George Orwell once lamented the “decline of the English murder.” In his review of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Benjamin Weiner similarly laments “a sharp decline in the quality of its Nazis” when compared with its predecssors in the series. The film, like the others, involves a daring archaeologist’s search for a powerful ancient artifact—the sort of plot device that Alfred Hitchcock termed a “MacGuffin.”
Here [the magical object is] an Archimedean time machine that [is] also a thoroughly secular MacGuffin. Those of the original trilogy—Raiders, Temple of Doom (1984), and Last Crusade (1989)—were supernaturally religious all the way down. Indy, in reverse order, sipped a healing draught from Christ’s Holy Grail, achieved worldly salvation through the ethereal radiance of Shiva’s sacred stones, and withstood the wrathful angels that came writhing out of a violated Ark of the Covenant.
[The producer, George] Lucas, was big enough to admit the Ark made the best MacGuffin, even though it wasn’t his idea. The inspiration came from Philip Kaufman, a comrade in the close-knit circle of now legendary New Hollywood filmmakers that also included Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola. Initiated into Ark lore as a child by his Uncle Morrie, “a revered Ḥasid,” Kaufman’s fascination intensified when he was treated for mononucleosis by Raphael Isaacs, a renowned hematologist who had also published a “spellbinding” monograph on the Ark as a sort of mystical ham radio.
When, [in the movie] the Ark was forced open by Indy’s nefarious rival, it poured out the spectral horror of unbridled wrath, which was all the more compelling because its Master was the God of the Hebrews and its trespassers were Nazis. . . . The Nazis of Dial of Destiny, by contrast, are products of the Indiana Jones series’ auto-nostalgia.
Raiders grounded its light entertainment in the living memory of Nazi villainy. It was a cartoon but one with moral and historical ballast. By contrast, the convolutions of Dial of Destiny emerge in a moment when Nazism is becoming just another rootless meme.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/uncategorized/14495/indiana-jones-and-the-meme-ification-of-nazis/