Cultural Imperialism in the Film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - Essay Example

 Cultural Imperialism in the Film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom Thesis statement Steven Spielberg’s film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) depicts the adventure of whip-hyping, bonnet-wearing archeologist Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) who burgles into a underground castle, ends sacrificial rites from mad witch-doctors, and learns the old ways of holy gods to accomplish his job. The film is full of racist, stereotypical “Orientals” images buttressing colonial ideas of the pagan and uncultured, a remnant of the legacy that appear in Hollywood films approving colonialism and white cultural high- handedness of America. Introduction American imperialism has always treated the Asian as some kind of cultural savage to be portrayed as behaving suspiciously, the buffoon type with their broken English, and in particular angled, tapered eyes insinuating a wily demon, a type still to be found in a number of current American films too. It is American imperialism of a different sort. Earlier, we were used to accept the term Imperialism as one country controlling another through might and economic control, The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and Gentleman's Agreement (1908), law treating Asian immigrants in America harshly are classical examples where the imperial power could subjugate an economically poor nation by high handed legal power. The history of immigration to the United States and their contribution through succeeding generations of American-born racial groups are indispensable in United States’ social, economic, political, and cultural history .By 1870, a huge flood of Chinese immigrants (8.6 % of the total populace of California forming 25% of the labor force) arrived in the U.S., mainly on the West coast between the beginning of the California gold rush in 1849 and 1882, until the U.S. Congress ratified federal law in 1882 to avert Chinese immigrants from coming in or staying in the U.S. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first important law curbing immigration into the United States of an racial working group, also first in a run of governmental, administrative, and legal acts by the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries s that many historians, scholars consider as racist. The Chinese Exclusion Act was followed by official U.S. government policy that excluded or limited by quota immigration by Japanese, Filipinos, and the whole range of peoples from Asian nations by an agreement called the Gentlemen's agreement (The Chinese Exclusion Act, lehigh.edu). It was an accord between the United States and Japan in 1907 making Japan to end the migration of its workers to the United States and t United States stopping to victimize the Japanese living in the United States. This accord ended in 1924 by the act of Congress ruling out immigration from Japan, as immigration from China had been earlier prohibited (Gentleman's Agreement, multied.com). Academics like Carol Gigliotti consider that all artistic decisions and expressions essentially have a moral implication. Therefore, Spielberg’s action-adventure movie(To critics, like Daniel Griffin, it is more like a pasty Tarzan film rather than an action movie of old westerns genre, or, superhero serials, and war pictures), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is not just an escapist fiction movie but a post-colonial distortion of Indian culture and traditions. So, modern India is demonstrated here as immature, sub-human and crude “reality” forcefully, credibly, and intentionally built by Spielberg (Kotwal, The Film Journal). Edward Said’s definition of the Orient and its relation to the West, mainly Europe, consist s of matters concerning the Settler and the settled. Said studies the upshots of the colonized when the colonizer goes away. He examines the mind of the colonized already looted of its economic, social, cultural, religious, political, historical bases and future potential, in absence of the colonizer. According to him the Orient is the place of Europe’s oldest colonies, the starting place of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its genuine and most frequent images of the Other. Also, the Orient has helped to label Europe (or the West) as its complementary image, concept, character, experiences, it being an essential part of European civilization and culture as we know today.. Explaining the numerous meanings of Orientalism Said says Orientalism is a Western Style for ruling, streamlining, and having the last word over the Orient (Said,78). Images of non-whites as savages have been a strong point of the Western cultures – a culture to which such people evidently needed “humanizing”, even if it was by “dehumanizing” by brutal ways. Colonialism was likewise justified by the idea that the Europeans were only bringing “civilization and culture” to the Asian and African continents, where awful people live in spite of the fact that many of the most primitive r civilizations had originated around the Nile in Africa, the Indus River on the Indian sub-continent, and the Tigris and Euphrates in the Mesopotamian basin ( In the Americas, indigenous Indians were also “painted” as sub-human, pagan and animal -like devils that needed to be educated to build a amicable society, away from the religious hounding and harrying on the European continent. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom deliberately or inadvertently, does the same age-old propaganda of colonialism. It narrates the story of how Indy, abandoned by accident in India, is beseeched by an entire peasant village to get back their lost Shankara Stone, stolen by a group of con occultists at a palace close by. Indy is also requested to save the village's children, kidnapped by those deceiver “Thug”s. Voyaging to the Those thugs’ temple and palace compound, Indy confronts the most murky black magic and then effectively stops the Thug’s coercion of the villagers , freeing the child-slaves. The sub-plot of the child-slaves, needs to be studied seriously as it directly reflects the outlook of Western, paternalism. By presenting the leader of the Kali Goddess cult as a child- binder, the filmmaker contends that Indians are unable to care for their children with pride and concern needing a more caring father( perhaps in the appearance of colonialists), forgetting the fact that it was the same guidelines of colonialism that led to near-slavery (Kotwal, The Film Journal). Paradoxically, even as Spielberg appears to highlight the saving of young lives as his plot’s hidden principle, the violence raises doubt about its usefulness on children’s mind. By delegating Indy with the compassionate assignment of rescuing the Indian children Spielberg does exactly what Maria Fernandez finds as “rhetoric . . . crucial for imperialist projects since it is through such rhetoric that decent people come to willingly support imperialism” (as cited in Taylor, 1994) . Works Cited Gentleman's Agreement-1908, retrieved from http://www.multied.com/documents/Gentleman.html The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882): Brief Overview, retrieved from http://www.lehigh.edu/~ineng/VirtualAmericana/chineseimmigrationact.html Kotwal, Navroze , Kaizaad ,The Film Journal, retrieved from http://www.thefilmjournal.com/issue12/templeofdoom.html Film as Art: Daniel Griffin’s Guide to Cinema, retrieved from http://uashome.alaska.edu/~jndfg20/website/templeofdoom.htm Said, Edward, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon Books, 1978 Taylor, Philip M. Steven Spielberg: The Man, His Movies, and Their Meaning. (New York: Continuum, 1994), p. 108. Read More