If reviews of 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull made reference to an “aging” Harrison Ford, in 2023 there is no denying that the actor is now old. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny does not shy away from this fact. The film opens by showing Indiana Jones in 1969: We find him clad only in his underwear, awakened in his easy chair by the longhairs partying in the adjacent apartment, blasting the Beatles first thing in the morning. 

Still a bit drunk from what appears to be a nightly routine of solitary boozing, Indy grabs a baseball bat and heads to confront the revelers, who laugh and tell the old man to get lost. Humiliated, he returns to his tenement, where he confronts the reality that his family is falling apart. Outside his apartment building, New Yorkers are enjoying a ticker-tape parade celebrating the moon landing. But Dr. Jones is exhausted by the present.

As Americans celebrate the Fourth of July in 2023, we are confronted by a nation seemingly drained of its past vitality. Jones’s malaise now animates our society at large: We, too, are exhausted by the present.

In both cases—the real America of 2023 and Jones’s life in 1969—our exhaustion stems primarily from the present’s stark contrast with the past. There is some sense that our halcyon days are over, and that they cannot be recaptured. Today, the country grapples with the important questions posed by this fatalism. What is the value of the past? Who, if anyone, has the rightful claim to it? Should it have any role in the life of the present – or does the past have a right to stay in the past?  

These are the issues addressed by Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. While it isn’t a great film, it does offer some compelling answers—answers that can help those of us who sense that the great America that we used to know is taking on the status of an ancient relic.

In many ways, the Indiana Jones series itself is a historical artifact. The first film was released in 1981 to universal acclaim in a much different America. While everybody loved these movies, not everyone has loved Indy. Critics have derided the character as an avatar of western colonialism, an educated cowboy who travels to exotic places, blasts and whips his way through the local muscle, and locates cultural treasures—only to steal them back to the safety (and sterility) of an American museum. Indeed, the screenwriters apparently feel a bit ashamed of Indiana Jones: All five films include characters who level charges that he is a “thief” and a “graverobber.”

But contrary to what woke critics and Indy’s fictional detractors say, he is not a thief or a graverobber. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jones doesn’t try to procure the Ark of the Covenant as much as he tries to prevent the Nazis from doing so, and he protests when he learns that US authorities will simply keep it in secret storage. In Temple of Doom, when he finds that a small Indian village’s sacred Sankara Stone has been stolen by a Thuggee blood cult, he retrieves it and returns it to the people. In Last Crusade, Indy doesn’t want to seek the Holy Grail—he is compelled to do it in order to rescue his father, a grail expert who has been kidnapped by the Nazis. The goal is not to possess the grail, but to keep it out of Nazi hands. When they find it, there is a brief moment where the younger Jones does want to take the cup, but when his father tells him to leave it behind, he complies. Similarly, the entire plot of Crystal Skull is driven by Indiana’s effort to return the artifact to its indigenous place of origin . 

In short, the films don’t depict a rapacious crusader, but rather a man with a deep and abiding respect for the past. Time after time, his impulse is to protect artifacts, to honor them, and when possible, to leave them be. When the situation does not allow them to be left alone, his refrain is that they “belong in a museum.” Woke zealots today see museums as mere storage houses for the spoils of colonialism and war, but that’s not what they are for Indiana Jones. He wants the remains of the past in a museum precisely so they will be protected. 

But protection isn’t enough. After all, the Ark of the Covenant would be quite secure sitting in a locked crate at a secret government facility. The museum is a place where the relics will get the reverence that they deserve. Reverence from whom? Professors? Curators?  No. Reverence from everyone. Reverence from the people. This indicates Dr. Jones’ recognition that if anyone “owns” the past, it is a collective ownership, a human ownership that reflects our shared history. To know our own time is impossible if we don’t understand both how the present differs from the past and how it represents a continuity with history.

Early in the Dial of Destiny, Jones’s partner insists that “some things should stay buried.” This a pithy digestion of the entire theme of the film, which culminates in a moment where Indiana must decide whether he will live in the glorious past or in the present. While the present is less than ideal, making a choice to abandon the past in its favor amounts to a gesture of hope. The future is uncertain, after all. Choosing to live in the present reflects a will to believe that the future will be worth living. Viewers of the film will find that Jones needs a little intervention in order to let the past go—but he does. 

Ultimately though, (re)resurrecting a beloved film franchise—a piece of our shared (pop) cultural inheritance—simply to have an octogenarian encourage us to honor the past by leaving it behind…well, it’s a strange bit of metafiction. After all, if Ford and the makers of the movie really believed its message, they would have never set out to make it. Indeed, for decades Ford himself scoffed at the idea of revisiting classic characters like Han Solo and Indiana Jones. But he has returned to both. 

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This unwillingness to let cinematic history stay in the past is also underscored by Dial of Destiny’s impressive use of computer technologies that “de-age” Ford in certain scenes, depicting him as a younger man around the age he was in the first three films. Again, this is a very odd choice for a film that finally tells us to let go of the past and live in the now. One wonders: with technology like this, have we really seen the last Indiana Jones movie featuring Harrison Ford (or at least his digitally rendered likeness)? New stories featuring a 35-year-old Indy in his prime could be made in perpetuity. There’s a lot of money to be made. Let’s hope Hollywood can learn the lesson of Dial of Destiny and respect the past by leaving that money on the table.

Which brings us back to our present. This week we celebrate the foundation of this nation and our shared history. The great symbols of our heritage have not been treated well as of late. The founding is falsely smeared as an effort to protect slavery. Whether it’s via demands to expand the Supreme Court or calls for abolishing the electoral college, the government bequeathed to us by the Constitution is under attack. Many Americans now see these documents as relics: ones that deserve no reverence, even ones that might need to be destroyed. In making these attacks, the belligerents of our society assert some ownership of that past—they claim the right to do with it what they will, even if that means their destruction. 

The Fourth of July is a holiday where we remember our past, and how our present is an extension of it. By remembering it, we revere it. And while the America that we see in 2023 may never again be what it once was—before the cultural revolution and its assassinations, before 9/11, before the terrible year of 2020—it still belongs to us. That means that while the past perhaps cannot be recaptured, we nevertheless have an obligation to honor what remains, to protect it, and to transmit that legacy to a new generation. That Independence Day remains an occasion to celebrate this nation is one of many ways we continue to fulfill that duty. In doing so, we rededicate ourselves to its legacy, and choose to look toward a shared future in a spirit of American optimism rather than one of trepidation.