In “Temple of Doom,” Indiana Jones is force-fed the blood of Kali instead of the water of Christ. A brownface, red-bearded Thuggee bruiser pries his mouth open, and unlike his leap of faith in “The Last Crusade,” none of what happens next occurs of Indy’s own volition. He’s possessed by the Black Sleep of the Kali Ma, so you can’t blame him for getting caught up in the mélange of human sacrifice and off-brand voodoo (in, uh, India?) before his youthful sidekick Short Round (Ke Huy Quan) burns it out of him.
Early in “Temple of Doom,” there’s an interesting scene where a Shaman (D.R. Nanayakkara) insists that the Hindu god Shiva brought Indy’s raft to his village. He believes Indy is fated to retrieve the “sivalinga” (or Shiva linga), a real-life worship object that the movie juices up as one of the imaginary Sankara Stones.
Two characters with opposing viewpoints offer different interpretations of the same event, with Indy assuring himself as much as anyone, “It’s just a ghost story.” That’s easier for him to say before he witnesses the high priest Mola Ram (Amrish Puri) dig bare-handed into a man’s chest and pull out his still-beating heart as the man awaits his fiery lava death.
Not content to stop at children in chains, Mola Ram is bent on total religious domination. “We will overrun the Muslims,” he says. “Then, the Hebrew God will fall. And then the Christian God will be cast down and forgotten.” And, “You don’t believe me? You will Dr. Jones. You will become a true believer.”
Though he invokes Shiva’s name against Mola Ram, and though he confesses the magic rock’s power to the Shaman, it’s not until “The Last Crusade” that Indy really has the agency to choose belief in something he can’t see.
Putting his father’s life in peril in “The Last Crusade” is a sturdy, character-based way to do it. Otherwise, beyond characterization, Indy’s stubborn, anti-Fox-Mulder-like refusal to believe verges on becoming a plot hole. Are we really meant to think that, after everything he’s seen in his weird and wild escapades, Indy’s mind still isn’t open to the possibility of luminous things beyond this crude matter?
In “Dial of Destiny,” Indy reiterates that he doesn’t believe in magic but that, a few times in his life, he’s seen things he couldn’t explain. That’s the understatement of the century, since, among other things, his rich character arc in “The Last Crusade” involves him miraculously faith-healing his gunshot dad with Grail water.
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