raginrayguns:

i know these movies aren’t deep but i just think indiana jones is kind of a cool character. Like he’s a professor, it’s this respectable place in society, but he isn’t really a respectable person. He’s willing to bullshit for funding in the first movie and work for a criminal in the second, he’s pretty comfortable killing people and seems to deeply enjoy violence when he’s winning

Oh one digression: Indiana Jones’ Nazi rivals aren’t shoehorned in for drama, German academics absolutely dominated ancient culture archaeological research in the early 20th century and they were a major vector by which German culture understood history as a series of rises and falls of peoples, nations, and empires

Also, most of the “calipers” phrenology-type stuff was basically downstream of efforts to extract as much historical understanding as possible from human remains before DNA testing or carbon dating

Thinking about female students falling over Indiana Jones as the idealization of “The Cool Professor” and his sexual access to the young as a fringe benefit by Boomers who didn’t even go into academia