Sometimes what we notice the most about some of our favorite movie characters are the things that we would definitely miss if they weren’t there. When it comes to Indiana Jones there are a few things, such as the company he keeps, which has dwindled over the years, the adventures he goes on, and the outfit he tends to wear most often. The leather jacket, the whip, and of course, the fedora. To be fair, there wasn’t a lot of thought given to the customary headpiece that Jones appears to like so much until 1989 when The Last Crusade came out and we had the chance to find out where he actually came across his favored hat. When young Indy managed to lift a golden cross from a bunch of tomb robbers but then lost it to the same robber’s thanks to the town sheriff, the leader of the group made it a point to plunk his own fedora down on Indy’s head and give him the inspiration that would carry him from that point forward. The fact that Indy lost the fight that day but was given a nod of respect, in a way, from a fellow treasure-seeker managed to help him keep his head up in a big way as he kept the hat and wore it from that day on. There’s no doubt that the individual that gave him the hat passed on in canon quite a while back, but the hat has been a part of Indy’s person in a big way ever since. In fact, it’s one of the few personal belongings that he always tries to save when he can, and the hat has even come back to him when it’s believed to have been lost, as it did when he was still sitting on a ledge, out of breath after avoiding a terrifying fall in a tank. The hat just rolled back to him via the wind, as though to say “That was a close one, ready to get going?”.
Indy isn’t the only figure in pop culture to have such an attachment to his things, but trying to imagine him without his or his whip is kind of awkward since it has happened, but not that often. When he does take his hat off it’s usually because he’s in polite company or because he’s in trouble and the hat was either taken off or it came off during a fight. Amazingly, the hat has stayed on in certain moments when it should have by all rights come off. He went without the hat a few times in Raiders of the Lost Ark when he needed a clear line of sight or when he was resting. But during fight scenes that hat rarely comes off, much as it didn’t in the hanging bridge scene in The Temple of Doom. Someone might think that he jams his hat on his head in order to get it to stay, but the fact is that the hat kind of defies the laws of physics more than once when it comes to staying on under duress and remaining on Indy’s head despite his many frantic motions. Seriously, a stiff wind can catch the brim of a baseball cap and fling it off at times, so it kind of stands to reason that a fedora, which has far more area for the wind to catch, would come off with far less prompting. But since the character needs his hat more often than not it’s widely accepted that it’s NOT going to come off unless it absolutely needs to. That’s fair really since Indy without his hat looks just like any other guy, but Indy with his hat and whip becomes a bit of a badass that’s hard not to like. The guy is definitely a product of his time, but in one of the best ways since he’s a learned scholar and an intrepid archaeologist.
Of course, real-life archaeologists tend to cringe when they watch Indiana Jones simply because what he does to archaeological sites and the handling of certain artifacts is not how this profession is run. But in all fairness, it is a movie and he’s more of an adventurer and teacher than a real archaeologist. He knows what he needs to know when it’s time to go after an artifact, but in the last movie, he didn’t know much save for the average wisdom and learning that he’d already had over the years. There are a lot of things to be said about Indy, but one thing that can be said is that if not for the fedora and the words that came with it, he might very well have thought twice about continuing his adventurous ways. But of course, movie plots don’t tend to work that way, thankfully.
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