Imhotep
Rises Again.
There is so little to say about The
Mummy (1999), directed by Stephen Sommers that to write on
it is almost like hunting a gnat with an elephant gun. What
significance this film, like so many new releases, has in and of
itself is negligible; its interest lies in its collateral
relations to current and older movie genres and to the lineage of Mummy pictures. Therefore, for anyone who just wants a
straightforward yea-or-nay, is it worth seeing assessment, I here
offer a capsule review before looking into these other questions.
The Mummy is
an entertaining adventure film more than a horror film--no one
should go to it expecting to see a remake of the 1932 original,
although it does borrow from its predecessor in some interesting
ways. The movie is advertised as
"This Summer's First Special Effects Event!" and the
effects by Industrial Light and Magic are suitably impressive,
particularly a sandstorm that pursues the hero and his cohorts in
a biplane and that takes on the shape of Imhotep. Handsomely
photographed by Adrian Biddle, The Mummy has a striking
look, emphasizing brown, black, and gold tones, and employing
low-key lighting in many sequences--particularly those which take
place underneath the necropolis of Hamunaptra--to create an
appropriately ominous atmosphere. The cinematography is abetted
by the production design of Allan Cameron, whose sets cover a
wide range of periods from the ancient Egypt of the prologue
which explains how Imhotep came to be mummified alive to the
ruins of Hamunaptra and the Anglicized Egypt of the 1920's. The
film is also well served by Jerry Goldsmith's score--every note
of which was faithfully rendered by the Sony Dynamic Digital
Sound system--and by the capable editing of Bob Ducsay, which
keeps the viewer on the edge of his or her seat throughout The
Mummy's two hour plus length.
As the American adventurer, Rick O'Connell,
Brendan Fraser gives a solidly athletic performance and Rachel
Weisz is quite attractive as the aspiring Egyptologist, Evelyn,
the eventual object of his affections. But none of the performers are
very well served by Sommers' script--The Mummy's weakest point--especially not Arnold Vosloo,
who plays Imhotep. The first
picture did not have such a strong cast, although Zita Johann as
Helen Grosvenor made quite a striking reincarnation of
Anck-es-en-Amon, Bramwell Fletcher had a memorable scene as Ralph
Norton, the young British archaeologist who goes mad, and Edward
Van Sloan was his usual reliable self as the occultist, Professor
Muller. However, the picture gave Boris Karloff what may have
been his best horror vehicle ever. As Imhotep/Ardath Bey, Karloff
absolutely carried the movie in as powerful an incarnation of
evil as Bela Lugosi's Count in Dracula. Poor Vosloo, on
the other hand, has to babble in what I take to be ancient
Egyptian when he first shows up on screen--babble because at that
point in the story he is only a decomposed corpse--and he only
has a handful of lines later in his resuscitated form. Nor does
the script do much for the other performers. Brendan Fraser gets
some funny one-liners which he delivers quite well but Evelyn's
unscrupulous brother Johnny (John Hannah) and the even more
unscrupulous Egyptian guide Beni (Kevin J. O'Connor) do little
more than behave badly on every possible occasion. That said, it
remains to examine some more interesting if more tangential
issues, and like good archaeologists it behooves us to start from
the surface and dig deeper, proceeding with care
1)
Excavating The Mummy.
Mummy movies have a surprisingly long ancestry; the Internet
Movie Database lists
titles such as The Mummy and the Cowpuncher, The
Egyptian Mummy, as well as The Mummy and the Hummingbird,
dating from 1912, 1914, and 1915 respectively. There is even a
picture directed by Ernst Lubitsch in 1918, called The Eyes of
the Mummy Ma. (According to fairly sarcastic user's comment
in the IMDb entry on the title, one which gives quite a thorough
synopsis of the plot, there is no mummy in the movie.) But the 1999 Mummy is a descendent of the line that commenced in
1932, although the question of the possible influence of older
films on the Ur-Mummy remains a tantalizing one. (Henceforth, the two films will be identified as Mummy
1 and Mummy 2, and their respective monsters as
Imhotep 1 and Imhotep 2.) Mummy 1 was directed by the
legendary cinematographer Karl Freund who had previously
distinguished himself by photographing Tod Browning's Dracula.
(There is even speculation, discussed by David J. Skal in The
Monster Show and by Skal and Elias Savada in Dark Carnival,
their biography of Browning, that Freund may have directed some
scenes in Dracula.) A few years later, in 1935, working at
MGM Freund made another horror film, Mad Love, starring
Peter Lorre--a remake of Robert Wiene's 1925 silent film The
Hands of Orlac--which is quite good, but Freund's reputation
as a director would certainly have to rest on Mummy 1. The
screenplay for this film was written by John Balderston--who had,
of course, had previously rendered the same service for Dracula--and
based upon a story by Nina Wilcox Putnam, and Richard Schayer,.
