It sure ain’t a peaceful end, but something about the live brain cremation of Cate Blanchett’s bad guy in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull really appeals to Eliza Janssen.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
With the release of the fifth Indiana Jones film, Flicks has been abuzz with talk of whips, menacing rolling boulders…and a whole lot of flak directed at Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Seemingly the last Spielberg-directed Indy film we’re ever gonna get, Dominic Corry called the legacy sequel “one of the most god-awful examples of the form”: Luke Buckmaster ranked it the worst movie in the franchise, saying “the joints of the picture are swollen and achy”.
I look back on Crystal Skull with a little more fondness. Nothing excuses that dumb bit of Shia LaBeouf swinging on vines like a monkey, true, but I kinda dug the nuclear test fridge escape, and the bit with the man-eating ants was freaky. Above all else, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull showed me something deeply, existentially significant: the method in which I most want to die.
The Indy films take great care—glee, even—in how they kill off their nasty fascist bad guys. Nothing can top Raiders’ Ark-ified Nazis, wherein one bloke shrivels up, another explodes, and best of all, pasty bespectacled scientist Lacey melts, eyeballs pouring out of their sockets. In The Last Crusade, traitorous Donovan chooses the wrong grail and sips up a big gulp of instant death, raisin-ing himself in an instant through more sick practical effects.
There is absolutely nothing practical about Cate Blanchett’s CGI-heavy death in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. She plays Irina Spalko, a severe Soviet Agent with a bob and microbangs that look suspiciously similar to Michelle Williams’s hair as Mitzi Fabelman in Spielberg’s most recent, most personal film The Fabelmans. Did Steve see something of his flighty, passionate mum in this villainous Commie character?! Apparently the hair was Blanchett’s choice so probably not. But it’s still wacky and Freudian to consider. Anyways.
Irina, like me and so many other characters from Indiana Jones’s rogues’ gallery, is haunted and humiliated by the limitations of her feeble human state. There has to be more out there to know, to conquer, to manipulate for one’s dark political agenda. Obsessed with using some mystical ancient knick-knack for all the wrong reasons, these baddies are each perfect foils to the all-American altruism of Harrison Ford’s hero—if you consider it democratically fair to just snatch up these priceless artefacts and lock ‘em away in a big US Army warehouse somewhere.
That sinister, yet somehow relatable drive, is what brings her before the towering crystal skeletons that the fabled crystal skull looks so neat atop. Indy, Marion (Karen Allen) and new sidekick Mutt (LaBeouf) defeated, Irina prepares to carefully place the crystal skull onto one skeleton’s neck, only for the head to satisfyingly zokkk into place. From the depths of the Amazonian temple, the inner chamber begins to crumble and spin. The skeletons illuminate, Irina’s mooks getting slurped up into a overhead flying saucer—sorry, interdimensional portal or some shit—just as Indy hustles all the good guys out of the room (“don’t think we wanna go that way”).
Irina, like all of my favourite characters in fables and mythology past, must stay. She’s Lot’s Wife in the Bible or the Greek Orpheus, helpless to resist the human urge to turn around and witness a terrible thing that will doom us forever. “I’m ready!”, she begs the “spacemen” skellies, as their corpses whorl and combine into one fleshier figure: “I vant to know!” With Indy and co. already out of the room, we in the audience know that she is absolutely not ready for whatever destructive nonsense is about to happen. Tendrils of what must be pure, cosmic, awful knowledge snake out of each crystal skull’s eyes and into hers.
By the time her brain is completely consumed by centuries, nay, galaxies’ worth of Lovecraftian things man was never meant to comprehend, her cries of “no more” are pointless. The skeletons are now a singular, dodgy-looking CGI alien: shooting her a mean, eyebrow-less glare, it looks much like Clint Eastwood staring down in disappointment as his son Scott admits he didn’t even make it into the latest Fast and Furious sequel. It’s also been compared to President Joe Biden, but really, whoever the Crystal Skull alien looks like, I long to meet his gaze, too. To feel my brain burn up in a fiery instant of absolute comprehension, before my body combusts into only more ashes for the saucer to slurp.
I’m not saying Cate Blanchett’s death looks fun or pleasurable. There are plenty of movies where the heroes are allowed to victoriously and soothingly die in their sleep, like in Titanic where Rose slips away into the afterlife surrounded by photos of all she’s accomplished and memories of her sexy youthful tryst. But that’s an end for suckers and goody-goodies. While I hope I’m not as egotistical or, um, fascistic as the truth-seeking bad guys in Raiders and Crystal Skull, there is something tantalisingly forbidden about how they go out: in a final, agonising blaze that nonetheless illuminates all of the universe’s impossible contradictions and secrets. Before landing in hell (let’s be realistic here), I wanna know who really killed JFK. What the human appendix is for. What religion got it right. Most importantly, whether my cat knows how much I love her.
I liked Crystal Skull more than the recent Dial of Destiny, and I’m not quite sure how much of that is purely down to this goofy, overstimmed death scene. Curiosity killed the Cate, and I’ll probably still be jealous of how she carked it from my grave.
