Political Correctness in Indy V

Toht's Arm

Active member
bebop said:
Would I love to be in Indiana Jones 5? You bet! I did research on African-American professors teaching in the U.S. in the mid-1950's and there actually were a few. So is it historically conceivable David Koepp could create a new Marshall College colleague for Dr. Jones that was African-American? You bet. Would the professor's race play into the story-line?

This sounds great!

bebop said:
Two other Raiders moments also stand out as racially insensitive, moments I was not aware of until adulthood: When Indy shoots the Arab Swordsman for no good reason and when Indy and the truck-driving German soldier share a laugh about the Arab worker knocked off the windshield.

I've never thought about that second scene that way, but that's certainly a valid reaction to it. I think I always assumed Indy was mocking the German at that point, rather than genuinely having a good time with him...


bebop said:
For that matter, I have read many legitimate criticisms of Temple of Doom as being racist in it's stereotyping of Indian people, rendering them caricatures, (except, in my opinion, for Rosahan Seth who played a seemingly three dimensional Chatter Lal). This awareness of perhaps unintentional insensitivity on the part of the Indy Jones production team has not ruined my enjoyment of the film.

Yeah, that film certainly crosses a line that the other three only come close to.
 

dr.jones1986

Active member
Attila the Professor said:
I think we're meant to think that Dietrich would have called Katanga something other than "savage" in response to his sex slavery gambit, had Katanga not been black.

***

By the way, bebop, I'm unable to respond at length right now, but I'm grateful to you for sharing these thoughts, and look forward to giving them a full look.

While I agree that Dietrich's comment may not be purely based on the sexual nature of the situation, I don't think his use of the word "savage" is indicative of a lack of PC in the movie. Dietrich is clearly shown to be someone who is buying into the Nazi ideology of Aryan superiority. His response to Belloq later in the film about being "uncomfortable with this Jewish ritual" clearly displays this. Also Lucas and Speilberg portraying a captain of African decent with a black crew and a ship with a very African name like Bantu Wind could be a sign of empowerment. Especially during the 30's, an era of colonialism abroad and segregation back in the US.
 

Raiders90

Well-known member
Katanga is actually a very good character. He's not a crude stereotype as are a lot of minority characters in films like these. Look at the prison warden in 1999's The Mummy - he's portrayed as a stereotypical "dirty" Arab figure, lecherous, crude, smelly and unintelligent. Look at the grubby, dirty, greedy Hungarian Beni in that film, who is the secondary antagonist. The Indy trilogy may not be the most "PC" series ever, but it was filmed not long after the Iran hostage crisis and gas shortage and yet his best friend is an Egyptian (in your average Joe's eyes, an Arab). I'd say that's pretty big for the time period. Sallah isn't the brightest light, but he's also not a stereotype. Marion is a pretty strong female character, especially when you compare her to Willie Scott, who is more akin to the 1930s Damsel in Distress, or even Elsa, who is a pretty stock 1940s femme fatale.
 
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Attila the Professor

Moderator
Staff member
dr.jones1986 said:
While I agree that Dietrich's comment may not be purely based on the sexual nature of the situation, I don't think his use of the word "savage" is indicative of a lack of PC in the movie. Dietrich is clearly shown to be someone who is buying into the Nazi ideology of Aryan superiority. His response to Belloq later in the film about being "uncomfortable with this Jewish ritual" clearly displays this. Also Lucas and Speilberg portraying a captain of African decent with a black crew and a ship with a very African name like Bantu Wind could be a sign of empowerment. Especially during the 30's, an era of colonialism abroad and segregation back in the US.

Oh, you misunderstand me: I don't think it has anything to do with any so-called "political correctness."

What you suggest is precisely what I mean: that Dietrich would have called Katanga something other than "savage" if he weren't black, and that it's a demonstration of feelings of racial superiority.
 

dr.jones1986

Active member
Attila the Professor said:
Oh, you misunderstand me: I don't think it has anything to do with any so-called "political correctness."

What you suggest is precisely what I mean: that Dietrich would have called Katanga something other than "savage" if he weren't black, and that it's a demonstration of feelings of racial superiority.

My bad on misunderstanding what you meant to say.
 

Attila the Professor

Moderator
Staff member
dr.jones1986 said:
My bad on misunderstanding what you meant to say.

It's cool; I likely could have been clearer.

