Thursday, March 30, 2006

Indiana Jones as Nietzchean Drama

It's a slow day today, so I thought I'd just throw this one out.

In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the climatic scene has Indy and the evil Thuggie cult leader, and a bunch of his cultist hanging from a cut bridge. As they all climb up the bridge, they throw off the people above them in their way. The cult leader actually deliberately throws off his cultists in an attempt to knock Indy off the bridge and into the alligator infested gorge below.

Is this not a perfect analogue to Nietzche's tightrope metaphor in Thus Spoke Zarathustra? That man must cross the bridge to be the overman, overthrowing all the weak men in his way? And that the weaker men are sacrifices to the pursuit of the overman (much like the cultists are sacrificed to get to the top of the bridge and to safety)? If I made that analogy in my Post-Modern Political Thought class, would I not be really insightful (as opposed to just crazy)?

All I know is that while everybody else was comparing Nietzche to Plato and Socrates, I'm like "no, the real story here is what happens in Indiana Jones." Can somebody say seminar paper?

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