‘Indiana Jones’ and the Proper Use of Handwaves
The Indiana Jones franchise has never been about realism, but it’s always been very good at handwaving small plot points.
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I recently got very drunk and decided to watch Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. These two data points are not unrelated1. Indiana Jones is one of those pieces of intellectual property that I have little interest in seeing continued. I love the original trilogy, am very glad the character exists, but regard it as a kind of perfection—to be clear, the films are not perfect, only the fact that there were precisely three of them. After Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, there was simply zero need to continue Dr. Henry Jones’ story, so I regarded 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and 2023’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny as unwanted and unnecessary. I would have been happy to be proved wrong, honestly!
Sadly, I was not2.
Crystal Skull is pretty bad, but Dial of Destiny is ... better. A solid 2.5, let’s say3. It has some nice touches, it’s plotting is coherent if unspectacular, and they manage to make dragging an 80-ish Harrison Ford back into action almost logical4. One of the big mistakes the latter two films have made is making their MacGuffins kind of weightless—the crystal skull-cum-alien jive in Crystal Skull and the titular Dial of Destiny are both kind of non-compelling, even if you know about their real-life inspirations. I mean, the Antikythera mechanism can detect “fissures in time,” but there’s no indication that it creates these fissures, so ... why haven’t people been stumbling into these fissures constantly5? We’ll never know.
Still, an Indiana Jones film has certain pleasures, even if it’s not great. The character has grown more superheroic over time until we’re dealing with an 80-year old man (Harrison Ford) who can both take and deliver a punch with the best of them6, but Indy is designed as a Johnny Takeabeating type who actually looks worse for the wear when he goes through the mill. And the implication that the world is a place where anyone can make their way via confidence and a solid wardrobe remains as charming today as it did in 19817.
Something else the Indiana Jones films do really, really well is the handwave.
Keep Moving at All Costs
Stories have momentum, and one surefire way to kill that momentum dead is to overexplain aspects of your story. Stopping the action to make sure your audience understands how something happened or how something works is clunky and no fun for anyone8. Of course, sometimes you have to explain stuff to your audience or they riot. Knowing when you have to offer the details and when you’re better off just waving a hand at them to indicate the implications and move on is part of the gut instinct of a writer. The various and sundry folks who have worked on the Indiana Jones films have been very good at it.
For example, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, at one point Indy’s love, Marion, is taken onto a Nazi submarine, and all seems lost. Then! Suddenly! There is Indy, climbing up onto the sub (totally closed up and sealed) as it glides through the water! And then, in the next scene, Indy’s at the villain’s island base. He couldn’t have gotten into the sub, so how did he survive9? Instead of offering us an explanation, the film just shrugs and says well, you know and wave’s its hand at us as if the answer is kind of floating on the wind. There actually was a sequence shot where Indy clings to the periscope as the submarine submerges just a few feet under the water, but this sequence was cut from the release, probably because everyone sobered up just in time10.
Regardless of the balls-out awful solution they almost used, simply not bothering to explain this was the right move. Sure, here we are 40+ years later still pondering it, but on the other hand 30 seconds of Indy spluttering sea water as he—and I must repeat my emphasis here to denote how balls-put awful this idea is—clings to the periscope of the submarine would have been absolutely laughable. Just handwaving this and leaving it to the audience to come up with their own ideas11 was the right move, because it’s just not necessary that we know this information. And we’ve already seen Indy get out of some terrible scrapes, so we know he is superhumanly resourceful and tough, so it’s easy, at this point in the story, to accept that he’s done something incredible, even if we’re not sure what it is.
BOOM There It Is
There’s a fresh example in the most recent film. After diving to retrieve the MacGuffin dial-thingy from its watery grave, Indy, his goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), and her partner Teddy (Ethann Isidore) surface to find the bad guys have arrived, and they’re taken prisoner. Helena pretends to be willing to help the villains in exchange for money, but reveals this to be a ruse when she shows an outraged Indiana a stick of dynamite in her pocket, which she then uses to blow up the bad guys12.
How did she get the dynamite? She was shown handling it earlier, but she’d just been diving, and it’s doubtful the bad guys just left her unobserved to roam the boat. Again, instead of offering us some laborious and supposedly clever explanation for this fortuitous event, the four writers credited to the movie wisely just handwave it—she got the dynamite, no need to worry about how. And again it’s the right move—it keeps the story lurching forward, and adds credence to Helena’s equal status to Indy in terms of general badassery13.
The line between wisdom and laziness when it comes to handwaving aspects of your plot can be tortuously thin, but the way the filmmakers handled the submarine situation offers a clue: Better to write too much explanation and convert it to a handwave later via judicious editing then to write too little and be accused of simply being too lazy to fill in some blanks. I know what it’s like to be falsely accused of laziness, after all, because there are some people who still refuse to believe my general state of pantslessness is a political statement14.
NEXT WEEK: The Killer and pointless competence.
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Not being talked about here is the fact that this process took 3 weeks and involved four countries. I can’t explain, there is too much.
Is it tough being right all the time? Not for me. The Duchess suffers a bit, though, based on her reactions to me telling her how things are all the time. “Choad” can be a term of affection, can’t it?
It is the James Marsden of films.
Could Harrison Ford kick my ass? Sure, but there’s nothing special about that. I’ve had my ass kicked by small children. A whole generation of kids thinks my name is NOT IN THE FACE!
Unless these fissures often span just a few seconds, explaining both where missing socks go when you’re doing laundry and why I’m standing in the kitchen with no memory of the past 12 hours. Okay, maybe this bottle of Scotch explains both just as well.
Seriously: What is Harrison Ford eating?
As The Duchess will tell you, I have a lot of what scientists call unearned confidence but also have the world’s worst wardrobe. They cancel each other out, leaving me without superpowers.
Even if you hire Margot Robbie to sit in a bubble bath to do it.
Theory: He didn’t, and everything that’s happened since in the IJ universe has been a Owl Creek Bridge riff. This explains … everything, really.
Cocaine is a hell of a drug.
My idea? He calls upon the Great Eagles from The Lord of the Rings to carry him to Mordor, er, I mean the base.
I often think the missing ingredient from my life is easy access to dynamite.
There are a few too many CALM DOWN, OLD MAN jokes in this script for my tastes, since I am thisclose to being an old man myself.
Believe me, when I go Full Nude y’all are gonna look back on my pantsless days as the Good Times.