While Putnam ended up writing inspirational pieces for Reader's
Digest, Schayer is an altogether more interesting if shadowy
figure, like John Colton, who also worked on the screenplay for
W.S. Van Dyke's Trader Horn (1931) and headed Universal's
story department at the time Frankenstein was being
prepped.
There is thus a legitimate Mummy
line--why not in a horror film cycle which pays so much attention
to royal blood?--one which is made up of four dynasties, so to
speak. The first of these had no immediate descendents but in
1940 Universal commenced a new dynasty, reprising the figure of
the Mummy who is still pursuing his dead love centuries later but
on a somewhat different basis (see Reviews for
reviews of these films on video). The second dynasty, which had four members,
only lasted until 1944. An English addition came out in 1959, but
it was also without issue, so the 1999 Mummy is the newest
successor to the line. Whether or not it will be a fruitful one
is not yet clear. However, since studios today are as hungry for
a profitable series as they were in the 1930's and '40's, the
possibility of an heir seems a definite likelihood. Unless Mummy 2 is totally eclipsed by the orient sun of George
Lucas' The Phantom Menace, it promises to do exceptionally
well at the box office, which bodes auspiciously for a new
dynasty. As this brief survey
should make clear, the continuity of the line has been constantly
interrupted--there is nothing like the series of links however
twisted which joined the various Universal Frankenstein
productions to one another-- which already makes the status of
the latest arrival problematic.
2) Mummy Genres. I think every review of Mummy 2 I have seen
so far has emphasized its indebtedness to Steven Spielberg's
Indiana Jones pictures--which is quite right. What the reviews
overlook is that all these pictures are in turn the offspring of
older action and adventure pictures such as Van Dyke's Trader
Horn and Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), Merian C. Cooper
and Enest Schoedsack's King Kong (1933) and Cooper,
Schoedsack and Lothar Mendes' Four Feathers (1929)--which
had already been filmed twice before, in 1915 and 1921--and
Herbert Brenon's Beau Geste (1926) as well as innumerable
serials. Like the Indiana Jones films, Mummy 2 follows the
conventions of the cliffhanger but those conventions go back to
the beginnings of commercial movie production and beyond there to
the popular culture--dime novels and melodramas--late nineteenth
century popular culture. At its best, Mummy 2, like Raiders
of the Lost Ark, resembles a classy revision of those older
films, one which is by no means unworthy of them. But this is
hardly the end of Mummy 2's genre questions, since the
older action-adventure genre has been inflected by some
distinctly recent innovations in the American cinema. The most
easily recognizable of these is the more drastic version of the
disaster genre, the apocalyptic movie, very much in evidence last
summer. From the very beginning of Mummy 2, the audience
is informed that Imhotep's return to life will threaten the
safety of the human race, and no sooner does he return than the
Ten Plagues of Egypt (Exodus: 7-12) break loose on an
unsuspecting world. But there is worse to come when Imhotep
succeeds in gathering about him a mob of followers who do his
every bidding and riot through downtown Cairo.
The other innovation,
far less easy to nail down, is not a genre but a thematic
convention of numerous horror films made in the last twenty
years, the theme of paranoid fantasies about the human
body--bodies which are easily dismembered or which deliquesce to
reveal all kinds of abominable beings or unmentionable toxic
substances inside. Although the
locus classicus of these fantasies is Alien with its scene
in which the nascent alien emerges from the body of Kane (John
Hurt), they have played a far more prominent role in the horror
genre, especially in the pictures of David Cronenberg--one of my
least favorite of all directors--whose stock in trade they are,
rather like a child who specializes in picking his nose in front
of grown up's. Needless to say, Mummy 2 plays this card
for all it's worth. Imhotep 2--who only appears swathed in the
prologue as he is being wrapped alive--returns to life as a
decomposing cadaver, whose flesh has been devoured by carnivorous
scarabs buried with him, and who must reconstruct his body from
the parts he steals from others. Nor does the film stop there,
throwing in scenes in which scarabs burrow under the skin of
their victims, shots of Imhotep 2's still liquid tissue before he
is completely restored, and at the end a whole host of more or
less rotting priests that he has called back to life to aid him.
The horror here is grossly physical--ultimately of a total loss
of identity in a protozoic ooze like the one to which Imhotep 2
returns at the conclusion. The words found by Rick and Evelyn
which the still-living Imhoptep 2 had scratched in his
sarcophagus, "death is just the beginning," could well
serve as an epigraph for the movie.
