What Raiders Taught Me

A few months ago I wrote a blog called "The Collected Works", in which I mused about the size of the body of work I've written over the course of my lifetime. I knew at the time I wrote it that I had, in my basement, several filing cabinets and boxes in which I had many handwritten projects that never saw the light of day, either because they were unfinished, or had been written in my childhood and were ridiculous. But what I decided to do after I wrote that piece was to go through and digitize whatever I could still decipher of my chicken scratchings (winner of the 1989 Rosetta Stone award for questionable handwriting in my senior year of high school, thank you very much), just so I could have some record of it existing in the first place, for good or ill.

What I found as I started to go through and collate the contents of those file drawers was startling. I found several aborted short pieces, and a full screenplay, that were excessively violent and at times just mean-spirited. My style suddenly swung from swordplay and Dungeons & Dragons-variety derring-do to spies, devil worshipers, and more deadly gunplay than any Sam Peckinpah film. It seems that I was always eager to set up simple kill-or-be-killed conflicts, mostly with one person against incredible odds, and require them to slug or blast their way out, with no quarter given.

I'm still in the process of going through all these old stories, but early in the process I started to see a pattern developing, a clear tipping point when my work turned more violent and turned into a series of action set-pieces. It became clear during my attempts to place these writings on a timeline; the most reliable method turned out to be following my progress through my preferred writing process: from longhand block writing to cursive, back to print, then to manual typewriter, followed by electric typewriter. Adding in any recollections I have of where my family lived when I originally wrote them, I found I could usually place a piece somewhere within a year of when it was written. And that sea change came somewhere around 1981, when I was nine years old. So what caused it?

A little background: growing up, I was in what most people would term a "progressive" household. At the dawn of the Seventies, I had a mother who worked, a father who changed diapers, and a strict no-gun toy policy. All of these things, I probably don't need to point out, were turnarounds from the way houses had been run in the Fifties and Sixties. Not that my parents were hippies in any sense of the word, but they took the lessons of that decade to heart and raised my brother and me in a kid-friendly, stable household, with emotional support and a sense of safety.

Keeping this in mind, I’ve realized that my early works fall into two clear camps: pre-Raiders of the Lost Ark and post-Raiders of the Lost Ark. That film, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas's homage to old-time movie serials, was Harrison Ford’s first turn as archaeological explorer Indiana Jones, and came out over thirty years ago, right at the beginning of summer 1981. I remember that I saw it twice in the theater that summer, accompanied by my Dad, who fell asleep midway through both times.

Up until that summer, the most action I had experienced on screen was three years before, when I saw Star Wars for the first time (I didn't catch it until the 1978 summer re-release, so there's no need to call the sci-fi math police, folks). Raiders was a different kind of animal, though. Seeing an alpha male blow his problems away with a pistol that sounded like a cannon, while repeatedly saving a woman who was simultaneously helpless and able to drink a giant Sherpa under the table, must have been more of a revelation to me than Star Wars.

I have to say, this shocks me more than a little bit. And it's taken me all this time to realize how that movie had held such a strong hold on my childhood psyche. I’ve rewatched the film a few times in the last decade, and every time I watch it as an adult, it kind of washes over me without having any effect. I know all the individual shots, I know so perfectly how it's going to go that there's no excitement or suspense. I took this for granted until now, thinking that it was just one of those movies that was so overplayed on HBO back in the day that I just sort of absorbed it. But maybe the fact that it’s been so long since the film had any emotional impact on me is evidence that it’s part of my DNA now.

This recent evidence has now proven that I was hypnotized by this movie specifically, and action movies in general, so much so that it stuck me in a creative rut for the next five years. Looking at my creative output during that time, it’s astonishing how clear my M.O. became: Take someone with no experience or background, and throw them into a life-threatening situation where they have to use violence to escape.

Of course, once I figured this out, I had to go further and figure out exactly why I gravitated toward those kind of stories. Here's the best I can come up with, and it matches up with something else I know about myself. It goes back to the choices my parents made bringing me up. Like I said, there was a no-gun policy in our house, toy or otherwise. And while I don't argue that my parents should have been more active in teaching my brother and me about violence, I think that might be the reason.

My parents were always clear with us that violence was not the answer to problems, and while they let us watch pretty much any TV shows we were interested in, they didn't let us watch old Popeye cartoons for that very reason. Growing up in that environment, I didn't end up having a real frame of reference for the consequences of violence. So when Raiders of the Lost Ark exposed me to it on a level I had never seen before, I don't think I knew how to process it correctly. It's strange; in being somewhat sheltered from violence, I also took a while to really learn the value of life. The pendulum ended up swinging the other way in my later childhood and early adolescence, when I began almost hyper-aware of onscreen violence, and even the dispatching of the most despicable/expendable evildoer would cause me to sympathize with their untimely end.

For a while I actively stayed away from violent material, but eventually the balance righted itself. And don't think that I'm calling out Spielberg and Lucas for making Raiders -- it's solid entertainment and delivers exactly what they set out to accomplish. I just wish I hadn’t taken it so much to heart, and thought it was the only way to tell a story. Still, if it hadn't been that film, another would have taught me the real price of violence, even if it did take me some time to work out. I suppose there are all sorts of issues that people just have to work out in their own time, and this is one that I'm still unearthing from my past.