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I think Indiana Jones is one of my favorite movie characters of all time. He's just such an incredible man of contrasts and extremes and yet they're completely believable. I mean, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, we join him as he makes his way through the jungle and in the opening scenes we already see that he stands out from everybody else from his hat, the famous Indiana Jones hat, but most importantly, he's much more comfortable than the native people, or at least the local people, are even in this scene. He's just in full control of his element, like this is what he was born to do.

He goes into the temple, he overcomes all the obstacles, he gets to the main chamber, he puts the sandbag in the place of the statue so that he can take the relic, and just when you think everything is working out as he planned, oops! You know, the sandbag mustn’t have been right to the exact weight of the statue and just everything falls apart around him, but that's not the most exciting thing about the opening for me. It's the contrast that's established in the next scene.

It's really masterful how the screenwriter sets up the contrast in the next scene. I mean, from this daring, anything goes treasure hunter, we jump to a rather shy, afraid of all his female students university professor. We presume he’s at some prestigious school in the Northeast, maybe Harvard or somewhere like that. I mean, Indy is so eager to escape the attention of his students that he goes to his office as they all clamor with questions around him, locks his door, and slides out the window. He escapes. I think that’s the thing that all great characters are made of. They have hidden lives and the lives that they show to the rest of the world. It doesn't have to be as extreme as Indiana Jones, but there has to be some kind of dichotomy in the heart of who they are. There has to be a sense that what we see is not all there is to know.

Ultimately, that's what's going to draw us into the story and help us want to go on the journey with them. I mean, I think in our everyday lives we’re all beings of contradiction, aren't we? Like, there’s what we show to the world and what we feel in our hearts. I think sometimes it takes courage to be willing to be vulnerable, is the word that we often use, to really show our truth to other people and to be truly known, and it's only through the process of really showing that that we can be known. So I don't think it's artificial in any way for great characters to represent beings of contrast and contradiction. I think we do too, and perhaps today we feel that more than any other time in history. I mean, we live in an era where we are constantly sharing of ourselves on social media. You know, whether it’s Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or you fill in the blanks, Snapchat, there are so many ways that we can curate and build a persona to show to the world. Is that really who we are? Do we show all our insecurities? Do we face all our fears? Probably not. Are we always the same person, depending on who we’re hanging around? Are we always the same person whether we are at work or in our private lives? 

We as human beings are constantly wrestling between our public and our private selves, and I think that this is one of the truths that great characters accentuate. They model for us the struggle of being in the world and not being of it, of being public and yet needing to be part of something that's greater than ourselves. Sometimes a character can't find a way to integrate a bigger story, and maybe that leads them to give up on life, on their friends, on their dreams. At other times, they get invited into a story that's bigger than they are, and then it really becomes a question of rising to the occasion and pushing ourselves to grow. I think that’s how life works. You know, they say that you are the product of the five people you surround yourself with, the people you spend the most time with. Do you want to spend your time around people who make you comfortable, or in your own life, do you want to surround yourself with people who stretch you? Comfort is maybe overrated, right? We tend to strive for that today, but I'm not sure that that's the best solution.

© SJ Murray, 2018