#dora and the lost city of gold

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I saw Dora and the Lost City of Gold (2019) at a local cheap theater with one of my friends last night and, to quote my friend, it was “wild”. Overall Dora is a fun movie that offers very important and positive Latine representation, and most of the minor things that bothered me (lack of narrative cohesion, the unrealistic absence of the sheeramount of paper involved in actualarchaeology) certainly wouldn’t bother the core demographic (children). However, Peter Debruge, writing for Variety, commented:

““Dora and the Lost City of Gold” goes out of its way to establish that the character isn’t a tomb raider or a treasure hunter, but rather an explorer, risking her life for the love of knowledge. That ranks her as perhaps the most “woke” big-screen adventurer since the invention of cinema, making Indy’s indignant “That belongs in a museum!” seem so 20th century by comparison” (“Film Review: ‘Dora and the Lost City of Gold’”).

This is where, I think, we get into some trouble. Spoilers below.

There are, on the surface, some obvious differences between a “treasure hunter” and an “explorer.” Treasure hunting is destructive and extractive, taking artifacts based on how high their potential resale value might be, with a complete disregard for the surrounding artifacts/environment, let alone the cultural meaning of the either artifact being extracted or the things being destroyed to retrieve it. An explorer, we are told, doesn’t take the gold.

“Exploration” and “explorer,” however, are highly loaded terms. Exploration is intrinsically linked to colonialism and imperialism, and explorers have historically been central to the production of knowledge and the generation of public and private interest which paved the way for colonization. They have also, historically, taken the gold. This is highly evident in the way that Cambridge Dictionary defines “explorer” as “a person who travels to places where no one has ever been to learn about them” because if explorers go where no one has ever been and explorers go to places where people of color have lived and are actively living, we now know who counts as a person and who doesn’t. To be fair, this specific phrasing is not a universal definition, but other definitions still contain the same problematics. Google Dictionary, for example, defines “explorer” as “a person who explores an unfamiliar area; an adventurer”. Here we can maybe concede that the “unfamiliar area” is unfamiliar to the person exploring it not an area that “no one” is familiar with, but again when we consider how the term is applied, explorers implies an emptiness to the region being explored: someone on vacation might “explore” the city of New York, but they wouldn’t be considered an explorer for doing so.

This leads us into the problematic of “jungle puzzles.” The phrase is first used in the movie by Randy, the cliche socially awkward nerd, after they have fallen into an aquifer. Dora and Randy both notice that the star map on the roof is wrong, prompting Randy to say it must be a jungle puzzle and pull a lever at random in order to correct the star alignment and reveal something hidden. Dora says there is no such thing as jungle puzzles, the room begins to fill with water, and they realize the star map was in fact accurate the whole time and they had just been looking at it wrong. This scene offers an excellent subversion of the “jungle puzzle” trope which is so often utilized in jungle-action/explorer flicks. In the images and rhetoric of colonialism, we frequently see the “challenge as invitation” theme appear, and often in ways which are very violently sexualized. This model is not only applied to colonial imaginings of colonized women/women of color, but to the feminized land itself, and it is very much as rape-y as this implies. The entire jungle puzzle trope is centered around the idea that ancient and/or indigenous peoples built their cities and their civilizations in order to serve as “escape the room” tests of courage, morality, and knowledge for outsiders, rather than for actual use by the inhabitants of those cities/members of those civilizations. It carries over the idea that the challenge of solving the puzzle invites in explorers/colonizers, and often it further imagines a universal morality and understanding of value which the explorer/colonizer can access and succeed at. Because of this, having a scene where explorers believe that an element of indigenous civilization was designed for outsiders to “solve” in order to be “rewarded” only to realize that they not only misunderstood the accuracy of an Incan star map, but that the entire structure was just a regular part of Incan life that had nothing to do with outsiders is an important intervention.

Unfortunately, upon arrival at the city of Parapata this initial intervention is lost, as the children quickly realize there are in fact “jungle puzzles” both to enter the city and to view the giant golden monkey statue. I do want to emphasize here that between Indiana JonesandDora and the Lost City of Gold, it is obviously important and even radical to see the rugged individual (cishet white man) model of Indiana Jones replaced by four kids–two of whom are Latinx and one of whom is played by an Australian Aboriginal woman–working together, and this shift is apparent in the way they characters interact with the city and its guardians. However, because it uses the same tropes it has many of the same issues. Again, it imagines that the city was built as a test, but the problematics of this representation are heightened by the arrival of los guardidos perdidos/the lost guardians and the old woman who initially tried to keep both the treasure hunters and the explorers away from Parapata but in the scene leading up to Dora solving the final puzzle, transforms into a beautiful young Incan princess and allows Dora to attempt the puzzle.

First, as a separate but connected issue, the figure of the Incan princess also plays into the idea of indigenous peoples as mystical/mysterious, ancient, and displaced from/frozen in time. First of all, I again want us to think about definition and application; according to Google Dictionary “ancient” means “belonging to the very distant past and no longer in existence.” The Incan Empire fell in the 1530s under Spanish conquest and the Incan people still exist today; when we look at Europe, Stonehenge is ancient; you don’t ever hear about the “ancient” art of Leonardo di Vinci, and he was dead and buried for more than a decade before the Incan Empire was destroyed. While we are not told where the guardians or the princess comes from, what we are implicitly told by an de-aging of the Incan princess is that they seem to be connected to the “ancient” empty city rather than contemporary Incan society, and subsequently that there are no modern Incan peoples, or that the modern Inca are irrelevant to this story. Against this lack of contemporary Incan indigeneity, Dora refers to the student body of a Los Angeles high school as its “indigenous population” several times throughout the film; it is imperative to consider how this undermines modern indigenious communities and their experiences.

Furthermore, the figure of the old-young princess fully leans into the sexually exploitative imagingings of colonized peoples/cities/lands as desiring of the entrance of outsiders; as an old woman, the princess’s role is to warn away, but as the young woman her role is to invite in the worthy, with the worthy being those who are able to solve the puzzle. Dora says she wants to learn, and the princess allows her to attempt the puzzle, but what exactly is Dora supposed to be learning (it seems the reward for the puzzle is the ability to view a giant gold statue of a monkey) and, more importantly, why is the entire city centered around this test?