More than anything else,
these fantasies of apocalypse and deliquescence indicate the
distance of Mummy 2's world from that of the 1932
one. The older film took its
supernatural machinery quite seriously. Imhotep 1 was a demon
with genuinely supernatural powers, capable of killing at a
distance through radiating his evil force abroad. (Some of the
most powerful shots in Mummy 1 are close-up's which show
his glowing eyes, lit like those of Lugosi in Dracula, as
he is engaged in willing some new disaster.) No ordinary weapons
are of avail against his power--even the amulet Muller gives to
Frank Whemple (David Manners) can do no more than ward off
Imhotep 1, not defeat him--and only the intervention of Isis can
vanquish him in the last reel. In Mummy 2, however,
Imhotep 2's power is physical and pestiferous--whatever he
touches, he has the power to infect--the shades of Ebola and AIDS
walk in this mummy's cortege. Moreover, sheer physical force is
an effective weapon against this monster--not only does Rick
blast the priests with a machine gun, but after the spell from
the "good" Book of Amon Ra has been read, nullifying
Imhotep 2's invincibility, Rick can run through the now mortal
monster with a sword. Who would have dared try that with Imhotep
1? Qualitatively speaking, fear as represented in Mummy 1 and
Mummy 2 has undergone a profound transformation in the
intervening years: fear in Mummy 1 is that of
onto-theological annihilation, in Mummy 2 that of violent
physical destruction--of liquidation in more than one sense of
the word. Mummy 1 moves in a suffocatingly oppressive
world of obsessive, spiritualized rituals; Mummy 2 in a
labyrinth of paranoid violence--a labyrinth in which global
epidemics and international terrorism wait at every dark turning.
3)
Variations on a Necrophiliac Theme. Mummy 1 leaves no doubt about its principal
theme. When Frank describes to Helen Grosvenor his excitement
upon entering Anck-es-en-Amon's tomb and touching her
belongings--adding that he "sort of fell in love with
her"--she counters, "Do you have to open graves to find
girls to fall in love with?" True, Mummy 1 was a
pre-code production but Universal was quite a chaste studio by
the standards of the early 1930's. By and large, sexuality, at
least in the classic horror films, appeared on screen in a
symbolically camouflaged form. (In The Monster Show, David
J. Skal relates that Carl Laemmle Jr. was appalled by the
potential homosexual implications of Count Dracula preying upon
male victims, a far cry from Irving Thalberg's encouraging Salka
Viertel to add lesbian overtones to the script of Greta Garbo's Queen
Christina.) Over the years, this theme not surprisingly
tended to get increasingly diluted but it never disappeared
altogether--as it could not without eliminating the basic plot
device of a priest who has attempted to bring a dead princess
back to life. Necrophila
is simply the main thematic axis of the entire series, right down
to Mummy 2--which contributes a distinctly
anal inflection to the theme with its scurrying swarms of scarabs
(aka as dung beetles). But this
theme can hardly be divorced from the device by which Imhotep
himself is revived, since it is the same Scroll of Thoth which
Imhotep had stolen from the temple of Isis in his attempt to
reanimate the princess which brings him back to life In Mummy
1. The Scroll having been destroyed by the fiery wrath of
Isis at the end of Mummy 1, in the next dynasty it is the
ludicrous tana leaves which keep Kharis alive and which would
presumably revive the princess, while the following dynasty,
Terence Fisher's The Mummy (1959), made by Hammer Films in
Great Britain, went back to a magic text, now dubbed The Scroll
of Life.
Mummy 2 complicates the picture by
employing two texts: the "bad" Book of the Dead--whose
reading calls back the dead Imhotep to life--and the
"good" Book of Amon Ra--whose charms counteract the
power of Imhotep. This is the least felicitous improvement of Mummy
2 upon its predecessor, apparently introduced to supply an
exciting finale when the "good" Book enables Rick,
Evelyn, and Jonathan to vanquish their adversary. Yet Mummy 1
taps into a whole tradition which makes of Thoth a highly
ambivalent deity--not least of all as the inventor of writing. In
a brilliant commentary on the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus--into
which Plato introduces a myth in which Thoth offers the gift of
writing to King Thamos--entitled "La pharmacie de
Platon" [in La dissémination], Jacques Derrida has
shown how writing in Plato's philosophy--and in Western culture
generally--functions as a pharmakon, a medicine or
supplement which is simultaneously feared as a poison:
"Plato maintains both the exteriority of writing and its
maleficent power of penetration, capable of affecting or
infecting in the most profound way." The Scroll of Thoth not only
explicitly revivifies Imhotep but implicitly a whole body of myth
which concerns the Egyptian god and his dangerous invention. (I would not imagine that Derrida has ever seen Mummy
1, but I'm sure he would find it quite amusing.)
Strictly
speaking, it can be doubted whether there has ever been an
unequivocally "good" book--even the Bible, in
some of its most impressive passages, speaks of the wrath of God
as much as it offers a promise of hope. The "goodness"
of the Book of Amon Ra is only apotropaic--a charm to ward off
the bad magic of the other book and to exorcise the potential
danger of writing itself. But from this point of view, the whole
change from The Scroll of Thoth of Mummy 1 to these two
books of Mummy 2 is itself an apotropaic device--just as
is the Mummy himself.
