Dave's Other Movie Log

davesothermovielog.com

Articles  Contents  Reviews  Guestbook

 

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, the necrophiliac 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 (Bramwell Fletcher), 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 (Edward Van Sloan), a specialist in the occult from Vienna, heatedly rejects the idea since he already fears that the box may contain The Scroll of Thoth as 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 terrifying 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 does 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.

        

The Universal Mummy

Metamorphoses of the Mummy

Home

E-mail Dave: daveclayton@worldnet.att.net