Is Indiana Jones a Communist?

An interesting piece showed up last week in the Boston Globe's "Brainiac" column regarding the political predilections of Indiana Jones.  The bad guys in the new movie, of course, are Russian Communists, and the film has been condemned by the remains of the Russian Communist Party -- which has called for a boycott.

The Globe's Joshua Glenn, however, puts together a couple of factoids from the blogosphere that indicate perhaps the critics need to go beyond the surface to understand the real Indiana Jones....

Details on the other side.

The first clue in the film comes when Indy is fired from his job at an Ivy-looking American university, under FBI pressure.  Questioned by his dean as to what he might do next, Indy replies that he's considering a job offer from a university in Leipzig.  As the Globe's film critic Wesley Morris points out

Leipzig is in what was then East Germany. Indy wants to defect!

As if that weren't enough, a few minutes later in the film -- after an exciting chase scene which culminates in a spectacular motorcycle slide through the university library -- an undergraduate asks Professor Jones a question about his anthropology homework.  Jones replies that instead of reading the author assigned by the student's teacher, he should look into the work of "V. Gordon Childe."  Indy gives the argument Childe has spent more time doing field research than the other author named, and that only in the field can one get a good sense of what is going on.  "Get out of the library," he says to the student.

Now, I took that reference at face value when I saw the movie.  Glenn, however, points out that Childe was

an eminent British prehistorian whose Marxism got him into hot water in his native Australia; during the early cold war, he maintained contact with archaeologists in the Soviet Union.

The anthropologist Alex Golub, writing at Savage Mind, asks the following relevant question:

Would a die-hard anticommunist really recommend a Marxist archaeologist to a student?

Interesting little hidden nuggets in an adventure film.  The screenwriter is listed as David Koepp, whose credits include Spider Man, Mission Impossible, Carlito's Way, and Jurassic Park.