All this is pretty easy to read if you pay attention to the movies, which, combined with Indy’s enormous popularity, makes him the perfect example to talk character building.

Essentially, characters need to be relatable, compelling, and variable. These are just three words I made up to help myself. You may hear them by other names, but the point is that they summarize the basic elements a fictional person needs to have in order to look like something other than a cardboard cutout.

In the case of larger-than-life figures like Indy, the compelling part is the easiest one to get out of the way. He’s an archeology professor that lives a second life as a treasure hunter, both a brainy scholar and a daring adventurer. This is the superficial side of the character. What makes him engaging for the audience. The profile that sets him apart from others. I like to think of it as a newspaper headline: it summarizes in one line what makes the character unique, piquing your interest in what his role might be in the story.

The relatable aspect is what makes him human. Again, characters must feel like real people. Even if they’re something as bizarre as a trash-compactor robot from the year 2805, they have to feel human. With Indy, the truth is that a lot of this came from Harrison Ford’s acting. Be it the way he looks at Marion when he finds her alive in Belloq’s tent, or the childlike confusion with which he reacts to the eyelid message of that horny student, the dude makes Indy feel totally like a real person. However, there was also plenty of stuff about the character laid out on the page, especially his weaknesses and shortcomings.

Despite being an action hero, Indy fucks up a lot. It’s not just that he’s afraid of snakes, he messes up constantly. He’s seconds away from getting killed by up to three different native tribes, only to be saved by other characters. He is beaten up by Nazis, fails to remember he lost his gun, miscalculates jumps, gets carried away by arrogance, and exhibits some pretty remarkable double standards. He is so damn far away from being perfect that Raiders of the Lost Ark even implies he seduced Marion while she was still a teenager, only to eventually dump her without giving a second thought. Seriously, think about it. She says, “I was a child! I was in love!” We know from an earlier scene that Indy met her through his college mentor, Abner Ravenwood, who was also her father. That takes us a good ten years back in time at the very least when Indy was a college student. And considering the age difference between Harrison Ford and Karen Allen, that means the affair happened when she was about…you know it’s better not to think about it.

Ugly stuff like this was probably explored to set up Indy’s sexual bravado and attitude towards women, which Marion confronts him about. Faults make him more three-dimensional, more layered and human, and therefore more prone to react in believable ways to the changes he will experience.

Photo: Paramount Pictures

Now, earlier I said lots of people think Indy doesn’t have an arc. If he hadn’t, he would’ve remained a very questionable character for most of the series. Thankfully, he was written with all those defects, which on top of making him more tangible, also gave him some ground floor to work up from.

Arcs are not mandatory for everyone in a story, and in some cases, not even protagonists have one. But they are there to support the narrative and help the character reach a meaningful, satisfactory end. In Indy’s case, he evolves noticeably throughout his adventures. This is what I call the character’s variable nature, what makes him susceptible to change.

In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indy turns from skeptic to believer. He goes as far as to mock Marcus for mentioning that the Ark of the Covenant may be dangerous, and later faces that same possibility when Sallah suggests it as well. By the end of the story, he has accepted the idea that there might be something otherworldly about the Ark, and it’s this acceptance that prompts him to close his eyes when the Nazis open it, exposing themselves to the wrath of God.

At this point, Indy chooses to believe in the Ark without any further proof. Belloq and the Germans, however, perform a ceremony to confirm whether they have the true Ark or not. They don’t respect it and get rightly punished as a consequence. This also mirrors Indy’s character journey with Marion, who he had once taken for granted, to eventually recognize her as a soul mate.

In Temple of Doom, set one year before Raiders, yet another of Indy’s flaws is brought into the limelight: his materialism. Being the first in the series in chronological terms, Temple is also the most fun movie to analyze, because it introduces a version of Indiana Jones that can be directly called evil.

Remember, this is him before Marion and the Ark; he still treats women like shit, and he doesn’t have too much concern for the artifacts he discovers. In fact, we first see him selling the remains of a Manchu emperor to the Chinese mafia. Later on, after being asked to retrieve the sacred Sankara Stone for some helpless villagers, he accepts with the sole goal of achieving fortune and glory. And he does that despite knowing that the same goons who took the stone also kidnapped the villagers’ children!