Through the MASS MEDIA MOVIE HOUSES!!!!
"The latest Indiana Jones movie, in which Harrison Ford's swashbuckling archaeologist battles Cate Blanchett's sinister KGB agent for control of a crystal skull that may or may not hail from another dimension, has ticked off a Communist Party chief in the former Soviet Union. "It's rubbish," Sergei Malinkovich told the Reuters news agency last weekend. "In 1957, the Communists did not run with crystal skulls throughout the US."
Unlike the fascists and cultists with whom Indy tangled in his previous outings, it seems that communists are still around -- and they don't like being maligned. But is "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" really an anticommunist movie? Does Ford's character oppose the theory of a classless, stateless society based on common ownership of the means of production? Or is he instead merely an anti-Communist, i.e., opposed to a single-party regime devoted to the implementation of communist policies in, for example, the USSR?
The movie -- in which Professor Jones is put on administrative leave because the FBI suspects he might have collaborated with Soviet spies -- doesn't answer this question. However, certain clues that have come to light in the blogosphere hint at a surprising possibility.
Writing at the Globe's Movie Nation blog, recently, film critic Wesley Morris noted that when Jones is placed on leave, the head of his department asks him what he plans 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!"
As if that weren't suspicious enough, Alex Golub, an adjunct assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai'i Manoa, points out at Savage Mind, an anthropological blog, that in one early scene, Jones tells a student to read V. Gordon Childe. (Childe was an eminent British prehistorian whose Marxism got him into hot water in his native Australia; during the early cold war, he maintained contact with archaeologists in the Soviet Union.) "Would a die-hard anticommunist really recommend a Marxist archaeologist to a student?" demands Golub.
Indiana Jones -- a pinko? What a cliffhanger! Can't wait for the sequel."
If it is going to be a World War III with Russia, I can!!!!
And have you ever tried to find a copy of Rambo III, readers?
You know, the one where Rambo bonds with Al Qaeda to fight the Soviets?
