Montana Smith
Active member
Attila the Professor said:I agree with all of this. But I feel like the period from 1945 to 1963 is its own era, and the 60s as we think of them don't really start in earnest until after Kennedy, that is, after 11/22/63. It's about hope and optimism and idealism of a sort that are symbolized as collapsing with the assassination - and I think nothing we've ever heard from Spielberg and Lucas gives us reason to think they wouldn't go along with precisely this interpretation.
I like your interpretation of '45-'63. There was probably the euphoria of rebirth from the ashes of the war. Yet at the same time, though, there was a dark shadow: the cold war, the iron curtain (a term which Stalin apparently coined a few months before Churchill), and the political corruption behind the scenes - the suspicious death of Marilyn Monroe in 1962, a woman who yearned for and had the talent for more, but seemed crushed by the expectations of others. 1962 was also the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
After Kennedy came the drug-fueled era of hippy culture, like an escape or a reaction to a negative reality. And we're a long way from that mythical golden age of the 1930s-that-never-was.
Bond arrived on screen in 1962, and it was a time when super-villains really could hold the world to ransom. Two-fisted Indy with his potsherds at the beginning of KOTCS is now a truly anachronistic figure. Sadly, it's now the age of Mutt (and for me, that's the end of Indy).
Which is exactly what you already wrote:
Attila the Professor said:It's true that there's room for a lot more exploration and adventure pre-'45 and as has been said, the Doomtown sequence dramatizes this very well, showing Indy as a relic who doesn't fit into the 1950s notions of suburbia. But post-1963, I'm not sure there's room for Indy's brand of heroism at all. So there's a declension of heroic ages, I suppose.