Curses and Colonizers in “The Mummy” (1999) – Part 2

0:12 Erin: Welcome to part two of our discussion of the 1999 masterpiece, The Mummy, directed by Stephen Sommers, who is obviously, you know, the Orson Welles of the 90s

0:25 Wes: and also known for such movies as Van Helsing.

0:29 Erin: That's also a movie.

0:30 Wes: I like the Money Returns and Odd Thomas and GI Joe.

0:38 Erin: Oh, there it is.

0:39 Wes: Rise of Cobra.

0:41 Erin: There it is. Yeah. That's probably the greatest. That's probably his Magnificent Ambersons. Just to say a little bit more. Also in defense of this film, I think it's just fun. Right. You had fun watching this, I'm assuming. Yeah. There's something about it, to me that. Not just because we're talking about origins and stuff like that, that is a kind of, er, movie or the ultimate movie in terms of the fact that movies are just. There's something about them that is fundamentally silly and they're in a certain respect, like the silliest art form. And of course that makes me want to say something also about mummies as the ultimate representations of film itself, which has, I think, been a point made by people like Andre Bazan and, you know, all sorts of. Vin Sontag in On Photography talks about this. Right. Just the idea of the photographic image as the preservation of dead people is. Is often the case.

1:35 Wes: And it's. You know, the chemical processing of film is like embalming.

1:40 Erin: Yeah, exactly.

1:41 Wes: Lots of parallels.

1:43 Erin: I'm just. I'm trying very slowly to construct a justification for why we are covering this on subtext. No, but I. But also. And I should. I should have said this at the beginning of the last one. This is my Gimme. My. My summer fun. In the same spirit of doing Elf at. At Christmas, I think I wanted to do a silly summer blockbuster. And of course they're also doing another. Another Mummy film soon with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. Finally. She'll be back. So it's also in honor of the resurrection of the career of Brendan Fraser.

2:16 Wes: He's going to be £300 in this one.

2:18 Erin: That'll be great.

2:19 Wes: Rachel. Rachel Weiss has to roll him around. I'm sorry.

2:23 Erin: So mean. That would. That would still be fine with me.

2:28 Wes: I just going to be called Beached.

2:35 Erin: So mean.

2:36 Wes: The I love the whale.

2:38 Erin: Yeah.

2:38 Wes: I cried, like, audibly at a theater.

2:44 Erin: He's so great.

2:45 Wes: Yeah, he's great.

2:46 Erin: But anyway, back to the conversation here about what? Did I say something about Picnic and Hanging Rock. Oh, this film is kind of like the inverse of Picnic and Hanging Rock. I thought in that Picnic is about the victory of the colonized over the colonizer that you eventually get destroyed by or defeated by the forces that you try to control. You get defeated in your attempts to fashion a narrative. Yeah. What is unknowable overtakes you and destroys your efforts at a kind of mental containment.

3:19 Wes: And again, it's contact with, like, a primal origin.

3:23 Erin: Exactly.

3:24 Wes: So in a way, it's the origin of your high level of consciousness, in a way. But it's primal. And so it can defeat that.

3:30 Erin: Yeah. And this is why the Mummy is. It's almost like a fantasy that you can feel secure as a colonizer, that you will eventually figure it out, that there is something to be figured out, that ultimately all of this has a logic that you can solve the puzzle. In fact, solve it twice over.

3:47 Wes: Right.

