Slandered and ridiculed among critics, Indiana Jones and the Artifact of Destiny - the fifth and final part of the famous franchise - nevertheless deals with one of the central problems of modernity: the distinction between fantasy and reality. Set in 1969, the story revolves around Jones' attempts to locate an ancient device - the Artifact - believed to enable time travel. He is estranged from his wife Marion and depressed over the death of his son; he is supported by his goddaughter Helena, while they are pursued by a new generation of Nazis who are themselves in search of the Artifact. The climax of the film occurs when Jones and Helena return to the year 212 BC, during the siege of Syracuse, where they meet the astronomer Archimedes, the inventor of the time machine. Convinced that in America in 1969 there is nothing to return to, Jones decides to stay in the past and live his century in the middle of a great historical event. However, Helena does not give up on him, hits Jones and brings him back to the modern world unconscious. After waking up in her apartment, Indy rediscovers her closeness with Marion, Helena leaves smiling and leaving them in an embrace. The happy ending, however, does not completely hide the bitter implications of the finale. Forced to leave ancient Greece, the hero-professor is now left with a life of broken domestic routine.
The fiercest critical arrows were aimed at the character of Helena (played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who was variously described as strange (measured by classic Hollywood standards of beauty and eroticism) or awakened, the main character who subverts the patriarchal clichés of feminine charm. However, Helena is neither a sex symbol nor a representative awakened the idea of gender: it simply brings an element of everyday opportunism combined with elemental goodness—a touch of what might be called real life. New Indiana Jones it's actually about Helena, a real-world person drawn into the fantasy world of Indy's treasure-hunting adventures.
As a variation on the theme from The matrix "welcome to the desert of reality" - that is, what happens when our protective illusions give way and we face the real world in all its fierce brutality - Indiana Jones and the Artifact of Destiny is part of the recent film trend, with Barbi, Oppenheimer and a miniseries I'm a Virgo, where the heroes move between reality and imagination. After being kicked out of the utopian Barbieland for not being perfect dolls, Barbie and Ken enter the real world on a journey of self-discovery. But what they find there is not some deep knowledge about themselves, but the realization that real life is choked with banal clichés even more than their own fantasy world. A pair of dolls is forced to face not only the fact that outside of Barbieland there is only brutal reality, but that utopia is an integral part of that brutal reality: without fantasies like Barbieland, people simply could not stand the real world.
Oppenheimer Christopher Nolan complicates this idea of venturing into reality. His subject is not only the transition from the refuge of academia to the real world of war - from reason to ammunition - but how nuclear weapons (the fruits of science) shatter our perception of reality: a nuclear explosion is something that does not belong to our everyday life. Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist, led the Manhattan Project, a team founded in August 1942 that developed the atomic bomb for the US. In 1954, the authorities would mark him as a communist due to his association with groups that advocate the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. Although Oppenheimer's attitude was courageous and ethical, he did not face the existential implications of his invention. In the essay "Apocalypse without a Kingdom," philosopher Gunter Anders introduces the concept naked apocalypse: "An apocalypse consisting of mere doom, which does not represent an opening for a new, positive state of affairs ('kingdom')". For Anders, a nuclear disaster would represent a bare apocalypse: no new kingdom would emerge from it, only the total destruction of the world.
Oppenheimer could not accept this nakedness, so he fled deeper into Hinduism, which he had been interested in since the early 1930s, when he learned Sanskrit in order to read Upanishads in the original language. In describing his feelings after the first atomic bomb explosion at the Trinity Test in New Mexico, Oppenheimer quoted Krishna from Bhagavad Gita in his address to Arjuna: "Now I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Although this is the quote most often associated with Oppenheimer, he cited another passage from Gite: "If a thousand suns suddenly flared up in the sky, it would be like the brightness of the Most High." Thus the nuclear explosion was elevated to a divine experience. It is no wonder that after the successful nuclear test, according to the recollection of the physicist Isidor Rabi, Oppenheimer appeared triumphantly: "I will never forget how he walked; I will never forget how he got out of the car... He moved like in a movie Exactly at noon... that walk. He succeeded."
Oppenheimer's fascination Gitoma belongs to a long history of efforts to find a foundation for the metaphysical implications of quantum physics in Eastern traditions. However, Nolan's film fails to show how the evocation of any spiritual depth obscures the horror of the new reality created by science. To truly face the "bare apocalypse" or cataclysm without redemption requires the opposite of spiritual depth: a grossly unworthy comic spirit. Let's remember that the best films about the Holocaust - Pasqualino Seven beauties (1974) Life is Beautiful (1997) - comedies, not because they trivialize the Holocaust, but because they implicitly acknowledge that it is too senseless a crime to be told as a "tragic" story.
Is there a film that dares to do that with the horrors and threats of today? Boots Riley miniseries I'm a Virgo (2023) follows Kuti, a four-foot-tall 19-year-old Black man raised by his aunt and uncle in Oakland, California. Two guardians dedicate their lives to keeping the Box safe, in isolation. Raised on commercials, comics and pop culture, Kuti doesn't go out into the world like that tabula rasa: he is already brainwashed by consumerist mass ideology. Somehow he manages to make friends, get a job and find his love, but he soon discovers that the world is more sinister than it seems - Kuti serves as a catalyst, and his entry into our shared social reality reveals all its antagonisms and tensions (racism, consumerism, sexuality ...). I kako he does that? As one astute critic observes, "don't be fooled by heavy subjects, I'm a Virgo is a comedy full of absolutely crazy scenes". Riley uses the absurd to point out the obvious in real situations. "I'm drawn to great contradictions," Riley says. "The contradictions of capitalism - how it works - will reverberate through almost everything we do."
This is where Riley's genius lies: the combination of two tragic facts (a coiled giant thrown into our world; the basic antagonisms of global capitalism) creates a sparkling comedy. The comic effect occurs because ideological fantasies and reality are not opposed: in the center of the darkest reality, we encounter fantasies. The perpetrators of horrific crimes are not demonic monsters who bravely do what they do - but cowards who do it to maintain the fantasy that motivates them. The Stalinists killed millions to create a new society, so they had to kill millions more to avoid the truth that their communist project was doomed to failure.
Most of us remember the climax in the movie A few good people Rob Reiner (1992) when lawyer Daniel Caffey (Tom Cruise), during the cross-examination of Colonel Nathan Jessop (Jack Nicholson), exclaims: "I want the truth!" - and Jessop replies: "You can't handle the truth!" His response is more ambiguous than it seems: it should not be understood simply as an assertion that most of us are too weak to cope with the brutal reality of the world. If someone were to ask a witness for the truth about the Holocaust, and the witness replied: "You can't handle the truth!", this should not be taken as a simple statement that most of us are unable to process the horror of the Holocaust. On a deeper level, those who were unable to deal with the truth were precisely the Nazi perpetrators: they were unable to accept the fact that their society was devastated by the economic and social crisis of the 1930s, so in order to avoid this troubling insight , engaged in mass slaughter of Jews - as if killing Jews would somehow miraculously restore a harmonious social body. And therein lies the final lesson of fantasy-to-reality stories: we don't escape into fantasy just to avoid facing reality, we also escape into reality to escape the devastating truth about the futility of our fantasies.
(The New Statesman; Peščanik.net; translation: M. Jovanović)
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