Like George Lucas' Star Wars trilogy, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) is a pastiche of and homage to earlier Hollywood movies: Star Wars was inspired in part by the Flash Gordon serials, and Raiders is an attempt to recreate the genre of Saturday matinee adventure serials, the cliffhangers of the 1930's and 1940's.¹ Like the serials, it is episodic, with a quest plot which is the framework for a succession of action set pieces and fabulous stunts. Nevertheless, Raiders does not merely imitate the tacky thrills of the old cliffhangers. It tells the story not in short weekly episodes but in a single feature-length film, and makes use of an enormously larger budget and much better, more “realistic” production values, including location shooting, state-of-the-art special effects, wide-screen color, and Dolby stereophonic sound. The action is almost nonstop, barely allowing the audience time to catch its breath before the next cliffhanger, but executive producer George Lucas, screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, and director Steven Spielberg have also spiced up the story with constant touches of visual style and humor. The visuals resemble as well the slam-bang illustrations of today's action comic books. So what we have is not simply a revival of the serials (the economic conditions and the particular audience for that form no longer exist) but, like Star Wars, a new kind of adventure fantasy, an elaborate entertainment which attempts to allow a more sophisticated, demanding audience to experience the feeling and original impact the serials had on naive young viewers decades ago.²

Apart from its formal differences from the old serials, Raiders is able to transcend the pulpish thrills of the genre to which it does pay homage by being deliberately structured as a monomyth, just like the Star Wars trilogy. Once again, this reflects the influence of George Lucas. As one critic writes, “Raiders is a timeless story about the heroic quest for a sacred object and the conflict between good and evil” (Roth 13). Another notes that Raiders follows “the epic mode of classical myth, the oedipal trajectory of primitive initiatory rituals, and the religious quests of legend and holy writ. … Indiana Jones, the putative hero of Raiders, follows the classical narrative trajectory of the mythological hero as outlined by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces” (Tomasulo 331-32).

The monomythic structure of the film is fairly clear; it follows the pattern of departure, initiation, and return and adheres closely to the various stages of the adventure that Campbell enumerates. Indy receives the call to adventure and leaves his everyday world—in which he is a professor of archaeology—and sets off on a quest to some of the most exotic locations on the globe in search of an ancient religious treasure of mysterious and awesome powers, the Lost Ark of the Covenant. (The subsequent two pictures in the series, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), follow the same mythic formula, merely substituting the lost Shankara stones or the Holy Grail for the Ark.) On his quest for this legendary prize, he battles the forces of pure evil (the Nazis), descends into the underworld (the Well of Souls), and risks his life repeatedly until he returns with the Ark, having saved the world. The pattern is similar to the adventures of Luke Skywalker.

What interests me in the pop culture monomyth that Lucas and Spielberg and their collaborators have created in Raiders is the central object of the quest, the Ark itself. Like the Maltese Falcon in John Huston's 1941 film of the same title, the Ark is the focus of all the passions and violence unleashed in the plot. The Ark is a mysterious, legendary object, holy and hidden. Men will kill for it, for it is imbued with strange powers, a kind of superweapon which can level cities and kill multitudes, like a nuclear bomb. As one character says, “An army which carries the Ark before it is invincible.” In this respect, it resembles the Death Star in the Star Wars trilogy. Yet the Ark is also imbued with an aura of the sacred and the forbidden, which can best be explained by reference to Freud's Totem and Taboo. Freud claims that objects become taboo because of ambivalent oedipal desires, and that the purpose of taboo is to allay guilt and effect a reconciliation with the father (32-35).³

I would suggest that the dual quest of Indiana Jones—for the Ark and for his old love Marion Ravenwood—can be understood on one level as an oedipal quest which enacts ambivalent desires both to rebel against the father and to be reconciled with him. I do not mean by this to imply that Indiana Jones could be said to possess an “unconscious”—he is a fictional construct, a superhero, a character in a fantasy—but that he becomes the vehicle through which the story plays out an oedipal scenario remarkably similar to the one enacted in the Star Wars trilogy (the recent Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, with its father-son conflict, simply reaffirms the oedipal struggle which underlies Raiders and all of Lucas's films). Thus Indy resembles both Luke Skywalker and Han Solo; Marion is the spunky heroine like Princess Leia; Belloq equals Darth Vader; the Nazis are the Imperial Stormtroopers; and the Ark has both the evil aura of the Death Star and the power of “the Force.”

