Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) & Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

I interrupted my Rambo-watching to go through the Indiana Jones films upon finding out that one of my friends had never seen them, and in anticipation of finally seeing the latest one next week.

Raiders obviously establishes the formulas and conventions of the series, and one thing that struck me was the Buster Keaton-esque nature of much of the franchise - the stunts get bigger, the fight scenes are full of strange coincidence and props, and Indiana often seems to be caught in an infernal machine beyond his control. The Marion character is being reintroduced in the newest film, a first in the franchise (which hitherto has followed the same pattern as the James Bond franchise by featuring a new girl in every film).

Temple of Doom is generally thought of as the low point in the franchise, and in some ways it's easy to see why. It occured to me, though, that the film incorporates (or perhaps further elaborates, since it's not completely absent in the first film) screwball romantic comedy conventions into the film pretty extensively. This lead me to consider the transgeneric nature of the overall franchise. Based on what I know of the newest film, it adds B-movie sci-fi to the mix as well. Perhaps an argument could be made that one of the ways in which the Indiana Jones franchise reintroduces itself is by shuffling its generic elements?

The movie also suffers a bit from a sort of second-film syndrome, which I see in many franchises of the period (particularly in Die Hard 2), which leads the film to go to sometimes ridiculous lengths to reincorporate and elements in the first film. For example, Indy's famously brief confrontation with a scimitar-wielding Egyptian in Raiders is directly referenced in Temple of Doom, self-consciously reconfigured. This self-reflexivity, I suppose, is part of a process of calcifying what exactly the conventions of a franchise are - as noted in an earlier post, Rambo II, not First Blood is the film which really establishes the Rambo formula. By deliberately invoking aspects of the first film, a second film can be seen as testing the water. Some elements which return in a second film may not return in subsequent instances, but those which to will become the trademarks of the franchise.