Interesting that they have that line, and Dietrich's concerns about the Jewish ritual, but cut the "donated by the finest Jewish families in Germany" [or whatever that line originally was] in Last Crusade. It's not as though they pulled their punches on book burning. Perhaps it was thought to be too close to joking about the Holocaust.
 

Toht's Arm

Active member
Raiders112390 said:
Katanga is actually a very good character. He's not a crude stereotype as are a lot of minority characters in films like these. Look at the prison warden in 1999's The Mummy - he's portrayed as a stereotypical "dirty" Arab figure, lecherous, crude, smelly and unintelligent. Look at the grubby, dirty, greedy Hungarian Beni in that film, who is the secondary antagonist. The Indy trilogy may not be the most "PC" series ever, but it was filmed not long after the Iran hostage crisis and gas shortage and yet his best friend is an Egyptian (in your average Joe's eyes, an Arab). I'd say that's pretty big for the time period. Sallah isn't the brightest light, but he's also not a stereotype. Marion is a pretty strong female character, especially when you compare her to Willie Scott, who is more akin to the 1930s Damsel in Distress, or even Elsa, who is a pretty stock 1940s femme fatale.

These are great examples, and I'd say they're indicative of a quite a bit of political correctness in the Indy series, actually, from the very beginning. Another reason why I'm not worried about the direction of the fifth film in this regard.
 

dr.jones1986

Active member
Attila the Professor said:
It's cool; I likely could have been clearer.

Interesting that they have that line, and Dietrich's concerns about the Jewish ritual, but cut the "donated by the finest Jewish families in Germany" [or whatever that line originally was] in Last Crusade. It's not as though they pulled their punches on book burning. Perhaps it was thought to be too close to joking about the Holocaust.

Is that true that originally it was mentioned that they were Jewish families donating the treasure for the Sultan in Last Crusade? Do you know what source says this? I never knew that, I always kind of felt they were implying it with the line donated from the "finest families in Germany." Too me it seemed implied that the treasure may have been confiscated loot, possibly from Jews or other people targeted by the Nazis.
 

Attila the Professor

Moderator
Staff member
dr.jones1986 said:
Is that true that originally it was mentioned that they were Jewish families donating the treasure for the Sultan in Last Crusade? Do you know what source says this? I never knew that, I always kind of felt they were implying it with the line donated from the "finest families in Germany." Too me it seemed implied that the treasure may have been confiscated loot, possibly from Jews or other people targeted by the Nazis.

I guess it's not a sure thing, but it's a piece of information that's been floating around forever, aided by the fact that there's a substantial pause in Donovan's line between "finest" and "families," during which Col. Vogel walks in front of him, obscuring his mouth from view.

In any event, if the families were Jewish, "donated" is surely a euphemism for "stolen."
 

IndyBuff

Well-known member
I hope they leave political correctness far away from Indy. I'm tired of everything having to be so watered down and sensitive that we can't say or do anything without someone throwing a fit. Just give us a bloody, rough and tumble adventure!:whip:
 

WilliamBoyd8

Active member
The film opens with Harrison Ford and a couple of children in a sunny forest.

Harrison begins to sing "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" from "Song of the South".

:)
 

Raiders90

Well-known member
Attila the Professor said:
I guess it's not a sure thing, but it's a piece of information that's been floating around forever, aided by the fact that there's a substantial pause in Donovan's line between "finest" and "families," during which Col. Vogel walks in front of him, obscuring his mouth from view.

In any event, if the families were Jewish, "donated" is surely a euphemism for "stolen."

Didn't the Nazis confiscate the gold, jewels and other precious items from the Jews around this time period - before the Holocaust and War, but after the political oppression? It would make sense to me. In Jones' version of the world, it was already obvious that Hitler was planning to take over the world in 1936, and an elderly professor in 1938 knew enough them to call them "the slime of humanity." They were obviously wretched, but I don't know how much Americans knew about what was going on inside Germany in 1936 or 1938. So I have no doubt the "finest families" bit was a euphemism for "Jews"...But that leads the film to a darker place than was intended.
 

Raiders90

Well-known member
WilliamBoyd8 said:
The film opens with Harrison Ford and a couple of children in a sunny forest.

Harrison begins to sing "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" from "Song of the South".