The opening sequence seems at first to be a separate, self-contained adventure, unrelated to the rest of the picture. It serves as a trailer or teaser for what is to follow, a movie in miniature compressing into a few minutes enough action, thrills, chills, and hair's-breadth escapes from death for an entire feature. Raiders begins in medias res, like Star Wars, as if this were Chapter Four of a continuing serial. Spielberg said the idea of the opening was “to grab the audience immediately, to show almost the third-act climax of a movie … in the first twelve minutes” (Crawley 91). But the opening sequence also foreshadows the conflict to come, demonstrating the horrible consequences of violating a taboo object (Roth 14). Says Spielberg, “It is really the end of the Raiders that preceded Raiders of the Lost Ark … Raiders of the Lost Fertility Goddess!” (Crawley 91).

We first encounter Indy as he is near the end of a laborious trek through a South American jungle with two ragged helpers and some native bearers on a quest for some yet unspecified treasure. The natives flee in terror when bats fly out of the mouth of a stone idol. Already, we are in the nightmare realm of the tropical, the exotic, the proscribed, and the taboo. Almost immediately, death threatens: they find a poison dart stuck to the trunk of a tree, a sign that the dangerous Hovido tribe is near, guarding sacred territory. Then, in the movie's first of a long string of surprises, one of the seedy helpers proves to be a spy and betrays Indy, pulling a gun to shoot him in the back.

At this early point in the film, any viewer already knows several things about the hero: he is the strong, silent type, for he has said nothing yet; he is commanding, for he always goes first; he is determined, for he has gotten this far; he acts quickly and decisively; and he is resourceful, intrepid, and apparently fearless. Nothing seems to faze him: neither the stone idol and the bats which panic the superstitious natives, nor the poisoned dart which so alarms his assistants, nor the attempt on his life. He anticipates the dangers and is confident that he can overcome all obstacles. Thus far, our hero is simply a compendium of heroic cliches, and everything in the film is deliberately presented in a bravura, hyperbolic style to make the character larger than life. He is a figure out of a boy's fantasy; James Bond, with his hyperactive sex drive, is a hero perhaps more suited to the adolescent male imagination. The cowardly, traitorous helpers are there mostly as foils to create further obstacles to the prize and to set off the protagonist's potency and heroism.

But Indy is more than your standard hero; he also has a mythical dimension. He is seen at first only from the back, from the shoulders down, or in shadow. The concealment adds an aura of mystery, just as Spielberg initially aroused audience curiosity by concealing the truckdriver in Duel, the shark in Jaws, and the alien and his pursuers in E.T. In one of the most dramatic introductions in recent cinema, we first glimpse Indy's face the moment he turns and, cracking his bullwhip, flicks the gun out of the hand of the man about to shoot him. The face is stern, impervious; he speaks with his whip. Here too is his superhuman dimension. He seems to have eyes in the back of his head: He senses danger behind him and reacts faster than the man with his finger on the trigger. The use of the bullwhip makes his first act, characteristically, one of phallic assertion.

Later we find that, like Superman, Indiana Jones has a dual identity: the mild-mannered professor of archaeology versus the bold treasure hunter. Again, like Superman in the 1979 movie, he is a contemporary superhero, fallible (afraid of snakes), sometimes bumbling, and ironically self-aware (“I'm just making this up as I go along,” he says at one point).

