Why Indy SHOULD smoke...

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Posted by New Jersey Hughes from h186.n-D1A278.sac.verio.net on October 19, 2000 at 12:27:44:

In Reply to: Harison Ford smokes! NNNOOOOOOOOOOOO! (nm) posted by Indy Andrew Jones on October 14, 2000 at 20:25:34:

Back in the 1930s, virtually EVERYONE smoked. Smoking made you look cool. It STILL does, but we now know it makes you look cancerous and dead, too. Having Indy NOT smoke is sort of like projecting our late 20th Century social mores and ideals into the era of the Depression. It misrepresents the past, even in a fanciful tale like the Indiana Jones saga. Political Correctness didn't exist in 1936; can you imagine if they tried to shoe-horn it into an Indy story nowadays, just to make it more palatable to a modern audience?

Hey, we all know smoking is bad for you, and it's important to teach kids when they're young that it'll shave years off their lives in unpleasant ways. But, and I ask this in all humorousness and in a sense of fun: who in the world uses Indiana Jones as a positive role model? Since when does Indy represent this heroic ideal, like SUPERMAN or Dudley Do-Right? If I may, I'd like to list a few of Indy's more 'heroic monments'...

1. He goes after the Ark of the Covenant, not for heroic reasons (i.e., to keep the bad guys from getting it first), but for personal & selfish reasons ('But the Ark? The museum gets the Ark when we're finished?')

2. He kicks the German mechanic in the nuts when he's not looking, and then proceeds to bite him; Indy fights dirty.

3. When Indy discovers that the heroine is alive and not in a million pieces, he ties her back up for the bad guys, so he can go off and get the Big Shiny Prizefor himself. "I'll come back for you later, sweetie; if they torture you too much, try not to spill the beans, okay?"

4. He shoots a guy in a knife fight (very unchivalristic, wouldn't you say?).

5. He's prepared to shoot & kill an unarmed Belloq in a bar in Cairo ('You wanna see God? Let's go see him together...').

I could go on... Not very 'idealistic' behavior, hunh? Now, I'm not saying any of the these examples are bad; not at all! These are the reasons WHY I personally dig Indy so much. He's NOT some heroic ideal that lights the way. He's a reluctant hero, a diamond in the rough, and I can identify with him all the more because of it (and so did millions of others back in 1981).

If you try to re-paint characters like Indy into heroic ideals, you're gonna get burned when you fins out they're real people, at their most basic level. And you can't let things like Harrison Ford smoking get in your way, either. There's no guarentee that our personal heroes subscribe to the same ideals as us. I mean, if you found out that Ford had different political opinions from you, would that 'tarnish the legend'? Hey, Ford went to college in the late 1960s; would you hate him if you found out he smoked pot in college, or experimented with all the mind-altering drugs that were so common back then?

On a related side note, I remember when Pierce Brosnan started playing James Bond, and he said that HIS Bond wouldn't smoke, since Bond is a role model for young kids, and he didn't want to send the wrong message. James Bond is role model for young kids? Since when?!? So, the message this 'role model' sends to the youth of the world is "Smoking is bad, but misogyny and casual sex are A-OK, kids!"

If Indy's become a role model, somehow, just because he doesn't smoke, then we also need to acknowledge the WHOLE message that Indy 'sends': 'It's Ok to lie, cheat, steal, and fight dirty to get what you want, as long as you feel it's justified. Oh, and don't smoke.'

I think maybe we should let certain people and characters be role models, and let others just be themselves, free to entertain us without having to uphold some bogus ideals we ascribe to them.

As I stated earlier, this is all typed with a smile. :-)


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