If there’s a new Raiders of the Lost Ark movie…
It must be time to talk to your six-year-old about Nazis.
I’m not kidding in the least. The conversation is inescapable. You see, any George Lucas movie is going to have major Lego tie-ins – multiple Lego sets, at the front of the Lego store. Hell, taking over the Lego store. Half a dozen sets, from $6.95 to probably $49.95. The bad guys carry guns, the good guys carry guns, everybody has guns. Every other day, there’s a new mailer with pictures of the new sets.
First, I don’t see how Lego reconciles the Raiders sets with their long-held principles on violent toys. For a long time, there were no Lego guns. In recent years, certainly all the lives of my kids, there were no guns in realistic settings, only in fantasy settings – Star Wars Storm Troopers carry blasters, but there are no guns in any of the “realistic” Lego City sets. Now we have Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is fantasy in a realistic, historical setting, and the Nazis are carrying realistic rifles.
Well, but are they Nazis? The Lego versions don’t wear swastikas. But what are you supposed to say when your six-year-old asks you who the bad guys are in ROTLA? Storm Troopers? Sith? Barraki?
Who are the bad guys in Raiders of the Lost Ark?
They’re Nazis.
Are they made up or real?
They were real.
Were they bad guys in real life?
They were some of the worst bad guys ever in real life.
What did they do?
This was a few weeks ago, and we really did review some of the things that the Nazis did. Six-year-olds don’t really have a concept of the number “six million,” anyway, if anyone really does in this context.
So then, tonight, the little guy is furiously assembling his first Raiders of the Lost Ark Lego set. I had been ambivalent in the past about allowing the purchase, but didn’t really feel I could make too big a gesture about it without hypocrisy. I saw the movie when it came out, loved it, saw the rest of them, saw them all many times, and have fully planned to watch them with the boys when the time came. So today I caved into the little guy’s most desperate desire and rewarded his good behavior with his choice of a middle-sized Raiders set, which has parallelopipedal Indy driving a DUKW and a machine gun nest in a tree with some kind of net. (I dunno about the net – dude gets by the machine guns, you think the net is going to stop him?) The LG throws the set together with his usual proficiency, and then comes up with his next set of Nazi questions.
Little Guy: You know, Daddy, it wasn’t fair at all what the Nazis did to the Jews.
Me[a little puzzled, but can't really disagree]: Of course it wasn’t, LG. The Jews didn’t do anything, they just wanted to live their lives.
LG: Yeah. And also, they didn’t even have any weapons! Just some spears, maybe, and they also made nets, I guess. How did they make the nets, tying vines together or something?
Me[appalled]: Uh, LG, the Jews were modern people. They lived in cities, ran shops, went to work every day, just like our family does. Their children went to school every day, just like you.
LG: Yeah, but when the Nazis went after them, all they had to fight them off were spears, right?
Me[figuring it out]: Oh, no, LG, the people who had spears were the aboriginal people that Indiana Jones was stealing relics from, at the beginning of the first movie, not the Jews. I’m not sure that the ROTLA movies ever really have any Jews in them, just Nazis and Indiana Jones and his friends.
LG: Does the girl have a gun?
Me[rattled, just going with the flow]: What girl?
LG: The one with the spedallion [kind of obvious, when you write it down, but think about figuring that out in context].
Me: The what?
LG: The spedallion. The girl has the spedallion that Indy needs.
Me: Oh, you mean the medallion.
So parts of it are funny, but overall you’re talking about the one completely unfunny topic in modern culture, the Holocaust. It’s not even funny when your beloved LG is making surreal conflations of different parties in the plot, saying things that would be completely hysterical if they involved almost any other two groups of people in any other historical setting. But there it is –
- Nazis are in the movie,
- you can’t explain what Nazis are without explaining about Jews,
- when you explain about Jews the six-year-old mind can’t tie it back to his kindergarten friend Other Little Guy,
- so it’s possible for him to think that in the movie “Jew” might be a word for the people who owned the gold statue that Indy steals.
And there’s the other side of it: Indiana Jones is actually a bad guy himself, even though what he does was sanctioned in the time period of the movie in the name of “Research.” His job, apparently, is to steal anything interesting or valuable from stereotypical native tribes by any means necessary short of deliberate murder – that’s the real difference between him and the Nazis, in fact, is that the Nazis won’t let murder get in the way of their plunder.
Several of the other kids on my street have gotten to watch the original movies lately, so LG has picked up a garbled understanding of the movie from the garbled understanding of the movie that the OLG’s have gleaned from watching it. Their parents, I suspect, had not remembered much about the movie other than a) it came from the guy who did Star Wars and b) it was way, way better than Star Wars.
LG[really angry]: Why can’t I watch ROTLA? [OLG1] and [OLG2] have seen it, AND they’ve also watch TWO Harry Potter movies that were PG-13 and I’ve only gotten to see one!
Me[actually, he watched the start of the second HP and bagged in terror after about fifteen minutes] Well, ROTLA is a lot scarier than those movies are.
LG[understanding]: Oh, lots of guns.
Me[Big nasty Nazi gets propellered to death, nasty science Nazis faces get melted off, Indy almost eats date poisoned by incredibly evil trained monkey] And blood. Indy almost dies a lot of times. Very scary stuff.
With the sanding given to the few sharp corners in the Star Wars franchise when those films were reissued – Han Shot First! – I have no idea whether the ROTLA movies have been similarly effaced. Was it the second ROTLA, or the third, when Indy goes to India? I remember being appalled – as a teenager – by the racial stereotyping of the Indian people in Temple of Doom (is that the one?) I think that it’s fair to say that Lucas has a racial stereotyping problem; Jar Jar Binks wasn’t his first slip, by any means.
LG[disconsolate]: I guess I’ll never get to see the ROTLA movies.
Me: Oh, don’t worry, LG. You’ll see them when you’re old enough.
LG[still disconsolate]: Oh, you mean when I’m eighteen?
Me: No, I think when you’re ten or so.
My Big Guy is almost ten, and most of his friends have seen ROTLA already. The eight-year-old up the street saw it last week. The BG, though, has only recently developed a stronger stomach for the movies, courtesy of Harry Potter and peer pressure; when the BG was still an LG, he had to be removed, screaming in terror, from Finding Nemo, of all things.
ROTLA is strong drink for kids; I seem to recall that it was ROTLA for which the PG-13 rating was created. I remember cheering and screaming all the way through it, which makes me wonder, in retrospect, what my father felt about the whole thing.