3:48 Erin: Because you have the first. The puzzle is about bringing the mummy to life, even though it can sometimes be accidental. There's an effort of piecing something together when the mummy comes to life. And then one has to also finish solving the puzzle or solve a second puzzle in order to then kill the mummy or send it back to the underworld or whatever the. The explanation is. And along the way, one also has to at least avoid, if not defeat, the fallout of the curse. So, yeah, so it's a fantasy about overcoming all of that. And I think the idea that makes this very psychologically suggestive is just that this, the mummy, is the puzzle that comes with its own kind of solution, in the way that Picnic at a Hanging Rock is the opposite of that, in that it's stubborn and it can't be solved. And I think the Evelyn character seems to embody this herself in that she has this maternal figure who's Egyptian, her father is English. So whatever drama is taking place with the mummy is also internalized somehow. Again, this is played with more in the Mummy Returns, which makes it stupid and weird. It turns out that Evelyn is actually the reincarnation of the pharaoh's daughter. So there's this whole Elektra dynamic thing that ends up going on. It's really, really, really ridiculous. But the female figure in the original 1932 Boris Karloff mummy, as I already said, she also has this dual heritage, this dual nature. And so the implication of that seems to me to be the idea that we have the desire to understand our own origins. So she's both puzzle and puzzle solver, and we want to figure ourselves out in order to resolve something that in us is unresolved. I think the curse, too, operates on the same logic in a way. Like I was thinking about how the curse is kind of like a conspiracy theory. You know way more about this than I do. I know this is an interest of yours, but you're applying a kind of faulty abduction to what you think is the fallout of something that has, rather than a sort of conspiratorial, systematic explanation, it has a magical explanation. So this idea of logic and mystery, or logic and magic, or the known and the unknown being sort of right next to each other for the purposes of one solving the other and therefore making you feel at peace and no longer cursed, no longer suffering under some lack of knowledge or understanding.

6:13 Wes: Right.

6:13 Erin: You figured it out. You've defeated these forces in yourself. That seems to be the kind of psychological underpinning in talking about abduction, which

6:21 Wes: I'm actually reading about right now. We're doing the Philosopher curse on our show. So inference to the best explanation. You're making me think about her first reading of the spell. Is it a spell? That we would call it. Right. She's a curious seeker of knowledge, really. Really. She's not trying to give a theory of anything literally. Right. She's just out of curiosity, reading what's in the book. But if you were to make a comparison to abduction, it's almost like it produces its own theory in reality. And the theory is the. Is the backstory. So what it does is it raises something from the dead. It's almost like breathing life into some theoretical entity that comes back to haunt you or something like that, that attacks me. And in the case of the conspiracy theory, Right, the theorized entity is a intelligent designer of a sort, but a malicious one, a persecutory one. And you get that in this case, right? There's a persecutory entity is aroused by one's curiosity.

7:25 Erin: Yeah. Just another complication to this is the fact that the mummy has been cursed to go after whoever awakens it by some sort of overarch. I mean, in this film, it's the idea that Imhotep has violated the pharaoh's mistress and he's sentenced to the hom die and all that stuff. But the mummy itself wants to be found. So that's why this is like a perfect little puzzle box for a colonizer's self Exoneration, because the mummy wants to come back to life. So it's a curse that wants you to trip the tripwire and it wants to play itself out. So it almost has this self fulfilling prophecy or self determinism element to it as well.

8:06 Wes: Right.

8:07 Erin: It's just another way I think of twisting such a thing. I mean, it's an angle that, that the films get at which the actual Curse of the Pharaohs, as it was publicized in the 20s, that angle wasn't there. But it seems like this is the further twist to get it to make Americans and, and British people and all that like, feel, feel like they're not responsible somehow or that this has some, some will to get a toehold in the human world again, that you're almost being used as a pawn in their scheme.

8:36 Wes: It's interesting that Imhotep, he's sentenced to the worst possible punishment, but there's a real like escape clause to that, which is if you're resurrected, you get to have. Be all powerful and destroy the world and get your girlfriend back. Is that the deal?

8:54 Erin: Because you got your girlfriend?

8:55 Wes: Maybe it's worth, maybe it's worth a try. Okay, I'll take that bargain.

9:03 Erin: Right.

