#19: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Carl Jung, and the Power of Images

Indiana Jones, looking yoked at the film's climax.

It's become common knowledge that it's best to avoid Indian Death Cults. This knowledge has come largely in thanks to Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the second of four IJ films, and the first in the series' chronology. The film portrays Indian Death Cults as pretty bad things, activities that probably should not be practiced on a regular basis, lest you become like the guy in the picture below, wearing large horns and a shrunken head as a hat.

This film is dark. Extremely dark, in fact. So dark that Steven Spielberg, great director of Empire of the Sun, The Adventures of Tin-Tin, and The Terminal, has all but disavowed it. Nevertheless, we at General Snobbery greatly appreciate its darkness, darkness that does not exclude depicting the tearing out of human hearts and a fat man's consumption of live, slimy snakes. Thus, we give to you a lengthy consideration of the merits of this second Indiana Jones film, as well as an explication of how its horror depicted has had lasting impact on the development of our psyches. 

Just to be sure we got sufficiently pretentious, we entreat considerations of Carl Gustav Jung, Swiss psychologist/sage, explicating his theories on the power of images. We are certain that Jung, plagued by dark images as he was during his years of writing the Liber Novus, would have appreciated this film. We hope that you appreciate it as well, listener, and we thank you, as always, for joining us on this snobbing journey.

Malo Ram, wielding the heart of the poor human sacrifice in the background.