Indiana Jones Star Addresses Controversial Raiders of the Lost Ark Dialogue

Even the most beloved films can have moments that don’t entirely sit well with audiences, even if they are somewhat acceptable at the time they’re released. Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example, has a piece of dialogue from Karen Allen‘s Marion Ravenwood in which she tells Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones that she was “a child” when the pair last saw one another, implying a romantic connection between them. While the complete history between the two is somewhat vague, this dialogue implies Indiana, who would have been in his late 20s at the time, had a relationship with Marion when she was 16, which understandably comes with some controversial implications. Allen recently detailed how, from her perspective, their connection was relatively “innocent.”

When asked by Uproxx about how this exchange could come with some “sinister undertones,” Allen went on to note, “Yeah, I guess you could say that. I think I say I was 16. I don’t know. That’s always what I imagined is she was 16, he was 26. And he was her father’s student. And it’s left very mysterious.”

She continued, “So we don’t even know what it is. I mean, they could have kissed a few times, and she was just completely bowled over, and he could have just not wanted to get involved with someone so young. And maybe my father would have been furious at him. I mean, what’s great about it is we don’t know what the circumstances are. So she obviously cared deeply for him. He may have cared for her, too. But, in the end, decided it was a dangerous situation and he didn’t want to be involved. I mean, I guess, when something is as vague as that, you can color it any way you want to color it. I’ve tended to color it, sort of, that it was quite innocent. When she says, ‘It was wrong and you knew it.’ I mean, I think maybe he led her on in some way. But when she says she was a child, I think she meant she was 16. Something like that.”

While this film being released in 1981 means the sequence was interpreted differently than more recently, the adventure also unfolds in 1936, while Indiana and Marion’s relationship would have been in the mid-20s. Given that some states currently allow people to get married at the age of 16, some could infer that whatever the nature of their relationship in the 1920s would have been, it wasn’t necessarily manipulative. Additionally, with audiences witnessing one of Indiana Jones’ college students writing “love you” on her eyelids, Marion could potentially have shown a similar attraction that he questionably reciprocated.

“I don’t think of him as a pedophile. That’s the direction some of these people are going,” Allen expressed.

The four-film Indiana Jones 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray set is out now.

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