9:03 Wes: It's an odd sort of curse and it's an odd sort of risk to take. And it speaks to the perils of vengeance. Right. If vengeance goes too far, it can, can come back at you with a vengeance. Sorry, that was another aspect of the movie that I thought was really interesting. This, which I thought you were kind of getting a little bit there, which is the oddly risk of risky form of punishment. Right. Absolute pain, but with the risk of absolute destruction of the entire world. And again, I think it's not unrelated to the perils of romantic love where, you know, again, where the world can get blotted out by a fused or codependent, let's say in modern parlance, relationship, the same thing. You know, few parallels of fusion with a maternal object, which we've talked a lot about on this show, in relation to a failure of a paternal authority, which in this case is the pharaoh. So there's something here about not being able to mourn an object or the maternal, the ultimate beloved, and try to maintain that object high at all costs, which can lead to this kind of destruction. The reading itself bothered, you know, when she read from the book so casually and started this whole thing off, that really got to me. And she didn't get really all blamed all that much for it, like. So it's like, oops, just got a Bunch of people killed.

10:23 Erin: She doesn't have parents, so.

10:27 Wes: Did I do that?

10:28 Erin: Yeah. I mean, when we first see her in the. In the Museum of Antiquities, and she knocks down the bookcases, which I would say is a really, like, a missed opportunity, because I had a memory. I've seen this movie so many times, and I had a memory of her doing this at Hamunaptra, that she knocked down all the columns, but that's actually not in the movie, so they never do a callback to the bookcase gag, which I think is. Anyway, would have worked well, but she knocks them all down. And then the curator, who's actually a member of the Medjai, says, give me frogs, flies, locusts, anything but you. Compared to you, the plagues would be a joy. So, yeah, she's the Mummy. She's a tool of the Mummy. She is the mummy. She's an extension of the Mummy. She herself is a plague. She can read and write ancient Egyptian, as she says, and she can decipher hieroglyphics and hieratic. And she knows it all. She knows all about. All she needs is field experience.

11:26 Wes: Yeah. Underneath all of this is that kind of nerds fantasy that, you know, hey, reading books is going to make me powerful after all, like Prospero and the Tempest, because it's going to be magic. Right. There's a spell in there which I think is kind of partly unconsciously beneath for people who have given up worldly power for the sake of a life of the mind. Let's say there's this, I think, maybe unconscious temptation to an unconscious fantasy that there's some kind of power in this that just transcends the power of knowing. Right. Transcends the power of being a professor. Whatever it is one. Or a writer, or whatever it is one does. One can transform the world, cast a spell. Maybe writing is supposed to be like that. Maybe. I suppose that is the writerly fantasy that you're gonna affect other people in some way, but in this case, it becomes grandiose. Right. It's all powerful, all destructive. But yes. The kind of shy librarian out in

12:22 Erin: the field, as you were saying, not too shy.

12:24 Wes: Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Cause she's not really that shy.

12:27 Erin: She's sheltered a little.

12:28 Wes: Yeah. Sheltered, okay. Yeah. But they don't really play up that part of her character as much as they could. Right. She could be more. She's bookish, but she could be more nerdy than she is. She's goofy. They do make her goofy. Yeah.

12:42 Erin: Yeah. My favorite moment in the whole Movie is her drunk. I'm proud of what I am. I am a librarian, which is really.

12:52 Wes: Hear me roar.

12:54 Erin: Yeah.

12:55 Wes: Yeah. That is great. She says, look, I may not be an explorer or an adventurer or a treasure seeker or a gunfighter, Mr. O', Connell, but I'm proud of what I am. And he says, what is that? I am a librarian, and I'm going to kiss you, Mr. O'. Connell. Call me Rick. Doing his best Harrison forward impression, she, of course, passes out before they can actually kiss. I should have let you read that.

13:19 Erin: No, no, no. It's way better that you read that.

13:21 Wes: Yeah.

13:24 Erin: She does say at one point explicitly, I think, that no harm ever came from reading a book.

13:30 Wes: Oh, yeah.

13:31 Erin: So this romance between o' Connell and Evie is, I think, part of the lasting appeal of this film, which I literally saw a car a couple years ago that had a bumper sticker on it, and I looked up the bumper stickers. Honk if you'd rather be watching the 1999 cinematic masterpiece, the Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. This is a real bumper sticker that I have seen in the world.

13:56 Wes: Does it go the whole bumper? It's a long one.

