Over the years, I’ve tried, with middling success, to explain to folks just how important and influential Raiders of the Lost Ark was for me. It dropped into my wheelhouse as I was turning the corner on adolescence, at a time when there was no Internet, no Netflix, no YouTube, none of that crap. If you wanted to know more about any given subject, you had to read about it. In books, or magazines. Thank God for Starlog!
As a 12-year-old geek in his larval stage, Raiders forever altered my course in ways that I’ve noted over the years, but until I sat down and started trying to backtrack my influences, I didn’t realize what a tangled mess it all is. That was an illuminating and sobering exercise. I stopped trying to map my Neural Geek Pathways when I got to larger tentpole topics, existing interests, and newer obsessions, because I had to draw the line somewhere.
That’s how I was back then (okay, still am). When I get interested in something, I want to know everything! So, in the case of Raiders, specifically, I watched the television special about the stuntmen who worked on the film, and I read every interview I could find with Spielberg, Lucas, and Lawrence Kasdan. I read the novelization. I collected magazines, bubble gum cards–anything I could get my hands on that had behind-the-scenes information that I could use to decode the formula of how someone could come up with a modern-day whip wielding archeologist who fought Nazis and played with monkeys. You can see how that would appeal to just about anyone, right?
And don’t get me started on my film theory that Raiders is the first post-modern film; a movie about a type of movie or genre, rather than the movie unto itself. It’s a conversation between the filmmakers and the audience, wherein they tell you what they liked about the genre by including representative scenes and themes into their movie, and also discuss and even mitigate the things that they don’t like, such as changing Marion from a damsel in distress to a woman who does not go willingly into the night as a MacGuffin for the hero to save.
I submit to you that because we had Raiders of the Lost Ark, we also got Kill Bill, Inglorious Basterds, and now Django Unchained. I’ll go into it later, one of these days, when I have the time. But it’s a great theory and it explains why the first film is so different from all of the sequels.
For decades, I’ve tried to explain it to people, and they would just nod, politely, and reply, “Well, MY favorite movie is blah-blah-blah.” No, you don’t GET it, I’ve thought more about this film and its antecedents and influences than I have any other film including Star Wars. It’s not my favorite movie because, well, I just like it, and stuff. It’s a part of my creative DNA in ways that still resonate with me to this day.
Because of Raiders, I created “The Blue Menace Mysteries” courtesy of the Violet Crown Radio Players. Sam Bowen from Clockwork Storybook owes so much to Indiana Jones. Every 1930s pulp-era Role-Playing Game session I ever ran was informed by the way Lawrence Kasdan chose to write the screenplay to Raiders. I write action scenes cinematically, a la Raiders (and Robert E. Howard, of course) and most of the tough guy dialogue that my characters say is usually, in my head, some variation on Harrison Ford’s delivery of nearly all of his lines in the movie. “I don’t know, I’m making this up as I go” and “Not much, just you,” and of course, “Ah hah hah ha haaaa…sonofabitch….” remain some of my favorite lines in the movie. Anything I write in first person is pretty much narrated by Ford in my head.
It’s all there, and so much more. I made this flowchart so you could really see and understand. It’s not my fault I’m like this. Raiders of the Lost Ark made me this way.
