistic relation of the white scientist to his object of research underscores the more general paternalism of Jones’s relation to his needy charges. The film’s gender model of political domination places the villagers in the position of children, dependent on the paternal West for protection.