13:59 Erin: It's yellow and kind of fat. I didn't really give much thought to this, but does it have a parallel or a. An origin somewhere that we could think of? He's sort of. What's the term that people use? Like a himbo. You know what I'm talking about? I mean, he's intelligent and resourceful, right? But he's definitely the brawn and she's the brain. I guess it's just like a Beauty and the Beast thing, only he's also beautiful. So. Yeah, but, yeah, bookish girl and big, brawny guy who is sort of antagonizing her, but also who inherently respects her and does whatever she wants.

14:35 Wes: Sort of like Harrison Ford in Star Wars. I mean, even though this film is often compared to Raiders of the Lost Ark, the attitude of Rick is more like, I think, Harrison Ford in Star wars, where he's sort of Han Solo is kind of cynical, and I guess the Rick character. Could you call him cynical?

14:52 Erin: I mean, he's willing to go back there, and he's. For a guy who almost died by hanging, he bounces back pretty fast.

14:58 Wes: He's worldly and not idealistic, practical in certain ways and all that stuff. So he is above love in that sense. He's not explicitly that he made out to be a womanizer or something like that, but he's the bachelor par excellence. And he's in a very different position than Imhotep, who is consumed by love to the point of risking everything, not just his life, but being eternally cursed.

15:27 Erin: You're making me realize how much of a nerd Princess Leia is. I wouldn't have thought of her in that way, but that's basically what she is. She's kind of nerdy.

15:37 Wes: Yeah. With those buns, you know, she belongs in. But she's much more feisty than Evelyn, I think.

15:45 Erin: Yeah. She's angry.

15:46 Wes: Yeah. Her and Han Solo, really. Yeah. Annoy the shit out of each other.

15:52 Erin: Yeah.

15:53 Wes: In a way that. There's some of that in this, but it's much more benign, I think.

15:58 Erin: Well, I mean, we could talk maybe about the three Americans. I don't know if you have anything to say about them. They're kind of just there to be caricatures of Americans and then to get their flesh sucked off their bodies. Yeah. It does give some funny opportunities for a comment by Jonathan, for instance, which Rick seems to sort of escape.

16:19 Wes: What does he say?

16:19 Erin: You know, they're all holding. Holding a gun in each hand and shooting all the magi when they come on the boat. And all Jonathan says when he looks at them, he sort of looks with disgust and says, americans, you know, because they're all, like, hooting and saying, yee haw. I don't know. It just makes us look like badasses. But not for long. They're kind of fun. And I guess it occurred to me, too, in making the connection between the Mummy and the vampire, which I suppose I still haven't talked about, just the fact that you have the. In Dracula, you know, you have the three. They're not all three Americans. Only one is American. But you have the three guys, you know, that each proposed to Minna, or whatever her name is. I haven't read this in a long time, but they're the trio that fight Dracula. So it almost seems like that's something that the movie is explicitly playing with, because these three figures, it doesn't quite line up with the figures in the 1932 mummy, so they seem to be bringing in more Stoker. But my favorite character in the movie is Dr. Bombay. Winston, are you a Bewitched fan?

17:21 Wes: I did watch Bewitched a bit as a kid, but it's been so long. Yeah. I can't call myself a fan.

17:28 Erin: Yeah.

17:28 Wes: But I did watch quite a bit of it on reruns as a kid, so.

17:32 Erin: Good. I love Dr. Bombay.

17:33 Wes: Yeah.

17:34 Erin: And I love Winston. I love that character. I was initially thinking about him as a kind of. Obviously some sort of ultimate figure of colonialism, but he's actually kind of the opposite of the Mummy.

17:46 Wes: How do you mean?

