With Indiana Jones’ return, looking back at the opening scene of ‘Raiders’

From page 17 saves, fake-outs and tight squeezes. Indy finally seems home free … and then comes the topper.

The most memorable image in a scene full of them plays out just as Lucas described it in 1978. “There is a 65foot boulder that’s form-fitted to only roll down the corridor coming right at him,” he explained. “And it’s a race. He gets to outrun the boulder.”

And shockingly, he does. He ends up covered in cobwebs and escaping empty-handed, but at least he escapes … … using a conveniently placed vine to make a skin-ofhis-teeth getaway, accompanied by, for the first time, John too. “The way you sold me for parts/ As you sunk your teeth into me,” she yowls, before anointing her ex with the coldest moniker imaginable: “fame [expletive].” That insult usually begins with “star” rather than “fame,” but Rodrigo knows that the condition of fame is far more toxic than any one person, and that someone who craves it is perhaps uninterested in personhood at all.

On “Drivers License,” Rodrigo still saw the other woman as an enemy, or source of tension, but now on “Vampire,” she understands what the lines of allegiance truly are, marking an emergent feminist streak. Here, she finds kinship with her ex’s other partners, and lambastes herself for thinking she ever was the exception: “Every girl I ever talked to told me you were bad, bad news/ You called them crazy, God, I hate the way I called ’em crazy too.”

There’s an echo here of Swift’s realization on “Dear John” that she, too, is closer kin to the other aggrieved women than to her ex: “You’ll add my name to your long list of traitors who don’t understand/ And I look back in regret how I ignored when they said/ ‘Run as fast as you can.’”

After sweeping past it for most of her career, Swift has just begun revisiting this moment — last month, she played “Dear John” live for the first time in more than 11 years, at one of the Minneapolis stops of her Eras Tour. That’s likely because Swift’s rerecording of “Speak Now,” part of her ongoing early album reclamation project, is being released this week.

But she also used the moment to both reflect on her maturation, and to urge her devoted, sometimes ferocious fans not to live in, or dwell on, her past.

“I’m 33 years old. I don’t care about anything that happened to me when I was 19 except the songs I wrote and the memories we made together,” she said from the stage. “So what I’m trying to tell you is, I’m not putting this album out so you should feel the need to defend me on the internet against someone you think I might have written a song about 14 billion years ago.”

When Swift began reporting on her own fame on “Dear John,” it had the secondary effect of activating phalanxes of fans who went to war on her behalf, too. But over the course of the past decade, something interesting happened: The battle became theirs more than hers. They hold on to her wrongs with pitbull-like grip, ensuring, in a way, that Swift can’t fully grow up.

So if “Dear John” is a creative guidepost for “Vampire,” this cautionary note offers a suggestion of what might come from it: a call to arms, a hardening of your outer shell, a conflagration that burns long after you light the match and walk away.

Williams’ unforgettable main theme. And then, once in the plane, we find out that (the previous sequence notwithstanding) there is one thing Indiana Jones is afraid of: snakes.

“In the end all it is a teaser,“ Lucas said of this opening, as they mapped it out years in advance. And he’s right; it’s a marvelous preview of the thrills, chills and laughs of the film that will follow. But the “Raiders” opening did more than that: it set a template for the “Indiana Jones” series — and for the thrill-ride blockbusters of the 1980s and beyond.