Movies - TV
How A Joke Gone Wrong Became Temple Of Doom’s Most Controversial Scene
By WITNEY SEIBOLD
“Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” is the scariest entry in the franchise, a fact that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas attribute to their respective breakups at the time.
The most notorious scene in the film is when the heroes are invited to dine with the Maharajá of Pankot, a meal that consists of “gross” dishes invented to frighten the audience.
Actor Roshan Seth (Chattar Lal) explained the scene was meant to be a sendup of the main characters’ assumptions; however, it came off as an insulting stereotype of Indian people.
The scene plays into a “foreigners eat weird things” trope, with the filmmakers deciding to “other” the Indian people by forcing the characters to eat live snakes and eyeballs.
The misrepresentation of the Indian people caused the movie to be temporarily banned in the country. Seth shared, “The banquet scene was a joke that went wrong.”
He said, “Steven intended it as a joke, [...] [as] Westerners think that Indians eat cockroaches, so they served them what they expected. The joke was too subtle for that film.”
Seth and the film’s other Indian actors seem to have understood that they were performing in a broad, Americanized view of India rather than a production that sought authenticity.