Along with his mythical and superhuman qualities, there is a moral ambiguity about Indy from the beginning of Raiders, as his introduction in the shadows suggests. In his quest and in his costume, he resembles Fred C. Dobbs, the prospector for gold played by Humphrey Bogart in John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948): the fedora, the leather jacket, the dust, sweat and stubble. Both Dobbs and Indy lust after gold to the point of fanaticism, obsession, and paranoia. The difference is that Indy's paranoia is justified, since he lives in a world where booby traps, betrayal by spies, and instant death lurk around every corner. So Indy has the heightened senses and ruthless survival instinct of the paranoid. Whereas Dobbs's mental and moral deterioration was contrasted with the rectitude of his two partners, Indy in the opening sequence seems a positively heroic paranoid compared to his sleazy, treacherous companions. The only moral of the opening sequence seems to be: Never go searching for gold with men dressed in rags. Nevertheless, if Indy is a mythic hero, there is still something at times harsh and brutal about him. Spielberg said of Indy as played by Harrison Ford, “He's a remarkable combination … of Errol Flynn from The Adventures of Don Juan [1948] and Humphrey Bogart with Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. … Harrison can be villainous and romantic all at once” (Crawley 93).

The film seems to be trying to have it both ways about Indy: he is a James Bond-style superhero yet also a sweaty, grubby soldier of fortune, a shadowy, mercenary figure unlike Bond.⁴ Why the complexity? It seems to me that one reason Indiana Jones is presented as morally ambiguous in Raiders is that the activity in which he is involved is always portrayed as sacrilege. Indy tampers with the taboo, and in movie morality such behavior is suspect and carries a price. In the primitive morality of so many American fantasy, horror, and science-fiction films through the 1950s, there were always things “man was not meant to know.”

Indy transgresses boundaries. First, in the opening sequence he violates a sacred temple and steals a holy object, a golden idol, defying all the warning signs. Second, in the main plot, he again ignores the many warnings and braves death to steal another golden idol, the Ark. The first raid is an assault against a mother figure (he penetrates a cave to steal a fertility goddess), the second an assault against a father figure (the Ark is associated with Moses and the Ten Commandments). Indy's trials, his many brushes with death, can be considered the price for violating the taboo. And neither raid is successful, for in both cases the sacred objects are taken out of his hands by more powerful forces: Belloq in the opening sequence; the U.S. government in the closing one. In the end, it is safer not to possess the dangerous totem.

The guardians and booby traps and many forms of sudden death which surround the holy icon in the opening sequence testify to the power of taboo. The cave scene rapidly triggers an avalanche of primal fears and phobias. If one does not get to you, then the next will: fears of the dark and the unseen; fears of being buried alive; fears of cobwebs, dust, and bugs; fears of the body being penetrated, violated, or crushed—bitten by tarantulas, punctured by arrows, impaled on stakes, or crushed by a collapsing ceiling, a descending stone wall, or a giant rolling boulder; fears of falling into a bottomless pit; and fears of the dead—decaying corpses, mummified bodies, and skeletons. The filmmakers seemed to delight in the excess and proliferation of these horrors, which caused me (and, I suspect, many other viewers as well) to react to the scene not with horror but with admiration and amusement, similar to the thrill evoked by a quick ride through an especially inventive house of horrors. Although Raiders uses some of the elements of a horror movie, it means more to thrill with perilous adventures than to shock with overwhelming horror. Nevertheless, I noted that the scenes of greatest horror coincided with the violation of a sacred, taboo object in the Temple, in the Well of Souls, and in the climactic scene when the Nazis open the Ark.

