Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the . . . Kremlin?

As the Guvernator might say, I interrupt Ty's "Cannes-age" with some thoughts from Mark Feeney about that new Indiana Jones movie we watched together yesterday. The movie put my central processing unit to sleep. Fortunately not Mark's.

The most bizarre plot element in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” doesn’t have anything to do with extraterrestrials or the existence of El Dorado or even Shia LaBeouf’s comb-wielding hommage a Marlene Dietrich in “Dishonored” _ all of which do figure in the movie. No, it’s a thankfully short-lived subplot about the FBI suspecting Indy of being a security threat.

How can such a thing be, an all-American hero like Indy, a subversive? Well, this is 1957, and his miraculous escape from a squad of tommy-gun-wielding Soviet soldiers in Area 51 (their presence is the movie’s second most bizarre plot element) raises suspicions. A pair of feds, one of whom bears a curious resemblance to Red-baiter
Roy Cohn, give Indy a grilling and clearly have doubts about where his loyalties lie.

Back in the classroom -- yes, that is New Haven, but Yale wasn’t coed back then, so maybe it’s the Connecticut campus of Hollywood High -- Indy finds himself put on administrative leave because of the government accusations. His dean (Jim Broadbent) resigns in protest. It’s a simple, if clunky, way to balance the hoary Red-menace aspect of the plot with an equally hoary jab at McCarthyism. Not to mention give the movie a slight but unmistakable homeland-security vibe.

The problem is, on the evidence of Indy’s own words, he is a communist. He’s packing his bags to leave when the dean asks him what he’s going to do. First, Indy says, he’s going to London, then there’s a job offer from the University of Leipzig he might well take. Leipzig is in what was then East Germany. Indy wants to defect!

Of course, this may account for Indy’s ability to hold up so well at such a ripe old age through all his physically demanding adventures _ he had access to those drugs the East Germans were using on their Olympic athletes. Not only is Indy a commie, he’s a juiced commie.