Taking a Roller-Coaster Ride With Indiana Jones

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Marion (Karen Allen): You're not the man I knew 10 years ago.

Indiana (Harrison Ford): It's not the years, honey. It's the mileage.

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When George Lucas co–wrote "Raiders of the Lost Ark," which premiered on this date in 1981, his intention was to re–create the movie serials of the 1930s and 1940s.

That was before my time, but my parents used to watch the movie serials when they were children, and I gathered from their reaction to the movie that Lucas succeeded in his objective.

Film critic Roger Ebert apparently agreed with them, even though he was born in 1942. Movie serials continued to be made into the early 1950s so he was probably old enough to witness the end of that era — but certainly not its heyday. Nevertheless, his homage to the serials was as entertaining as it could be. I watched it again recently, and I probably enjoyed it as much as I did the first time I saw it.

Ebert wrote nearly 20 years after its debut that the movie "plays like an anthology of the best parts from all the Saturday matinee serials ever made," but he added that "I haven't seen much discussion of the movie's other driving theme, (director Steven) Spielberg's feelings about the Nazis."

Ebert went on to observe that Spielberg gave us his adult treatment of the Holocaust in movies like "Schindler's List," but it was Spielberg's inner teenager who made "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

It was full of edge–of–your–seat adventures from Nepal to Cairo with snakes, spiders, explosions, Nazis — and Karen Allen, who played Ford's sidekick, his best of the series, in my opinion. And it had moments that one remembers years after seeing them — like the iconic scene at the beginning of the movie in which Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) outran the big ball.

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That was in the first seven minutes. After that, no one should have had any doubt about what to expect in the next hour and a half. And what followed was most of the stuff that tends to appeal to teenage boys — primarily action and pretty girls.

It was a roller–coaster ride, from one adventure to the next, each one loosely connected to the central theme of the race between the Nazis and the good guys to find the Ark of the Covenant.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about it was that it worked.

I have seen only a few original serial episodes, but that was probably enough to get a good idea what the serials were like, and my impression was that they were, in a word, preposterous.

I suppose they had to be. The plot, as it were, existed solely to get the hero into some kind of predicament so, no matter how unlikely the premise might be, the viewer would accept it — it was the price that had to be paid to see the hero hanging from a cliff by his fingernails or something like that.

(It is much like the strategy my journalism professors encouraged for prodding a reader to read one's story all the way through. Newspaper readers, we were told then, give — on average — less than half an hour to the daily newspaper, and with so many news sources available today I am sure the average is much lower now. Most newspaper readers, our professors told us, skim the headlines and read the first paragraph or two of stories with headlines that intrigue them.

(My professors told us never to reveal everything we knew about a story in the first paragraph — or the second or the third ... Instead, we should give just enough information for the reader to want to be hungry for more and continue to the next paragraph — and the next and the next. Before they knew it, the readers had read the entire story — even if that had not been their original intention. Well, that was how it was supposed to work. And sometimes I guess it did — or does.)

And, too, I suppose that the serials seem more preposterous to me in 2016 than they did to someone in 1946 because moviemaking technology is so much better now with computer–generated graphics and all that stuff that didn't exist during the serials' heyday. It can make even the most preposterous plot seem plausible.

And yet ...

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Was it so implausible to think that the Nazis would devote all those resources to locating a biblical artifact that may or may not have existed outside of the pages of the Bible?

After all, it is pretty well known that the Nazis sought supernatural support and justification for their cause — and, according to legend, any army that possessed the Ark was invincible. Could the Nazis have resisted such a concept?

It is beyond doubt that the Nazis actively sought any advantage they could get in World War II. The prophecies of Nostradamus, for example, were used as propaganda tools, and we know the Nazis were in a race with the West to develop a nuclear weapon.

Is it so far–fetched to think they might have been looking for the Ark, just as Spielberg and Lucas suggested?

I guess that is a matter of opinion. But the truth of the story was mostly irrelevant because, as Ebert noted, it was "just plain fun" — whether you were a teenage boy or not.

Colorizing Twain

I am second to no one in my admiration for Mark Twain.

There was a reason why, as I observed in 2009, William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature."

On that occasion, I also pointed out that his works had "fallen victim to 20th century political correctness."

"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," I wrote — also regarded by many, if not most, literary scholars as the definitive "great American novel" — was under assault "because of its frequent use of the word 'nigger,' which was commonly used in the 19th century."

In this matter, I have a new abomination to report — and you can thank, of all people, an English professor, who undoubtedly must have spent much time in college studying the great writers and their works.

He doesn't seem to have learned much from that experience.

This professor (Alan Gribben of Auburn University), Julie Bosman for the New York Times reports, approached the publisher (NewSouth Books) last summer with the idea of publishing "Huck Finn" with slave replacing nigger. The publisher will publish the edited version next month.

The professor told the Times that he wanted "to get us away from obsessing about this one word and just let the stories stand alone."

Sounds like a good intention. But you know what they say about good intentions, don't you?

Twain himself said, "Half of the results of a good intention are evil; half the results of an evil intention are good."

Personally, I think all of the results of this particular good intention are, if not exactly evil, certainly influenced by it.

A book like "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is a priceless window into history. It tells of an America in another century on the brink of unprecedented advancement. A gifted writer like Twain can describe the clothes people wore, the houses they lived in, the people they knew, the language they used, and the reader will come away with a clear understanding of what life was like in those times.

Gribben protests that "I'm by no means sanitizing Mark Twain. The sharp social critiques are in there. The humor is intact."

Maybe so, but to change even a single word from the way people spoke in the late 19th century in order to conform to some sort of 21st century notion of political correctness is just wrong.

(Incidentally, the word injun was replaced with Indian.)

"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" has been getting people worked up for more than 125 years. It's interesting, as Hillel Italie writes for Associated Press, that "[w]hen first published, 'Huckleberry Finn' was criticized for advocating bad behavior, for being a 'coarse book not likely to set a good example for the young,' says Justin Kaplan, author of a Pulitzer Prize–winning Twain biography."

As time went by, Italie observes, "values changed, (and) so did the objections."

Now the objections center on the language of another time, the context of another era, because the values of today are uncomfortable with the values of yesterday. Well, that isn't enough for me.

First of all, it is ridiculous, as I wrote in 2009, even to imply that Twain was a racist because a racist word appears in one of his novels. It's like saying that Carroll O'Connor was a bigot because he played one on television.

But, beyond that, I believe it is wrong to tinker with a writer's words. You may not like them, but that is not enough justification, in a free society, to censor them. A writer is an artist. If you're going to change an artist's work, you'd better have some damn good reasons.

The possibility that someone might be offended simply isn't good enough.

To me, it's like that period some 20 years or so ago when it was popular to "colorize" films that were made in black and white. I objected to that then for much the same reason that I object to this unnecessary deletion of an expletive. It is an alteration of an artist's work.

Besides, I'm not so sure that, by removing a word like "nigger" from the book, you remove the tension and the misunderstanding of its application by earlier generations. Obviously, in the 21st century, that word has some very ugly history, but much of that history hadn't happened by the time "Huck Finn" was published in 1885.

It's worth remembering that, even if "nigger" (and "injun," for that matter) is stricken from the book, it will still contain references to homicides, child abuse, substance abuse and other behaviors that most parents probably would prefer their children didn't emulate.

(If bad behavior becomes the basis for criticism, I guess that will mean we have come full circle.)

In his own defense, Twain recommended that those who desire more guidance on those subjects should consult "an unexpurgated Bible" — which never uses the word "nigger" but does discuss murders, fraud, theft and alcohol consumption (if not abuse) at length.