As Freud mentions, the idea of taboo expresses an ambivalent pairing of emotional attitudes: “on the one hand, ‘sacred,’ ‘consecrated,’ and on the other, ‘uncanny,’ ‘dangerous,’ ‘forbidden,’ ‘unclean’” (18). He explains the prohibitions of taboo as a result of emotional ambivalence: the desire to commit the oedipal crime yet the fear of doing so. Thus the taboo combines “veneration and horror” (25). Similarly, the golden idol in the South American temple is an object of worship, yet it is also horrendous, made almost unreachable through a series of elaborate, lethal booby traps. It is a holy object contained in an unclean place: a sort of tomb, a dark cavern filled with cobwebs, bugs, and corpses. The Ark, hidden away in the dark Well of Souls, is surrounded by terrifying giant statues, deadly asps and cobras, and piles of skeletons.

Taboo also “closely resembles the neurotic's fear of touching, his ‘touching phobia’” (Freud 73). Thus in the opening sequence, when Indy finally reaches the glowing, golden idol, he longs to seize it but knows he must move cautiously, for touching it may mean his death. To avoid triggering another alarm, he must instantly replace the idol with a bag weighted with sand. His hands approach carefully, and simultaneously his helper's fingers twitch in anticipation, heightening the suspense (such gestural mimicry is characteristically Spielbergian—recall the mimicry between boy and alien in E.T.). After he grabs the statue, Indy's brief elation turns to panic when the altar stone begins to sink and all hell breaks loose: the ceiling caves in as arrows fly out from slots in the walls. To grasp the taboo object means to risk death. Before he got to the idol, Indy anticipated the perils: don't step in the light and don't tread on the wrong stones. But once he touches the idol, the risks increase and accelerate, and he doesn't foresee the collapsing cave, the treacherous helper, the falling wall, or the giant rolling boulder. The idol is a hot potato that endangers or kills everyone who touches it; it passes from hand to hand, and no one can hold it for long. This pattern is later repeated with the Ark, which is stolen by Indy and restolen many times by Belloq and the Nazis. Almost everyone who comes in contact with the taboo object is killed.

The French archaeologist Belloq, as critics have noted, is not only the hero's rival in the quest to possess taboo objects, but also his doppelganger, or shadow (Snyder 209; Roth 19-20). Indy is American, straight-forward and physical; Belloq is European, devious and cerebral. Indy is grubby; Belloq is impeccably dressed in white. Indy relies on labor and sweat to attain his goals; Belloq lets him take the physical risks, then outwits him and steals the prize. Indy is laconic; Belloq eloquent. Indy speaks only English (at least in this movie), whereas Belloq is master of many tongues (French, English, Hovido, German, and Hebrew). Indy is made to seem crude in contrast to the suave, sophisticated Belloq, who twice refers to the need to “behave like civilized people.” The film plays on American stereotypes of the simple, virtuous American versus the cultivated, corrupt European, since Belloq has allied with Nazis and will stop at nothing to attain the Ark.

Despite the opposite characteristics of the rivals, Indy and Belloq are similar in their moral ambiguity. Belloq recognizes that they are both self-serving and obsessed with obtaining the treasure no matter the cost:

Where shall I find a new adversary so close to my own level? You and I are very much alike. Archaeology is our religion. Yet we have both fallen from the pure faith. Our methods have not differed as much as you pretend. I am only a shadowy reflection of you. It would take only a nudge to make you like me. To push you out of the light.

Ironically, even as Belloq says the above lines to Indy, Belloq is in the light, and Indy, who is ready to murder him in retaliation for Marion's apparent death, is in shadow on the left of the frame. In its imagery of a light and dark side, representing good and evil, Raiders is like the Star Wars trilogy, and Belloq plays a role similar to Darth Vader's.

