Maybe There Really Are Five Lights

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but there are five Indiana Jones movies. I grant you I myself have only seen four of them (three in the theatre!), but they exist. All of them. And joking that there are only two or three has gotten tired. I hate Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, myself, but it is a movie that demonstrably exists. It’s there. People acted in it, and there was an Electric Company magazine when I was a kid that talking about its special effects. Saying it didn’t exist would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it?

Don’t get me wrong; I get the impulse. Just pretend it doesn’t exist and refuse to interact with it. Certainly I will accept removing something from canon, which is a slippery subject at the best of times. But even though, say, Star Trek: The Animated Series is the only Trek show fully removed from canon except for like one episode about Spock’s childhood (I told you it was slippery), it’s still part of the extant Star Trek. The show exists, and even Gene Roddenberry didn’t pretend otherwise.

I also get that it’s a joke. It’s just a joke I’m tired of and don’t think is particularly funny. It was much funnier, years ago, to refer to Highlander III as Highlander: The Apology. It’s worth noting that the IMDb page for the movie does indeed establish its title as Highlander III despite the joke at the time that they’d need to remove the number in order to assuage people. So the joke that the movie didn’t exist is at least that old. It was a minor joke even then, not enormously funny, and yet here we are decades later still making the not-very-funny joke.

Besides, if you remove a movie from existence, how can you really delve into exactly why you don’t like it? You come across as more petty and childish, and while I can appreciate not wanting to engage on a deeper level, I do believe you need to leave the opening at least. Take, for example, the 1998 Godzilla, because I suppose someone must. You will not hear me defending it as a good movie, and indeed the first discussion I remember hearing of how bad it was happened in . . . 1998. But it does exist, Gods help us.

What do I have to say that’s more valuable? Let’s start—and we’ll do this with Temple of Doom as well—by calling out its racism. The first scene of that Godzilla is set on a Japanese ship, which you might think is a happy reference to the character’s origin. But we see a guy eating ramen and watching sumo wrestling, presumably because having him watch anime would’ve been too on-the-nose. And there are no Japanese characters with names, which is a hell of a waste of Clyde Kusatsu. Now, you could argue, and you would not be wrong, that such a terrible movie is a waste of Jean Reno, who’s a main character, but still.

You could also point out that a lot of what they’ve decided for movie continuity doesn’t touch what’s generally been shown in other Godzilla movies, and I have less to say about that, having only seen a few of them. I do, on the other hand, know a lot of people who care a whole lot about Godzilla continuity, and I’m sure they have Feelings, which they will tell you at length. In fact, the more people are fans of the movies, the more reason I feel they have to actually talk about what’s wrong with the ‘98 version. The rest of us are reduced to “movie bad!” Which, you know, it is.

Movies can violate canon or be bigoted or just not be very good, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. A lot of bad movies exist. I agree that it’s more frustrating when you love the original work and there’s a bad sequel or similar. You don’t want it to exist. You want to pretend it’s not part of what you love. But you can just do that—you can state you don’t accept it as canon and believe it’s bad fan fic or similar. But no matter what, it does still exist. Just like “Spock’s Brain.”