Raiders of the Lost Ark

At the beginning of the Raiders, there is a scene where a bunch of tarantulas fall just underneath the feet of Indiana (I think it was him), which reminded me a lot of the scene in ET, when the frogs jump to little girls feet. There is definitely a problem of masculinity in this movie. Even at the beginning of the movie, Indiana and the bad guys fight over the little statue. I think the statue represents masculinity and whoever gets in is more masculine. Indiana loses the statue and throughout the whole movie he is trying to gain it back. The girl in the movie starts out being very masculine. At the beginning she is drinking alcohol with some guys trying to win the bet, but towards the end of the movie she becomes more and more feminine and then Indiana's masculinity becomes more expressed. At the end he keeps saving her from all the snakes and spiders and then at the end, when she becomes the most feminine, he even saves her life by telling her not to look into the Ark. At the end, I think that Indiana did not prove his masculinity because when they are on the boat she is acting like his mother, petting him on his hair. The scene that should look sexual, does not look sexual at all but looks like the mother is comforting the child.

I also think that in this movie Spielberg is trying to show us that technology is bad. He does that in a discreet way. In one scene, a person in Cairo tells Indiana that the Ark should not be touched and at the end we see that the Nazis who had stolen the Ark, all die because of that. They used their technology to mess with something that old, and something that should not be touched and should be left to the nature.