Belloq, like Vader, represents both the hero's potential evil which the hero refuses to acknowledge and the father figure in an Oedipal rivalry. The first time we see Belloq, he looms above Indy as he steals the golden idol from him, saying, “Dr. Jones. Again we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away.” The same positioning—Belloq above, Indy below as Belloq steals the prize—is repeated in the Well of Souls. There, Belloq echoes his opening line: “So once again, Jones, what was briefly yours is now mine.” As Indy's rival and evil double, Belloq goes beyond Indy in violating taboo. He is a megalomaniac who covets the godlike powers of the Ark for himself: “It is a radio for speaking to God.” In the finale, Belloq commits sacrilege by staging a travesty of an ancient ritual. He dresses like a rabbi of Old Testament times, chants in Hebrew (the language for speaking to God), and dares to tamper with the holy Ark by opening it. When Belloq goes up in flames, he is dying in Indy's place (Snyder 211).

Just as Indy and Belloq are symbolically paired, so are the two prizes for which they compete: the Ark and Marion Ravenwood. Marion, Indy's former girlfriend, is linked with the Ark from the beginning of the quest. To locate the Ark, he must first locate her. Abner Ravenwood, Indy's former mentor, owned the headpiece to the staff of Ra, key to the location of the Ark. But ten years before, Indy had an affair with Marion, Ravenwood's daughter, who was then a teenager, causing a falling out between the teacher and his prize pupil. Indy has seen neither since. Before he begins his quest, Indy has the following conversation with his friend and boss, the archaeologist Marcus Brody:

INDY:
Suppose she'll [Marion] still be with him [Ravenwood]?
BRODY:
Possibly. Marion's the least of your worries right now. … I mean that for nearly 3000 years man has been searching for the lost Ark: It's not something to be taken lightly. No one knows its secrets. It's like nothing you've gone after before.
INDY:
Marcus, what are you trying to do, scare me? You sound like my mother. … I don't believe in magic, a lot of superstitious hocus pocus. I'm going after a find of incredible historical significance. You're talking about the boogeyman.

Indy here sounds much like Han Solo in Star Wars, the man who believes only in his gun and not in the power of the Force, but who will later learn otherwise. What particularly interests me in their conversation, however, is the conjunction of five anxiety-provoking topics which are all perhaps unconsciously linked: Abner Ravenwood, Marion, the Ark, Indy's mother, and the boogeyman. Later, Marion tells Indy that the late Abner “loved you like a son.” What alienated Abner was Indy's seduction and abandonment of Marion, who says, “I was a child! I was in love! It was wrong and you knew it! … Do you know what you did to me? To my life?” Marion, like the Ark, is a prize “not to be taken lightly” and surrounded by taboo (“it was wrong and you knew it”). Seducing the daughter of a man who was like a father to him could be considered symbolic incest.

Significantly, Indy is warned against tampering with the Ark by two good father figures, first Brody and then Indy's Egyptian friend Sallah (father to an enormous brood of children). Like Brody, Sallah warns of the danger of violating taboo: “It was something man was not meant to disturb. Death has always surrounded it. It is not of this earth.”

Marion is so often closely associated with the Ark that the two are almost interchangeable; they are both treated as valuable prizes, objects of barter, constantly stolen and recaptured, passing from the hands of one man to another. Marion's fate is linked with the Ark's. Like the Ark, she is surrounded by danger and hidden away in a remote location (Indy finds her running a bar in the mountains of Nepal); she wears around her neck the headpiece that is the key to the Ark's location; she comes along with the headpiece to Egypt. The scene in which Indy unseals the Ark in the Well of Souls is crosscut with Belloq's attempted seduction of Marion (she too is “unsealed”; Belloq watches in a mirror as she undresses): as a religious taboo is being broken, so is a sexual one. After the Nazis lift the Ark out of the Well, they throw Marion down into it, as if she were its replacement. When they take the Ark off Katanga's ship, they also take Marion. Later, Indy threatens to blow up the Ark unless Marion is freed; again, the two are treated as equivalent. Finally, Belloq tells Marion, “You are beautiful” and says the same thing later about the apparition of a woman who appears out of the opened Ark: “It's beautiful!” Significantly, the beautiful ghost changes into a death head.