17:47 Erin: He's not at all about being obsessed with a single woman. He seems both completely uninterested in women and also interested in any woman at any given moment. He's seen with a woman on his arm and he's just getting drunk all the time. So he's this figure of dissipation and doesn't seem particularly attached to anyone. And his lack of attachment makes him just the perfect figure to want to sacrifice himself for some cause. His only attachment seems to be to die some sort of glorious and heroic death because he feels guilty for being a survivor and he just wants to go out with a bang. So no attachments in this world. No desire to get back to some sort of past of his? Well, there is actually. Okay, now that I'm talking through this, it's interesting, right? There is a desire to sort of undo the past, to undo the fact of his survival, but it's about pressing the eject button and just getting out, getting out of this world entirely. His desire for this glorious death is about being useful and then disappearing. As the oldest maybe character in the film, he's an interesting counterpoint to the truly old characters in the film. Like emotep.

19:05 Wes: Yeah, he says, I just wish I could have chucked it in with the others and gone down in flame and glory instead of sitting around here rotting of boredom and boobs. Yeah, well, they give him his glory in the end.

19:18 Erin: Yeah, he's just, yeah. The perfect opposite, I guess, to the Mummy. Where the film, if it does fall apart in any locatable place or if the whole thing is just kind of a silly. A silly mess. Lovable mess. Perhaps it's when the Mummy transports both Benny and Evelyn back to Hamunaptra in some sort of self created sand tornado, he becomes sand at one point to go through her keyhole. That sounded dirty. Just saying that. I regret that. Yeah, I don't know, but best not to look at that too closely. But maybe I should just use that as the way into talking about the vampire thing for a second. The thing about the vampire is that the vampire is rapacious. Much more a figure of, say, sex rather than love. And someone who wants to constantly make new conquests. As opposed to this pharaoh who seems to only be, or not pharaoh. As opposed to this mummy who seems to only be giving his attentions to Evie as a way to secure her as some human sacrifice so he can get his girlfriend back. He still only has one woman in mind. I thought of you the whole time. I guess. Also another difference that occurs to me. So we have him sucking the life out of these American guys. So obviously there's something vampiric about that, but it's in order to reconstitute his

20:43 Wes: own, just add American flesh.

20:46 Erin: Yeah, it's very, very Silence of the Lambs. But yeah, it's, I suppose, kind of about stealing the life force, but not really. And then I was also thinking about the vampire as being just alive forever and therefore not tied to a particular time, sort of to a place, but not really. You know, he has his castle and he does sleep in a coffin and stuff like that. But he's not really specifically identified with a particular culture. Whereas the mummy is obviously more rooted in a historical context. So it seems as though the mummy is more about both through this constant love object and through the particular culture out of which he comes. Much more about history and the past in a specific sense rather than this sort of sexualized undead threat that can appear anywhere and overtake you.

21:40 Wes: So what's our taxonomy of the undead? We have mummies, vampires, zombies, Is that it? Are there any other major undead categories in films?

21:53 Erin: I don't know if Frankenstein's monster is enough to be a category unto itself. That's a zombie, right?

21:59 Wes: He's a category unto himself.

22:00 Erin: Oh, okay.

22:01 Wes: He's not really a zombie. He's, you know, he reads Milton, right? Come on.

22:07 Erin: He's an electrical man.

22:09 Wes: Also, he's part very, very sensitive guy. Yeah, he's not very good looking. Actually. He's really good looking in the movie. Did you see the.

22:20 Erin: I haven't.

22:22 Wes: The recent movie. Yeah, they make him. No, he's a very good looking actor, which I thought was like, all right, he's still stitched together, but, you know, you got a good face and he's very tall. But any case. Yeah. So I think he's in a category of his own. Zombies. Yeah. I'm just thinking about my different feelings of the effectiveness of these different. I guess none of them really do it for me.

22:44 Erin: Vampires do it for me, really. But yeah, I maybe have to have a blood disorder to really.

22:50 Wes: Oh, yeah. Well, there you go. Yeah. Have you tried that for your blood disorder? Yeah, exactly, you sod. About zombie films. I don't. Philosophically, socially, it interests me because it's about the collective. What is the zombie? I think it's about old people, really, but stumbling around trying to Eat us because they envious or the dead.

23:14 Erin: Yeah, but that's also what vampires are about to a certain extent. Yeah, yeah. Basically this is all. They're all mummies is what you're saying. They're all the past trying to.

