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.