Indy's dual quest—for the Ark and for Marion—is a way of repeating his original Oedipal crime and at the same time undoing it. He is both protecting the Ark and violating it, in the same way that he is constantly rescuing Marion and yet putting her at great risk by associating with her. Says one critic, “Poor Marion suffers a great deal of pain in the film (she is bound and gagged repeatedly, slapped around, threatened with a fiery poker). I first thought the filmmakers were indulging some kind of weird SM fantasy” (Asahina 19).

Indy originally violated taboo by stealing Marion; symbolically, he also killed Ravenwood. Now he will break a taboo once again: gaining the Ark will reunite him with Marion and make amends to her and her father for the injury he did them; he will also complete the unfinished quest of his dead mentor. In Freud's theory, one way to see the totem object is as “a surrogate father.” In their relation to it, the tribe attempts “to bring about a kind of reconciliation with the father” (Freud 144).

It might seem confusing that the Ark is connected both with the father (Abner Ravenwood, Moses, the Ten Commandments, the power of God, and the boogeyman) and the mother (Marion and Indy's mother). Yet the totem is really symbolic of both parents; the ambivalent emotions surrounding taboo combine veneration of the parents with the horror associated with thoughts of incest. The refusals to touch the totem or to violate the taboo are intended to reassure the father that the mother will remain sacrosanct.

Indy's violation of taboo is thus ostensibly an act of obedience: he will rescue the totemic object from the hands of evil (Nazi) fathers and deliver it into the hands of good (American) fathers. Yet his deepest anger in the film is directed toward father figures, and the Nazis and Belloq provide a convenient focus for his rage. At one point, Indy becomes depressed and starts drinking alone, believing he has unintentionally caused Marion's death. His depression turns to murderous rage when he confronts Belloq, whom he blames for what happened to Marion, and he is ready to die so long as he can take Belloq with him. And at the end of the film, he rages against the “bureaucratic fools” in Army Intelligence who take the Ark away from him. His repeated anger suggests that the action of the totemic plot, which according to Totem and Taboo is intended to bring about a reconciliation with the father, has not entirely worked out an underlying resentment of authority figures.

As a taboo object, the Ark is viewed with ambivalence as both divine and demonic. It is continuously associated with light and fire—a dangerous light human beings were not meant to look upon and a scourging, destructive fire (similarly, the Grail in Last Crusade can bring healing or everlasting life to the faithful but instant death to the unrighteous). The Ark is first seen in an illustration in an old book; from it emanate rays of light that Indy describes as “lightning, fire, power of God.” Men struck by the rays writhe in death agonies, foreshadowing the climactic destruction of the Nazis. Later, when Marion holds up the shining medallion, the headpiece to the staff of Ra, it is juxtaposed in the image with a candle flame. The medallion lies in the fire that consumes Marion's bar and becomes so hot that its pattern is branded into the palm of the Nazi who grabs it (again suggesting the taboo against touching). He screams in pain after grasping the headpiece, just as he screams later in the climactic scene when the Ark is opened and the Nazis burst into flames. When an Egyptian examines the medallion and translates its markings to mean “honor the Hebrew God whose Ark this is,” the lighted lamps on his ceiling mysteriously begin to sway. In the Map Room, when sunlight hits the crystal on the headpiece, blinding beams of light shoot out, like the rays in the illustration of the Ark. The night that Indy and his helpers open the Well of Souls to reveal the Ark, lightning crackles in the sky. Indy fights with flaming torches the snakes who guard the Ark. The Ark itself is golden, glowing with an apparently sacred light. When it is crated up, heat from within burns the swastika off the crate. And in the climax, a scourging fire melts and incinerates the Nazis. Only Indy and Marion survive because they refuse to look upon God's holy fire.

