Rocket Surgeon said:
These points have been made by members as well...question is: what do you think of /where do you stand on them?
I don't have a fully fledged opinion on the issue. That said, there are things that personally rub me the wrong way, as well as things that I think can reasonably be found objectionable even if they don't bug me that much. For an example of the latter...
Henry W Jones said:
So, are we saying that people in films cannot be heros outside of their own country of nationality or it is racist? Or only when it is a white hero?
It can be dubious when those being helped are so clearly helpless, yes. Do I think it is racist? Again, it takes me awhile to jump to that word. But here's an account of what's presented here:
Indiana Jones, an educated, white Westerner finds himself and his companions (one of them a young Chinese boy with an interest in America) in a remote, starving Indian village. The primary spokesman of the villagers is their shaman, who believes that Shiva brought Indy and friends to the village to save them from the evil that has befallen them. In the course of the film, he does so. We have no real reason to believe that the village has attempted self-salvation in any way. Only Indy can do it. They need him.
From a plot perspective, I can accept this. The villagers are, after all, starving. Indy, as a Westerner and a noted scholar, can achieve access to Pankot Palace that the villagers cannot. Indy does have certain qualities that allow him to do what he does, his name, race, and modern education included along with his more mercenary talents. There are, of course, many south Asians at the Pankot banquet as well, but they all seem to be of means; it's reasonable to expect that the village did not have access to either a sympathetic figure of like type or the means to masquerade as one.
But the film is constructed as such. The "Great White Hero" is an old
trope, and the film is within its rights to employ it. And yes, the film definitely subverts it in having Short Round save Indy himself before Indy saves the slave children. The film also supports the point of view of the shaman in that <I>he was right</I>; the sivalinga did need to be recovered for life to return to the village. That is to say, the resolution of the film seems not to privilege a modern, perhaps Western, scientific point of view over an Eastern, mystical one.
I don't think the film should be penalized for presenting such a different plot from the first film. Indy isn't just presented with a mission by the same people as he was last time, to find an artifact before the bad guys do. It's a rescue mission, of both the artifact and the village's children. Unless we take Mola Ram seriously - and we can choose to do so - it's a much smaller threat than in Raiders. That's great; it's a departure from formula to an extent that, say, Ghostbusters II could never even dream of.
I don't claim to be eloquent on these issues. Indeed, I've stood up for Heart of Darkness on a number of occasions as a text that's much more about evils in Europe than evils in Africa, and people find that work a pretty easy target along these lines. Another partial reason I haven't dived into this thread up till now, and that I'm still reluctant to do so, is that I don't feel like a good spokesman on these issues. Many are more sensitive to the nuances than I am.
But simply as storytelling the depiction of that Mayapore village always rubs me the wrong way a little. I think it might be that it's a little simple; there's not much texture to it. We don't get any of the expositional grace notes we receive in Raiders, where we actually get some sense of the relationship between Eaton and Musgrove as well as those between Indy and Marcus. It's uninteresting; it's a simplistic third world vision.