:)

Wouldn't be worse than the opening to Star Trek V. Spock, Bones, and Kirk camping in Yosemite, eating marshmallows, and singing Row, Row, Row Your Boat in front of a fire.*


*I do love Star Trek V and feel it was underrated, but it was definitely a poor opening.
 

Attila the Professor

Moderator
Staff member
Raiders112390 said:
So I have no doubt the "finest families" bit was a euphemism for "Jews"...But that leads the film to a darker place than was intended.

I think, even if I don't know the precise source for the idea that the theatrical release included the word "Jewish" in the line, there's some pretty compelling circumstantial evidence.

A) There's a temporal gap in the line at a moment when Donovan's speech happens to be covered by the Sultan (not Vogel, as I previously misstated) walking in front of him.

B) The Boam script has a different version of this scene without the chest, but the script published after the fact renders the line this way, with a telling pair of quotation marks:

DONOVAN
Precious valuables, Your Highness,
"donated" by some of the finest
families in all of Germany.​

C) The possible alternate interpretation, that some wealthy Nazi party supporters donated their gold and silver for some presumably unstated purpose (you've got to assume the grail hunt was secret), is a touch odd. More likely stolen from a group who, in the Nazi cultural imaginary, were hoarding gold and silver they didn't deserve. (The published script, by the way, says no more than "gold and silver objects of every description." We - or I, anyway - can't see enough of the chest's contents, even on the blu-ray, to say whether there's a menorah or any other object of Jewish significance in the chest.)

D) Spielberg first heard of <I>Schindler's List</I> around 1983, and the project was in some stage of development or another for the subsequent 10 years (often with him trying to hand off a difficult project to somebody else). That is to say, Spielberg's consciousness of the Shoah was developing in these years, and should be quite strong by 1988, when the script revisions occurred. The Stoppard revisions, or else an Amblin revision after the Boam and preceding the Stoppard, are responsible not only for the "finest [Jewish] families" moment but for strengthening the moment between Hitler and Indy, which, in Boam's version, was merely a bit of eye contact. (I think it's an open question whether post-Boam revisions ever contained the Leni Riefenstahl bit of humor, with Hitler stepping back when told to step forward.)

So, assuming the story about the cut word is true, it was a means of tip-toeing away from a clear reference to the Shoah, in favor of either A) a more oblique reference to it or B) a basically contentless/toothless notion of fine Aryan folk giving up their pretty things - in lieu of money - for some unstated purpose. We can call the change weak, but it's hard to obscure what's actually going on in the story.

I leave it to those with interest in the subject to determine whether the change was caused by "political correctness."
 

Udvarnoky

Well-known member
I think Spielberg was always trying to walk a tricky balance with tone where the Nazis are concerned. The audience knows what atrocities the Nazi's committed before and during WWII, but Spielberg probably didn't want to overly emphasize that in what was ultimately a popcorn franchise - a franchise with sometimes cartoonish tendencies where depicting the villains is concerned. And as we all know, after Schindler's List Spielberg claims he's completely incapable of walking that line with the Nazis ever again.

In that light, evidence that he was already a bit sensitive on the subject by Last Crusade makes a degree of sense. I can see Spielberg watching that scene in the editing room and deciding the "Jewish families" line pushed the tone a little too far into territory he wasn't interesting in taking the movie.

It's interesting to examine the methods Spielberg has employed to try to lighten up these movies. I know a lot of people think he was so put off by the darkness of Temple of Doom that he "overcorrected" with slapstick humor (like the mallet falling on the guys head with a cartoon sound effect), creating a kind of tonal whiplash. I always thought he handled that balance pretty successfully though. The slapstick tendencies were established in Raiders of the Lost Ark, after all.
 
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Raiders90

Well-known member
Attila the Professor said:
I think, even if I don't know the precise source for the idea that the theatrical release included the word "Jewish" in the line, there's some pretty compelling circumstantial evidence.

A) There's a temporal gap in the line at a moment when Donovan's speech happens to be covered by the Sultan (not Vogel, as I previously misstated) walking in front of him.

B) The Boam script has a different version of this scene without the chest, but the script published after the fact renders the line this way, with a telling pair of quotation marks:



C) The possible alternate interpretation, that some wealthy Nazi party supporters donated their gold and silver for some presumably unstated purpose (you've got to assume the grail hunt was secret), is a touch odd. More likely stolen from a group who, in the Nazi cultural imaginary, were hoarding gold and silver they didn't deserve. (The published script, by the way, says no more than "gold and silver objects of every description." We - or I, anyway - can't see enough of the chest's contents, even on the blu-ray, to say whether there's a menorah or any other object of Jewish significance in the chest.)