The fire connected with the Ark suggests the idea of sinners in the hands of an angry God and of fire as ritual sacrifice, which occurs in Temple of Doom as well. The fiery, climactic scene of Raiders, a ritual at an altar, resembles a human sacrifice to avenge a wrathful God. As Freud writes, “the portion of the sacrifice allotted to the god was originally regarded as being literally his food … fire, which caused the flesh of the sacrifice upon the altar to rise in smoke, afforded a method of dealing with human food more appropriate to the divine nature” (33-34). The fiery sacrifice is meant to atone for the violation of taboo.

Thus I would argue that Raiders is not as lighthearted a romp as an initial viewing might suggest. It transcends the old action serials because it is deliberately structured as a coherent myth which taps into the power of religious awe, the occult, and things repressed, unconscious, and taboo. The object of the quest, the Ark, is not merely a “MacGuffin” (Hitchcock's term for the excuse for the action) but a holy icon which the film imbues with a genuinely spooky aura. Raiders has some of the chilling power of the uncanny, and all its humor and adventure help us to accept the breaking of taboo.

Notes

1. Among the 1930s and 1940s serials which inspired Raiders are Lash LaRue, Tim Tyler's Luck, Tailspin Tommy, Masked Marvel, Spy Smasher, Don Winslow of the Navy, Commander Cody, Blackhawk, Zorro's Fighting Legion, and Secret Service in Darkest Africa. On the sources of Raiders, see Crawley 90-91; Scapperotti 49; and Ansen 60. Harmon and Glut describe an incident in the Republic serial Zorro's Fighting Legion (1939) which sounds like one in Raiders: in “The Descending Doom,” a huge skipdrum rolls down a mine shaft about to crush the hero (297).

2. Jameson 116-17 discusses the “nostalgia film” such as Star Wars or Raiders which children and adolescents can take straight, while adults can respond to it nostalgically as a return to the aesthetic objects of an earlier period. On one level, Raiders is “about the '30's and '40's, but in reality it too conveys that period metonymically through its own characteristic adventure stories (which are no longer ours).”

3. There is also an anthropological interpretation of taboo as a violation of the boundaries between such categories as male/female, human/animal, or self/world. See Douglas, Purity and Danger. Nevertheless, I find Freud's psychoanalytic explanation of taboo better able to explain certain aspects of Raiders.

4. During the 1970's, Spielberg had been turned down as a possible director for a James Bond film. Lucas pitched Raiders to him as “better than Bond” (Crawley 90).

Works Cited

Ansen, David. Rev. of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Newsweek 15 June 1981: 60.

Asahina, Robert. Rev. of Raiders of the Lost Ark. New Leader 29 June 1981: 19.

Crawley, Tony. The Steven Spielberg Story. New York: Quill, 1982.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Boston: Ark, 1966.

Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo and Other Works. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 13 (1913-14). Trans. and ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1955.

Harmon, Jim, and Donald F. Glut. The Great Movie Serials: Their Sound and Fury. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972.

Jameson, Frederic. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend, WA: Bay, 1983.

Raiders of the Lost Ark. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Story George Lucas and Philip Kaufman. Screenplay Lawrence Kasdan. Exec. producers George Lucas and Howard Kazanjian. Music John Williams. Dir. of photography Douglas Slocombe. With Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey, John Rhys-Davies, Denholm Elliot. Paramount, 1981.

Roth, Lane. “Raiders of the Lost Archetype: The Quest and the Shadow,” Studies in the Humanities 10.1 (June 1983): 13-21.

Scapperotti, Dan. “Lucas and Spielberg Revive Slam-Bang, Saturday Matinee Thrills,” Cinefantastique 11.3 (September 1981): 49.

Snyder, Thomas Lee. Sacred Encounters: The Myth of the Hero in the Horror, Science Fiction, Fantasy Films of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Diss. Northwestern U., 1984.

Sterritt, David. Rev. of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Christian Science Monitor 18 June 1981: 18.

Tomasulo, Frank P. “Mr. Jones Goes to Washington: Myth and Religion in Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 7.4 (Fall 1982): 331-40.