Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford)

Character Analysis

Indiana Jones: "professor of archaeology, expert on the occult, and… obtainer of rare antiquities."

Translation: This guy would have gotten all of the hot tamales on Rate My Professor.

There aren't many movie characters as iconic or beloved. There's James Bond, there's Jack Sparrow, and there's Indy. Everyone else becomes debatable.

With all that cultural baggage, it gets hard sometimes to look at who he really is, and what kind of changes he undergoes during Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Grave Robber

Everyone knows the general 411 on Indy: He's super-intense; he has a passion for ancient cultures and artifacts; and when he's not teaching kids about ancient barrows, he's out plundering tombs of their cultural riches.

The technical term for this is "grave robbing," which makes Indy a bit darker than people often think. It's massively illegal, for starters, and yet he seems to spend a lot of time on it. (We wonder how he manages to hold onto a teaching job with all of his globetrotting ways.) "The museum will buy them as usual, no questions asked," Marcus Brody tells him early on, suggesting that Indy's activities fall well beyond realm of the ethical.

Bad Boyfriend

We also know that he's a womanizer, and kind of a skeezy one at that. His classroom is full of adoring girls decades younger than him, one of whom writes "love you" on her eyelids. There's also a cut scene in Indy's house, right before Marcus shows up to send him on his adventure, where he's seducing one of his students. If you look closely, you can see signs of it in the existing film: Indy has a pre-opened champagne bottle with two glasses, one of which he's already poured.

That's just a garnish to the main bit of skeeze: Ten years before the movie begins, he loved and left his mentor's very young daughter Marion, hurting her so badly that she now runs a bar on top of a Himalayan mountain rather than deal with the rest of humanity.

Still a Hero?

So for all his heroic reputation, this guy has a serious dark side. "Grave-robbing sexual predator" doesn't exactly evoke squeaky-clean Boy Scout values.

Why, then, do we root for him?

Well, for starters, he's got a yard of guts. Never let it be said that the man shrinks from a challenge, whether it's braving a trap-filled Peruvian temple or taking on an entire Nazi convoy single-handedly. He hates the Nazis, too, which puts him firmly in the Good Guy camp despite his significant personal shortcomings. And he's a smart guy: well-educated and with a lot of practical knowledge that comes in handy when the walls sprout spikes and start closing in.

He likes the money he gets, sure, but he's also interested in getting the things he steals into museums: not hidden in some rich guy's house, but in public view where school kids can come and learn about the culture that produced it. He's Two-Fisted Teacher Man, bringing enlightenment to the masses at serious risk of life and limb. We here at Shmoop fully approve of his rationale.

Always the Little Guy

But more importantly than all of that, Indy represents the perennial underdog: someone weirdly vulnerable in a period where people liked their good guys god-like and unstoppable. When Raiders came out, the James Bond films were in their Late Roger Moore phase, where Bond never broke a sweat and seemed to have the answer to everything thanks to those nifty Q gadgets. Overly muscled ubermensch like Stallone and Schwarzenegger were getting ready to take over the world.

Indy does a lot of the superhero feats they do: escaping death traps, thwarting whole armies, and the whole "rescuing major artifacts from the forces of evil" thing. But, man, do they make him sweat for it. He's always hanging on by his fingernails, running into trouble he can't handle, and stuck in places that no one would ever want to be. And oh yeah, he's afraid of snakes.

The perfect example comes in the movie's first scene, when he escapes that Peruvian temple. He's survived collapsing walls, poison darts, spiders, spear traps, a pair of serious jerks for partners, and a giant pet rock intent on turning him into the world's first archaeologist pancake. He goes through all of that, clutching his hard-won prize in his hands as he finally emerges from the temple, only to find his hated nemesis outside waiting with a tribe of cranky locals ready to ice him then and there. All he can do is run for his life, leaving Belloq cackling like a schoolyard bully holding the idol Indy risked his life for.

Indy finds himself in that situation a lot throughout the film. Not only does it make us naturally sympathize with him, but it gives him a sense of humanity. This is no suave secret agent or unstoppable force of righteous butt-kicking. This is a guy who lives every moment a missed step away from a brutal death (or snakes). We've all felt that way from time to time: like we're up against the wall with no one to help us. And while there might not be snakes and poison darts involved, the effect can be remarkably similar. It makes Indy human and relatable, someone we can seriously get behind, without detracting from the flaws and foibles that might otherwise tarnish his credentials as a good guy.

Realigning His Karma

As a matter of fact, you could look at Raiders of the Lost Ark as Indy's quest to atone for his bad behavior of the past. Think about it: The Ark is just as lost at the end as it was at the beginning, and clearly God didn't need any help getting it away from the Nazis. (Can you imagine what would have happened if they brought it back to Germany and opened it at a Nuremburg rally? Problem solved. Hey, God, why didn't you think of that?)

So why does Indy go through all of this? To heal his relationship with Marion—to realize how much he hurt her and to help her close some of the wounds that he inflicted. It's not an easy trip. He realizes how badly he's screwed up with her early on, when he's about to head off after Abner and cautiously asks Marcus if he "think she'll still be with him?" When they meet, she socks him right in the jaw and verbally tears him apart, which he attempts to assuage by buying her off (three thousand dollars for the headpiece; stay classy, Indy).

Even after he keeps the Nazis from burning off her face with a hot poker, there's a lot of ambivalence, and at the end of the day, the Ark initially means more to him than she does. (Hence why he leaves her in the hands of the Germans rather than cutting her free: Again, that's a pretty jerk move.) He even gets jealous of her at one point, making some snide comments about her dress in the Well of Souls after basically abandoning her to escape on her own.

And yet that slowly changes as the movie proceeds. "You're not the man I knew ten years ago," she concedes during one of their few down-times, suggesting that his jerk qualities may be receding in light of what he's done to her. But the real proof comes when Indy points that rocket launcher at the Ark just before the whole "God kills everyone" climax. "All I want is the girl," he tells the Nazis. He's willing to leave the Ark in their hands because she now matters more to him.

That's what the good guy really does, and over the course of the whole "keeping this priceless artifact out of the hands of pure evil" thing, he learns that lesson. God's got the Ark in hand. For Indy, it's enough to figure out how awful he treated his girl, show her that she's really important to him, and let that long-sought shiny treasure slip through his fingers with a last wistful look back. Indy isn't beating the Nazis so much as he's winning over the dark side of himself: acknowledging it, confronting it, and coming through all of the peril and snakes and scary guys yelling in German to become a better man.

It happens almost without his knowledge, but that's ultimately the journey he takes. Those are lessons worth learning, and the thing that makes Indy far more worthy of our sympathies than all the daring escapes and Nazi pummeling he can produce.