So the setting is obviously the 1950s, and this very much is a red scare movie.

I mean, whatever Steven Spiel or whatever innocence he pleads,

funnily enough, the Communist Party of federation uh called for a ban on the

and accused the production team of devonizing the soviet union party officials said in

1957 the ussr was not sending terrorists to america but sending the sputnik satellite into space

Spielberg responded in kind and he said, when we decided that the fourth installment

would take place in 1957, we had no choice but to make the Russians the enemies. World War

2 had just ended. The Cold War just begun. The U.S. didn't have any other enemies at the time.

That's such fucking bullshit. I mean, this is why I don't like the guy is because he says, oh, well, you know, we just had no choice for reflecting the world as it was. And, you know, he has a choice with how he reflects these things in art. You know, he's the most powerful filmmaker of the world's ever known. And his conscious project is to just depict the received wisdom, a certain kind of liberal received wisdom about America

and burnish it.

You know what I thought was very funny is how the film takes the Red Scare stuff up to such a notch

that on one of the scenes set on campus, there's like a student protest going on, but it's

an anti-communist student protest where they have signs saying like

better dead than red and I just love the idea that in the 50s that would have been

happening on a college campus I mean maybe maybe it did but I feel like if if you

listen to you know conservatives especially in the 50s the problem was that there were

too many socialists on the campuses of America's Ivy League schools.

Anyway, I suppose in a certain sense, the politics of the film are kind of non-existent in the way that Spielberg would have us believe.

I mean, the function of the Russians is just to be a generic villain.

And Kate Blanchett plays this kind of, you know, sultry Soviet seductress who does an absolutely

terrible rocking bullwinkle-ass accent, you know, and much of the rest of the kind of Indiana

Jones' stic is still present. So you got, you know, temples full of feral primitives and loincloths,

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