D) Spielberg first heard of <I>Schindler's List</I> around 1983, and the project was in some stage of development or another for the subsequent 10 years (often with him trying to hand off a difficult project to somebody else). That is to say, Spielberg's consciousness of the Shoah was developing in these years, and should be quite strong by 1988, when the script revisions occurred. The Stoppard revisions, or else an Amblin revision after the Boam and preceding the Stoppard, are responsible not only for the "finest [Jewish] families" moment but for strengthening the moment between Hitler and Indy, which, in Boam's version, was merely a bit of eye contact. (I think it's an open question whether post-Boam revisions ever contained the Leni Riefenstahl bit of humor, with Hitler stepping back when told to step forward.)

So, assuming the story about the cut word is true, it was a means of tip-toeing away from a clear reference to the Shoah, in favor of either A) a more oblique reference to it or B) a basically contentless/toothless notion of fine Aryan folk giving up their pretty things - in lieu of money - for some unstated purpose. We can call the change weak, but it's hard to obscure what's actually going on in the story.

I leave it to those with interest in the subject to determine whether the change was caused by "political correctness."

To be honest, even without the script sort of confirming it, I always had a feeling - from the time I knew about the Holocaust - that the "precious valuables" donated from those "finest families" were goods stolen from the Jews living in Germany. Now, I don't think the line was cut for reasons of political correctness, so much as to keep a hint of darkness away from Indy...LC was supposed to be a light hearted romp. At least for myself, if it was explicitly stated to have been stolen from Jewish families, my mind clicks to the horrors of 1930s Germany and the Holocaust...The scene is supposed to be played for laughs (With how goofy the Sultan is portrayed, and the "Tanks"/"Thanks" gag)...Having what would be in essence a reference to the Holocaust or at least Jewish repression, one of the darkest periods in modern history, really changes the intended atmosphere of the scene.

That said, I think the intent is implicit. It's Donovan, who is already shown to be slime, saying it; the way the valuables are handled by Vogel and the Germans, almost if they're "dirty"...I always viewed it long before this thread as being a veiled reference to the thefts from the Jews. Some things are better conveyed by not being expressly stated.
 

Stoo

Well-known member
Raiders112390 said:
Having seen the way Disney introduced elements of both political correctness,a and also subtle identity politics in the Star Wars universe**, I am worried that the executives at Disney will force Lucas and/or Koepp to shoehorn in politically correct elements into the series...
Worried? It's 100% guaranteed.

Nice to know that you've grown up since 2012-2013. (See: Disney acquires Lucasfilm)

curmudgeon said:
When Temple of Doom came out, was anyone complaining about Indy having a "token" Asian sidekick?
No, because Asian characters in western cinema weren't "tokens" at the time.
 

curmudgeon

Well-known member
Stoo said:
No, because Asian characters in western cinema weren't "tokens" at the time.

Maybe it's my fault that I keep expecting people to catch my points without my having to spell them out.

The point is, if Asian characters weren't then, why would they be now?

The concept of this thread seems to be saying that it wouldn't be okay for a hero to have any diverse friends and allies in the new film because they would just be "forced tokens," despite past films having already depicted him as having diverse friends and allies.

That doesn't make any sense to me.

I get that some of the modern political correctness and inclusion movements have been annoying to people, but the series was already (at least a little bit) inclusive. Why can't it still be what it was without people getting up in arms?
 

IndyBuff

Well-known member
I had a film class in college about Latinos in cinema. The author of the textbook argued that the beginning of Raiders was inappropriate because it featured....wait for it...South Americans as the villains at the beginning. Did he expect a few guys from Brooklyn to be leading Indy through the Peruvian jungle? This is the same author who also had a beef with Aliens because he felt it implied that first world parenting was more effective than third world parenting. Thankfully my teacher didn't use the book for much.;)

The point is that some people will look for any reason to be offended or to get on some soapbox about how people should cater to their feelings. I have no doubt someone somewhere is petitioning to have the older films scrubbed of any Nazi references. As long as the allies and villains make sense within the context of the story then I'm all for whoever they use.
 
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