Previously, I hadn’t thought much on this concluding scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first in the Indiana Jone trilogy, but upon a second watch, this depiction of the final resting place of a mysterious, powerful and nearly-mythical object that comes under government purview is little more than a commentary on what and how bureaucracies in particular and bureaucracy theoretically render hidden and nameless, obscured by nondescript packaging and placed alongside so many similar objects, processes, documents, people and applications that receive similar inattention.
Official denial of these operations is what further obfuscates them, although, in this case, we are, it should be well noted, referring to an ostensibly unreal object, corroborated only by various biblical verses.
But there is nevertheless much to be read from this scene about bureaucracy, or how it is popularly declaimed and characterized. Seen as little more than a cavernous space of indiscriminate action, classification and storage, it may well be inferred that few items leave the literal space, the figurative implication being that bureaucracy consumes in its complicated, obfuscatory procedures, taxonomies, euphemisms, and institutional practices.
Hannah Arendt would delight to watch such a scene (and just may have, if not for all of the man-handling that Indiana Jones and his accomplices and antagonists are so often for their repugnant liberalities).
What is even more funny to think about is that the Ark is probably more lost now, under blankets of institutional obscurity than it ever was in a purported remote desert location, secured and protected by lost knowledge and separated objects. Removing it from such a resting place may be all but near impossible.
Bearer of Pity 