Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
1989 · Steven Spielberg · Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on Sightlines
A whip snaps back and opens a boy's chin.
That's 1912, ten minutes into the picture, and before the sequence is finished the boy has also acquired the hat, the whip, and a lifelong horror of snakes. Then the film cuts to 1938 and hands us Harrison Ford, wearing the same scar.
This is the film's real invention, and it's narrative rather than technical: an origin story delivered as a chase. Nothing is explained. A situation simply happens to a body at speed, and what's left over afterwards is the costume. Spielberg compresses a whole iconography into one bravura set-piece, and the hat arrives at the end of it like a verdict.
Deleuze has a word for that, and it's the right door into the rest of the film: the imprint, l'empreinte. In his account of the action-image (the engine of cinema from Griffith through the studio era, where a person perceives a situation and acts to change it), hero and world don't merely meet. They mark each other. The milieu presses on a man until he takes its shape, and the shaped man becomes the only instrument capable of pressing back. Normally that's a figure of speech. Here it is dermatology. The scar is the argument.
Why bring Deleuze to a matinee adventure at all? Because he is the theorist who took the action picture seriously as a form with working parts, and because The Last Crusade is one of the last major films built to that form on purpose, by people who knew the form had gone out of date.
Deleuze calls the version Spielberg is using the large form: Situation, Action, transformed Situation. The situation has to be global, an encompassing milieu he names the synsign, so large that nothing short of a changed world will settle it. 1938, the Reich, Nazi rallies, a Zeppelin cabin, a relic that confers eternal life on whoever holds it. The encompasser here is history with a supernatural cheat code inside it. What finally answers it is one man declining to pick up a cup.
The large form breathes. Deleuze actually uses that word, respiration: the film inhales into vast milieu-space and exhales along the taut line of the action. Douglas Slocombe, shooting his last theatrical feature after a career reaching back to Ealing, judging exposure by eye, gives the inhale: golden low-angle desert, figures small in widescreen sand, the compositional debt to Lean's Lawrence of Arabia carried openly into the canyon approach to Petra. Then a tank comes onto a road and the same landscape narrows to a single line of pursuit. In and out. Almería's Tabernas desert plays the American Southwest in 1912 and the Middle East in 1938, so the film ends up breathing through the same sand twice.
For the exhale to land, space has to stay readable, and that is Michael Kahn's department. His cutting keeps the tank chase and the Venetian catacombs-and-speedboat run geographically intelligible in the middle of chaos: you always know who is where, and what is about to arrive. Deleuze names this the organic-American montage, the Griffith inheritance, in which a whole is divided into parts that converge and meet. It is a form of editing that believes causes produce effects. Very little modern action cinema still believes that.
None of this grammar is new here, and the film doesn't pretend otherwise. Raiders of the Lost Ark built it: Kahn's momentum cutting, Ben Burtt's percussive whip-and-punch sound design (awarded an Oscar on this film, with Richard Hymns), Williams's march. Williams's habit of writing a theme per character and per locale descends from Korngold's scoring for The Adventures of Robin Hood. Even the silhouette is borrowed, Deborah Nadoolman having screened Secret of the Incas and built Indy out of Charlton Heston's fedora-and-satchel treasure hunter. Gunga Din supplied Lucas the comic trio and the humane joking nested inside the imperial romp. Film is a discourse, and this chapter cites its sources in the margins.
The route between set-pieces has its own shape: libraries, catacombs, a rally, an airship, a booby-trapped corridor. Deleuze calls this the vector, the line of the universe, a zig-zag across disconnected spaces where each stop discloses a little more of a situation you never see whole. The serials bequeathed it, and so did Bond, the template Lucas and Spielberg modelled the series on and then made literal by hiring Connery.
The serial also taught the film to trade in marks, Deleuze's term for an object that means by habit: see the hat, expect the man. The comic reversals the film is built on (the biplane, the rats, the no-ticket gag) all work by knocking a habit slightly out of joint.