4) The
Apotropaic Mummy. Another of Mummy
2's dubious bright ideas is that of moving the most
spectacular moment of Mummy 1--Imhotep's return to
life--from the very beginning to a point well into the movie and
also breaking the event into a series of actions--in one of which
the mummy is rediscovered and another in which someone unwisely
reads from the "bad" book. In Mummy 1, however,
this occurrence takes place in one scene, and almost in a single
space, the British Museum camp inside a ruined temple. Two
archaeologists, Sir Joseph Whemple (Arthur Byron) and the
youthful Ralph Norton, discuss the day's find, a mysterious
sarcophagus stripped of its funerary prayers, containing the body
of a man mummified alive and a box buried with him. When Norton
wants to open the box immediately, Professor Muller, a specialist
in the occult from Vienna, heatedly rejects the idea since he
already fears that the box may contain The Scroll of Thothas the
film makes subsequently clear. At this point, Sir Joseph and the
professor step outside to discuss the question under "the
stars of Egypt," leaving inside Norton, who has been
forbidden by Sir Joseph to touch the box. Of course, as soon as
the two have exited--one of three times the film cuts from the
interior set--Norton not only opens the box, but commences
translating the scroll, reawakening Imhotep. Retrospectively, it becomes
clear, however, that Norton has not only disobeyed Sir Joseph's
injunction but in effect repeated the same transgression that had
brought about Imhotep's own doom.
What is the symbolically charged box if not the surrogate for a
taboo feminine body that Norton wants to violate? (The effect is
even reinforced by Norton's own, apparently virginal persona, a
peculiar trait of roles for young male performers in the period.)
The features of a necrophiliac scenario already begin to manifest
themselves.
The scenario is underlined by the
scenography itself which places Norton between two sexual
symbols. If the box is--both as metaphor and metonym--a female
sexual symbol, what is the mummy if not the phallus? And what
does Norton do by reading the scroll but produce a monstrous
erection? In this way, The Scroll of Thoth is apotropaic by
guaranteeing against impotency. But the apotropaic function here
is wrong, since it supplements sexual potency exactly where it
should fail: before intercourse with a sacred virgin who also
happens to be a corpse. Norton's madness at the moment he beholds
the mummy is that of a terrible revelation, like the appearance
of the god in the dionysiac mysteries. On the other hand, as the
messenger of death, the mummy is also the executioner of
castration: not only is it fatal to behold this phallic plenitude
of desire but even more so to attempt to possess it. What else
does Ardath Bey's noli me tangere ("I dislike
to be touched--an Eastern prejudice") signify but a warning
of instant death for anyone who comes in contact with him? This remedy against sexual
failure--one that never fails--is thus too much of a good thing,
so much so that it destroys whoever uses it--Imhotep himself in
the first place. Yet the atropaic
dispensation of the mummy do not cease here. This "too
much" of the mummy itself masks a radical absence, the
incomprehensible nothingness of death. Or more exactly: it
occupies the imaginary point at which death, madness and desire
intersect. And what does the castration complex as formulated by
Sigmund Freud and his followers do but use the mythology of
psychoanalytic theory to cover experiences that ultimately elude
conceptualization?
Both films are themselves apotropaic, but
in ways which say a great deal about the respective historical
moments in which they have been made. Mummy 1 wants to
ward off the threat of repressed instinctual forces--marked by
the theme of necrophilia--and less obviously that of death, death
envisioned as nothingness. (Martin Heidegger's stony declaration
in "What is Metaphysics?" [1929] that "Fear
reveals nothingness" ["Die Angst offenbart das
Nichts"] is itself brought to life in that opening scene of Mummy
1 in a way he could hardly have imagined.) Mummy 2
aims at a more physical threat, that of natural dissolution, but
it too masks an implicit threat by giving it a tangible shape.
Radical loss of identity is no more conceivable than radical
annihilation, and the black plasma into which Imhotep disappears
in Mummy 2 is less disturbing than the total lack of
differentiation to which it points, just as a walking mummy is
less frightening than the prospect of complete non-being in Mummy
1. In a certain way, the continued survival of the Mummy
through these movie dynasties is an allegory about the continuing
return of the cycle itself to life, a more sublimated form of
sexual gratification than the one Imhotep had in mind, if
nonetheless phallic. To paraphrase the memorable words of the
opening titles of Mummy 1: "In many forms shall the Mummy
return - Oh, mighty one." There is something charming about Imhotep's
ability to rise again after all these decades, even amid all the
confused hocus pocus of Mummy 2's scenario. Better the nonsense of the Mummy dynasty
than the paralyzing seriousness of The Matrix, better
Imhotep than Neo.