When Indiana Jones (played by Harrison Ford) first strode into the Peruvian rainforest in 1936, at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), it was clear even to a little kid that he had the coolest job on earth. In the breaks between terms teaching archaeology at a US university, Indy donned a fedora, brandished a bullwhip and travelled the world, saving treasures from greedy thieves and mythology-obsessed Nazis.
He could ride horses, outrun collapsing temples and identify priceless historical objects at a single glance. He was an intellectual superhero; learned, gruff, fearless and driven by a sense of what was right. He had to have some sort of human vulnerability, so he was scared of snakes. Was that a bit Freudian? A psychoanalyst might note that he also had a scratchy relationship with his father.
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By the time of the third film, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Indy had me. Aged 11, I sat in a muddy ditch somewhere in the home counties, picking out broken bits of pottery and animal bones which all of us in the Young Archaeologists' Club fervently hoped might be ancient. It rained. We found nothing. Didn't matter. It was magical. The villains on this occasion weren't the Nazis, but some suits who wanted to plonk a supermarket on the remains of this Roman site. We had just three weeks before they were going to concrete over the entire thing. Fired up with righteous anger at these vandals, I brushed away the mud from another chicken bone. "This belongs in a museum," I growled to the other kids, with hindsight perhaps overestimating its value.
Of course I wanted to be Indiana Jones. I didn't know that the gender police would get in the way of this fantasy one day – it was the 1980s, when all kids wore dungarees, climbed trees and hurled themselves regularly into the mud.
Anyway, the women around Indiana Jones were of a squawky, useless variety with whom no self-respecting 11-year-old girl could have any truck. Marion (Karen Allen) in Raiders had some gumption but was prone to being kidnapped, distracting Indy from his important job of saving historical objects.
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The nadir was Willie, the shrieking blonde caricature of a harridan played by Kate Capshaw in the second film, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. There is no way a man as smart and tough as Indiana Jones would go for a woman as ghastly and frivolous as Willie. Oh, all right, there probably is. But his affair with her undermined his character. It made him look like a chump.
In fact, the whole of Temple of Doom made Indy look like a chump, played as the film was for witless slapstick and comedy racism. There is one brief moment of joy when Willie is covered in crawling, slithering bugs. But for me, even as a kid, the only canonical movies were Raiders and the rollickingly enjoyable Last Crusade. The much later fourth film is not spoken of in my household, and if you mention it by name a gigantic boulder rumbles down the hallway and squashes you. The definitive Indy is the Indy of Raiders: defiant, laconic, weatherbeaten, quick-witted and imperturbable, caring nothing for himself and everything for historical truth and justice.
Indiana Jones is, to a considerable extent, the reason I became a historian. There are fewer explosions and Nazis (except as subjects) – but the job does involve a lot of travel and fighting to get your hands on historical evidence before it crumbles, is stolen or gets shredded. I have been known to wear a fedora. Don't judge. It keeps the sun off your nose when you're climbing Mayan temples, and adds a certain butch gravitas. I stop short of the bullwhip. Most of the time.
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