Artist Statement: Historical Story
Machu Picchu is no secret today—it’s one of the seven wonders of the world. It’s quite the tourist sight, especially for western countries with money. Not a lot of people know the story of Machu Picchu’s “discovery” in 1911 by an American explorer who so generously relieved Peru of Machu Picchu’s artifacts in the name of Yale and turned the place into the tourist trap it is today. Hiram Bingham’s discovery of Machu Picchu showed the Peruvians that their country still was not and may never be safe from Imperialist powers like the Spanish Conquistadors of old and modern Western explorers.
So often, moviegoers, especially Western audiences, glorify Indiana Jones for his heroic adventures through dangerous worlds as he battles Nazis for the rights to historical and cultural artifacts. However, pitting two large Western powers against each other and casting characters and environments from another culture as antagonists encourages a xenophobic outlook on the world. We, however, thought that this piece could offer a different perspective on Indiana Jones; it is said, after all, that Spielberg based Indiana off Hiram. We want people to question Indi, perhaps make them view him as just as much a villain as the Nazis. We used this piece to show the destructive dynamic between Hiram Bingham and Peru, particularly through two relationships: Hiram and Pepe, and Hiram and Machu Picchu. We tried to write both Pepe and Machu Picchu as characters that antagonize Hiram—Pepe is the ignorant local who trusts at first only to be betrayed, and Machu Picchu is the wise force of nature that from the beginning sees Hiram as the parasite he is.
The historical sources that we found guided us heavily through our process. National Geographic’s video “Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham and Machu Picchu” informed most of our writing. We gleaned both Pepe and General Jimenez’s characters from information in that video that Hiram had with him a local guide and a Peruvian military escort. This source also informed us on how corrupt Hiram’s character was and helped us create him as such. Time’s article “What Hiram Bingham Got Wrong About Machu Picchu” helped to inform our dialogue and some of our action heavily. It influenced the entire scene in the stone tower in which Hiram explains what he thinks the room is. Of course, from the source, we knew that Hiram was generally wrong and that Pepe, along with Peru’s scientists, was right.
As Peter Forbes says in The Power of Story in an Age of Consequence, “For those of us who care about people and place, our most important work may be to look at the world honestly…and to re-discover our own prophetic voices.” We feel that we’ve done that adequately here. We wanted a brutally honest portrayal of the classic “Indiana Jones” character, and we feel like we've given that. And overall, we feel that the world may be better from this alternate perspective we’ve given through our prophetic voices.
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