Steven Spielberg and George Lucas created Indiana Jones in 1981 as a love letter to the adventure serials of the 1930s and 1940s, and the character they produced is the most successful contradiction in cinema. He is a professor and a brawler. He is a man of science who chases supernatural artifacts. He is a careful scholar in a tweed jacket who routinely destroys the archaeological sites he is studying by driving trucks through them and setting things on fire. Nobody has ever questioned this because Harrison Ford makes the contradiction look like a worldview.

Spielberg described Raiders of the Lost Ark as an attempt to create a hero who gets hurt. Indiana Jones is not Superman. He bleeds, bruises, and makes faces that suggest he is genuinely surprised that the adventure is this painful. Dr. Cornelius Holtorf of Linnaeus University, in his research on archaeology in popular culture, has noted that Indiana Jones singlehandedly created the public's image of what archaeologists do, which bears almost no resemblance to what archaeologists actually do. Real archaeology involves patience, cataloging, and brushes. Jones uses a whip, a revolver, and a distrust of snakes.

The Man in the Hat

The fedora is the character. Jones loses it, retrieves it, adjusts it, and reaches for it in moments of crisis as though the hat is the source of his competence rather than a fashion choice. Spielberg understood that iconic characters need iconic objects, and the hat functions as Jones's totem, the thing that makes him Indiana Jones rather than Dr. Henry Jones Jr., a perfectly competent but considerably less interesting academic.

The action sequences in Raiders are studies in escalation. Jones does not overcome obstacles through superior firepower. He overcomes them through improvisation, stubbornness, and a willingness to take absurd physical punishment. He is dragged behind a truck. He is thrown through windshields. He fights a man twice his size next to a spinning airplane propeller. And he keeps going, not because he is invulnerable but because stopping would mean giving the Ark to Nazis.

It Belongs in a Museum

Jones's famous line, it belongs in a museum, is simultaneously his moral philosophy and the thing that distinguishes him from the villains he fights. They want artifacts for power or profit. He wants them for knowledge. The distinction is not always clean, Jones clearly enjoys the thrill of the hunt more than the cataloging that follows, but it is real enough to separate him from Belloq, who is Jones's intellectual equal without Jones's conscience.