Today I responded to a gag on Bluesky which said that it was insane to make the new Indiana Jones game first person, since a huge part of the appeal of Indiana Jones was looking at Harrison Ford shirtless with a whip.
“Ah yes ha ha I can relate to this as part of my shared experience as a gay man,” I thought as I nodded and smiled along in… wait hang on! Have I been wrong about the Indiana Jones franchise my entire life?!
Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of my top 5 favorite movies, easily, and is usually what I’ll say if you ask me point blank what my all-time favorite is. I’ve seen it an awful lot. I had the poster for Raiders on the wall of my bedroom, the one with Indy in the center, cracking his bullwhip, his shirt half open. I also had the teaser poster for Temple of Doom on my wall for a while, the one with Indy standing in an archway with half his shirt missing.
I never thought much about how much of the imagery of Indiana Jones is bare-chested. Actually, that’s a complete lie; I thought about it a lot. What I mean to say is that I never thought much about the implications of it.
After all, these are some of the most heterosexual movies ever made, right? Not like Roadhouse or Commando by trying so hard to prove that they’re heterosexual; the Indiana Jones movies always felt super-straight to me because they didn’t have anything to prove. These are action movies all about recreating a long-lost archetype of a Man’s Man from the early 20th century. Women want him; men want to be him — and if the connection weren’t obvious enough, they made it explicit by casting Sean Connery1Even though he’s cleverly cast against type as his dad. And even though the second movie started with a fabulous musical number, it felt less like a musical number than like a man going out of his way to look at his hot new girlfriend in a tight dress.
I’m so used to things being “queer-coded” — whether it’s secret messages hidden in a work by sly artists speaking to a subsection of their audience, or oblivious artists making art that queer people will spend the next several decades furiously re-contextualizing and reinterpreting. I always just assume by default that I’m watching or reading any work “the wrong way,” appreciating things that the filmmakers never intended.
But now that I think about it, I’m no longer sure it was unintentional. The thing that’s become abundantly clear is that the Indiana Jones movies are super horny, and they’re super horny exclusively for Indiana Jones. And although I’m sure they exist, I can’t personally recall ever hearing a woman name anything in the franchise as their favorite movie. But tons of men do. So we have a group of heterosexual directors, writers, and actors all working to make a film franchise for men that’s about how impossibly sexy the male lead character is.
That’s not to say that women don’t enjoy it, of course. I still remember seeing Raiders for the first time as a middle school birthday party. Our chaperone, a young woman in her 20s, was silent throughout, until the scene in which Indy gets off a submarine, punches out a Nazi, and takes his hat. At which point she said, out loud, “He’s so fine!”
I’d even say that the spark of the movies directly correlates to how sexy Harrison Ford can be. Crystal Skull has a lot of issues, but I think the bulk of it comes down to the feeling of being a kid watching your parents at a dinner party with a bunch of other grown-ups. And Dial of Destiny kind of drives the point home with its extended opening sequence saying “remember when Harrison Ford used to be impossibly hot?” I read an interview that said he insisted that he appear in his underwear after the extended flashback, to drive home the idea of how much Indy (and he) had aged. And I respect that a lot, especially for a movie that is primarily about regret and vainly wanting to turn back the clock. But it’s an entirely different vibe from the earlier movies.
None of this is at all unprecedented, either. I can still remember seeing an interview with Robert Conrad as a retrospective of The Wild Wild West, in which he made a joke about how the producers of the show were always putting him into impossibly tight pants.
My conclusion from all this is that I should be less hung up about target audiences and whether or not I fit. There is a long tradition in commercial entertainment in making money off of attractive people looking sexy and doing exciting things while looking sexy. It was happening long before anybody started over-analyzing it, and before anybody realized how much money you could make by having stuff explicitly marketed towards queer people with disposable income.
The entertainment industry has never cared whether I was watching stuff “the right way.” They only cared that I was watching it.
I kind of prefer to think that I wasn’t alone in some weird silo watching Indiana Jones cracking his whip at Nazis2Or every character, male or female, in all of Bull Durham and swooning that he was cracking that whip for me. Or even finding community from other gay kids whose formative movie-watching years were in the early 80s, like how I discovered so many other guys who vividly remember the scenes in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? when Eddie Valiant had his shirt off. That’s all fine and good, but it’s somehow even more comforting to think that all of us were part of an even larger community, transcending gender and orientation, all sharing the universal human experience of being super horny for Indiana Jones.