"Not Exactly a Knight": Arthurian Narrative and Recuperative Politics in the "Indiana Jones" Trilogy

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas's The Last Crusade culminates as the trilogy's much-belabored hero succeeds in his quest for the Holy Grail. Although Indiana informs the Grail's chivalric guardian that he is exactly a knight, his achievement of the Grail makes him just that-and not just any knight, but the best knight in the world. Indiana Jones's triumph over the Grail Temple, a triumph that, in the words of earlier Grail legends, brings his adventures to a close, exposes the generic roots of all three films.' The tales of Indiana Jones are tales of knighthood, modernizations of medieval chivalric romances in which America stands in for the Arthurian court, the Third World becomes the forest of adventure, and the Nazis or Thuggees function as hostile knights to be defeated in an effort to recuperate and reaffirm America's cultural destiny. While many critics have persuasively discussed the Indiana Jones films as Reaganite entertainment, part of Lucas and Spielberg's attempt to restore the individual citizen's faith in America as the promised land, sanctioned to interfere in the affairs of its neighbors by its divine mission and moral superiority, these critics generally analyze the films as action/adventure stories and thus fail to take into account the trilogy's Arthurian roots.2 Yet, while it is true that the films owe much of their setting, plot, and suspense to Lucas and Spielberg's tribute to the action/adventure serials of their childhood, the films' Arthurian roots are also essential to an understanding of both the films' political and ideological agenda and how they function as story. In particular, the trilogy's Arthurian context informs the way in which it accomplishes its revitalization of what Peter Biskind has called the consensus of the center for a post-Vietnam generation.3 Without this context, most critics proceed from the assumption that Indiana is, like the hero of the action/adventure story, an unproblematic representative of Western culture, a properly constructed subject already interpellated into the dominant ideology.4 Yet, when we place the trilogy within its Arthurian context, it becomes clear that Indiana does not begin as a properly constructed subject; instead, the trilogy, as do all Arthurian romances, uses the process by which Indiana Jones, as hero, allows himself to be hailed and recognizes his place within the structure of the tale's dominant American ideology to affirm that ideology.5