ABSTRACT
There is very little ethnic scoring at all in the film, and most of what there is is source music. For instance, during the snakesand-monkey-brains banquet in Pangkot Palace, there is music for the dancing girls to dance to. And during the heathen Kali rituals of sacrifice, there is chanting, focused on words without melody to speak of. But the dramatic scoring almost never has an “ethnic” sound, and when it does, it only lasts for a few phrases. In large part, the film is a Ben-Hur epic soundalike, which suggests that there is a style of music we might call spectacle or epic in its own right (see example 7).3 However this music is named, it has room for neither subjectivity nor geography; it only bothers to represent the film’s broad comic action. The two-dimensional ethnic villains don’t get a chance, a point on which the narrative and the score are in wholehearted agreement. And Willy, whose rendition of “Anything Goes” in Chinese opens the film, does not get another musical moment to herself. So, Indiana Jones, even more blatantly than Riggs and Ryan, earns the right to herodom and citizenship by virtue of gender and color.