The Grail is doing something different. Deleuze reserves symbol for the object that condenses a film's organizing relation, and the vessel of eternal life sits precisely where the father's absence sits. Henry Sr. spent his son's childhood looking at a cup. The last of the three trials asks Indy to let it go. One line settles the theology and the family at once, which is why the Grail is not a MacGuffin in the way the Ark was. The trials themselves are the series' design signature working at full strength: penitence, the name of God, a leap of faith, all converted from abstract religious tests into concrete spatial puzzles a camera can photograph.
One image belongs to another regime entirely. When the wrong cup is chosen, the chooser ages and disintegrates. Deleuze's line of slope is the irreversible run downward toward exhaustion and death, and it usually lives in naturalist cinema, not in adventure. ILM does it here with prosthetics, articulated models and optical compositing, a few seconds before the digital era arrived to make such things easy and weightless. Adventure films end with a fall. This one ends with rot, and it is worth noticing how much darkness the picture permits itself in those seconds, four years after Temple of Doom's excesses had helped occasion the PG-13.
Deleuze's large historical claim is that the whole sensory-motor grammar broke after 1945, that characters stopped being able to act adequately on what they saw, and cinema turned toward watching and enduring. The Last Crusade is made forty years after that break by people who know the conventions are conventions. It explains its own hat. It hires the original James Bond and gives him an umbrella and a fussy medievalist's distraction. Deleuze called that awareness a consciousness of clichés and read it as the action-image dying from the inside. Spielberg takes the symptom and makes it a method. Knowing the grammar is inherited, he restores it anyway, at full conviction, with the belief supplied by the father-son story rather than by the relic.
That's the significance. Not a formal advance, an act of preservation performed at the highest level of craft, and a demonstration that the machine still runs when someone gives it something to be about. The prologue's device, iconography explained as spectacle, proved durable enough that the casting of River Phoenix seeded a television series about the boy.
And then the sunset. Four riders, a horizon, a frame giving onto something larger than itself that keeps going after the reel stops. Deleuze calls that the Open: the sense that the closed set was never the whole. The question the ending leaves is whether a form can be inherited and still be alive, or whether this golden light is already a memorial. Watch Slocombe's last frames and decide. Either way, you will see the joins now.
Concepts in play
- imprint (empreinte) — The 1912 prologue retroactively 'explains' the whip, the hat, the fear of snakes and the chin scar in a single bravura sequence: the milieu literally stamps the hero's body and costume.
- action-image, large form — A global situation (1938, the Nazis seeking 'the power of eternal life and taking over the world') presses until a decisive act — refusing the Grail, 'let it go' — transforms it.
- the encompasser (synsign) — Elliot Scott's world of libraries, catacombs, Nazi rallies and a Zeppelin interior, plus the 1938 Reich setting, constitutes an encompassing milieu that calls the action forth.
- respiration-space — Slocombe's Lean-derived vast golden desert (the Jordanian tank chase, the canyon approach to Petra's Al-Khazneh) alternating with the taut single line of the tank pursuit.
- organic-American montage — Michael Kahn's cutting of the tank chase and the Venetian catacombs-and-speedboat sequence, with 'a clarity of cause and effect that keeps spatial relationships intelligible amid chaos.'
- vector (line of the universe) — The episodic globe-trotting route — Venice catacombs, Nazi rally, Zeppelin, desert road, the booby-trapped approach to the Grail — each disconnected space disclosing more of the hidden situation.
- mark — The hat, whip and satchel silhouette inherited from Secret of the Incas, functioning as habitual signs; the comic reversals (the biplane, the rats, the 'no ticket' gag) work by displacing those habits.
- symbol — The Grail, 'the vessel of eternal life,' is 'repeatedly rhymed with Henry Sr.'s neglect and Indy's need for his father's attention,' so 'let it go' resolves theology and family in one gesture.
- line of slope (degradation) — The climax in which the false grail-choosers age and disintegrate, built from prosthetic makeup, articulated models and optical compositing rather than CGI.
- consciousness of clichés — The prologue explaining the series' own iconography, and the casting of Connery so that his Bond persona is 'knowingly inverted into a tweedy, umbrella-wielding father' — a franchise the films 'openly admire and gently parody.'
- the Open — The film 'closes the trilogy on a note of literal and figurative sunset,' the frame opening onto a larger continuing whole.