Thursday, June 10, 2021

Well, this changes things...

Yeah, but that's still way too...I mean, it's gross, right? Huh? What am I talking about? Why, this thing about Karen Allen talking about hers and Harrison Ford's characters in Raiders of the Lost Ark. In an interview with Uproxx, Allen was asked about a conversation between Marion Ravenwood and Indiana Jones where it is heavily implied that they were involved in an age inappropriate relationship, years earlier.
What, a couple of years, right? Like, two?
That's not so much a sinister overtone
as it is a crime. Like, an actual felony.
Allen's response to the interviewer's suggestion that the exchange had sinister undertones was:

"Yeah, I guess you could say that. I think I say I was 16. I don't know. That's always what I imagined is she was 16, he was 26. And he was her father's student. And it's left very mysterious."

-Karen Allen, not making
us feel better about that line

Um...mystery solved: Indiana Jones is a monster. The characters' ages are never established but I think we all sort of imagined, or hoped that Marion was at least eighteen, and that Indy was maybe a couple years older, but now we know that Allen was playing that scene as if there were a ten year difference, and she was underage and Indy was in a position of power while working for her father. All of which changes things. 
No, the fact that the two ultimately get married changes nothing.
Indiana Jones still committed a crime, and I'll thank you not to offer
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as evidence of anything other than 
the fact that the series should have ended with Last Crusade.
If a fandom has cosplayers, you 
can trust that they know their stuff.
For what it's worth, actor intent isn't the necessarily the same thing as narrative fact. So I guess we can take solace in the idea that it's not canon. Except that we can't. At all. Because it's totally canon. I checked the Indian Jones wiki--which is a thing that exists--and yup, Marion was sixteen and Indy was twenty-six. Which, gross. I'm not sure what expanded universe material established the particulars of their relationship, but if it's on the wiki, it's probably the result of exhaustive fan research, and if fans are good at anything it's exhaustive research.

Marion's full line is "I was a child. I was in love. It was wrong and you knew it." So in many ways, I guess we probably should have clocked this as problematic a bit earlier than decades after the film's release. I only caught on a couple years ago, but like I said, I'd head canon'ed that she was speaking figuratively. Sure, Indiana Jones is a thief and a grave robber who kills a lot of people--I mean, a lot of people--but why would Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas make their protagonist an actual child predator? 
Of course, a lot of the people he kills are Nazis, so...

2 comments:

  1. To be fair, different US states have different ages of consent, as young as 14.

    ReplyDelete