23:24 Wes: Yeah.

23:25 Erin: Trying to feast on the living and

23:27 Wes: the envy of the past for the living. So we, you know, of course, you know, we, we live by their rules. Right. All of our norms, as I was saying. Right. So the civilization is. Right. Has its formative origins and influences in these ancient civilizations. And then our dead ancestors, often the norms, at least their packaging. Right. Was determined by those who live before us. And we just sort of adopt their ways so they continue to live on in us. And sometimes we live on in very zombie like ways. It's like, well, I'm living by this code of ethics or these desires and things that I'm supposed to want and I, I don't know why I want them and I don't know who put this into me, you know, my parents or my culture or whatever. And so we do stump, you know, sometimes stumble around in the zombie like way in the state of pseudo desire. Right. The zombie is enough, I think in that state. Can't really desire. It doesn't. I mean it's animate, but not animate anyway, you get the, you get to get the picture. But you know, we, we can feel norms, the norms given to us by the dead as persecutory. But also I think there's some sort of fear of like the guilt, survivor guilt, you know, that produces a persecutory fantasy like the dead are going to come back for us.

24:44 Erin: Hmm.

24:44 Wes: It's not enough for them to persecute us with our harsh super in the form of a harsh superego. Right. And strict mores or values. They've got to come back in person and take life back from us. So those kinds of thoughts I find very interesting. But a bunch of zombies stumbling around like I think I could get away. It doesn't do it for me. I know. They make them faster now, I guess in some movies. What's it called? The Z. What was it called?

25:13 Erin: World War Z and then the Walking Dead.

25:16 Wes: I just. Yeah, I can't explain why. It just, it has no emotional effect for me.

25:21 Erin: Yeah, I feel the same way. The key with the zombie is that it might get you and then you become one of the undead too. And you. And I think this goes to your reading of these. The idea that the zombie is the victim of large cultural forces seems to be reinforced by the fact that the zombie is always part of a larger body of people. Whereas the vampire and the mummy seem more cult of personality, like they seem more. More individualistic and they have their own specific thing that they're after or about self employed. Right, right. Where. Where in the vampire it's maybe more appetitive and in the mummy it's more about. It's more intellectual, you could say, because it's more about memory and the past.

26:02 Wes: Yeah, there's more association of lust, I guess with vampires and with zombies it's a lack of, you know, again, like a pseudo desire. And desire. Not desire to do anything except to spread the. They reproduce, but they reproduce themselves by biting. Right.

26:19 Erin: It's not.

26:19 Wes: Not sexual reproduction or reproduction through love. So. And then in the case of the mummy, I think it's more about love. Right. We have lust, we have the aggression, at least in this story. Or maybe it's about knowing, maybe it's about knowledge, you know, the kind of things that you've pointed to. We're curious, but then we're greeted with something incomprehensible. This also makes me think of Peirce because he's kind of pointing to the ways in which knowledge is grounded in the incomprehensible. Right. Because at some point some kind of raw data comes in. It's unconceptualized and unknown. Kant calls this the manifold. And it's. Or it's the thing in itself. The alien unknowable thing in itself. Behind the manifold, perhaps. God, we have this weird situation where you're trying to cross the gap by knowing. But the very concept of knowledge implies something unknowable and alien and perhaps even persecutory. So again, once again, the curiosity, and the kind of benign curiosity of being in a museum looking at ancient artifacts could become fraught in some way.

27:24 Erin: I knew we'd get to Kant. I knew we'd be justified.

27:26 Wes: Sorry.

27:27 Erin: In choosing this film. No, I love it. I love it.

27:30 Wes: Yeah. It turns out Peirce was a big Kantian and Hegelian and it's just shocking to me how little I know about him and how profound he is. But. But anyway, final words.

27:40 Erin: I just. I hope I've proved to you how profound this film is.

27:45 Wes: I will. I will take it under consideration. No, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it.

27:52 Erin: Okay, well, thank you. And careful what you read.

27:57 Wes: Thank you.