Lisa Hopkins

School of Cultural Studies
Sheffield Hallam University
L.M.Hopkins@shu.ac.uk

 

Review of: The Mummy Returns.Dir. Stephen Sommers. Perf. Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, and Arnold Vosloo. MCA/Universal, 2002.

 

On her arrival at a pre-election Conservative Party rally at the Plymouth Pavilion in May 2002, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher cracked a rare joke. “I was told beforehand my arrival was unscheduled,” she said, “but on the way here I passed a local cinema and it turns out you were expecting me after all. The billboard read, ‘The Mummy Returns'” (MacAskill). Predictably, this got a laugh from her audience. What, however, did she actually mean? The word “mummy” has two senses–an affectionate diminutive of “mother” and an embalmed corpse–and, depending perhaps on one’s own political affiliation, either might seem an appropriate description of Thatcher. The Guardian seemed to incline to the former when it headed its report “Tory matriarch goes on stage and off message,” which posited her as a kind of monstrous mother returning to smother and stymie the hapless William Hague, but The Independent quoted an unidentified former Tory minister as saying after the election, “I wish The Mummy had stayed in her box…. Every time she pops up, she costs us votes” (Grice), where the reference to “box” seems clearly to align her with a corpse. It is, perhaps, suggestive that the generally left-wing, anti-Thatcher Guardian should think of her as a mother, while a former Tory minister, who might reasonably be supposed to be more in sympathy with her, should think of her merely as a corpse: is the mother actually more menacing than the embalmed body?

 

At first sight, this ambiguity may seem to be entirely absent from the film to which Thatcher was referring, Stephen Sommers’s 2002 blockbuster The Mummy Returns, the sequel to his 1999 hit The Mummy, since the mummy in question is, in both films, male: it is that of the high priest Imhotep, condemned to eternal undeath after he murdered the Pharaoh Seti I because he desired the latter’s mistress, Ankh-Su-Namun. We see both their love and their death in a brief vignette at the start of the film, and then switch swiftly to the early twentieth century, where Brendan Fraser’s legionnaire becomes involved in helping Rachel Weisz’s Egyptologist search for Hamunaptra, the city where Seti is supposed to have concealed his treasure. Inevitably, Weisz accidentally brings Imhotep back to life, and he proceeds to regenerate by sucking dry the team of American adventurers who first disturbed his resting place. This seems a bit rough on them, since it was Weisz’s character, Evie Carnahan, who actually reanimated him, but then Imhotep has designs of another sort on her, since he proposes to sacrifice her to effect the resurrection of Ankh-Su-Namun. To this extent, Sommers’s Mummy obviously pays homage to Karl Freund’s 1932 film of the same name, where the heroine, Zita Johann’s Helen Grosvenor, is identified by Boris Karloff’s reanimated mummy as the long-lost princess Ankh-Su-Namun. The debt is also acknowledged when a severed hand moves of its own accord across the floor, though Sommer’s film of course leaves its predecessor far behind in special effects, even allowing itself a little self-congratulation when Kevin J. O’Connor’s disreputable Beni says to Imhotep, “I loved the whole sand-wall effect…. Beautiful, just beautiful.”

 

It goes without saying that Evie is rescued from Imhotep in the end by Fraser’s character, the relentlessly gung-ho Rick O’Connell, thus leaving the way clear for a sequel (the film was such an instant hit that studio bosses requested a second one immediately). The Mummy Returns was released almost exactly two years after its predecessor and brought together pretty much every character from the first film who wasn’t dead, plus two who were, since Imhotep and Ankh-Su-Namun both returned. It also added a new villain, the Scorpion King, played by the wrestler The Rock; gave Evie and Rick an eight-year-old son, Alex; and introduced Rick’s old friend Izzy (played by Shaun Parkes). Plot, as many reviewers commented, is not the strong point of The Mummy Returns, but to give a quick summary, Alex is kidnapped by Ankh-Su-Namun and Imhotep; Izzy produces a dirigible which allows the frantic parents to trace their son; and there is a spectacular three-way showdown between Rick, Imhotep, and the Scorpion King which concludes with the villains defeated but with enough life in them still to make it back for the inevitable second sequel, which will doubtless have even bigger battles and ever more monstrous monsters.

 

These, then, sound like clear-cut action films, with no place for the kind of ambiguity that was operating when the title of The Mummy Returns was borrowed as a designation for Margaret Thatcher. In fact, it becomes increasingly clear that the ambiguity is indeed active in Sommers’s film, for there is an alternative candidate for the role of the returning mummy, one whom the film arguably does, at least on some level, find more menacing even than Imhotep. Both kinds of mummies are scary, as I hope to show by tracing the changing nature of the narratives of Sommers’s two films in relation both to each other and to their influences and predecessors.

 

Though the ambiguity in the nature of the menace is more pronounced in The Mummy Returns, it was to some extent present from the very outset of Sommers’s project. The souvenir film program for The Mummy lists “Jerry Glover’s Nearly Top Ten Mummy Movies.” Glover’s number 6 is the 1959 The Mummy, which, he observes, “spawned three sequels, proving that, along with Dracula, Hammer’s heart belonged to mummy” (31). Forty years later, the 1999 The Mummy showed clear signs of an allegiance equally split between mummies and Dracula, for those familiar with the works of Bram Stoker could hardly fail to notice that Sommers’s first film was, in many respects, a heady mixture of Dracula and The Jewel of Seven Stars. The conjunction is an interesting one in many respects. It is notable that eight out of ten of Jerry Glover’s “Nearly Top Ten Mummy Movies” center, like Dracula and Frankenstein, on male monsters, and in recent years the trend toward co-opting vampirism as a metaphor for AIDS has meant that it is the sexual predatoriness of men rather than women that tends to be emphasized, making Stoker’s male monster a culturally useful avatar. When Stoker wrote The Jewel of Seven Stars, though, Queen Victoria had only just died, leaving the memory of a long matriarchy fresh in people’s minds, and the alarming figure of the New Woman, to which Stoker refers directly in Dracula, loomed equally large in the popular consciousness. Consequently, perhaps, both his mummy and four out of the five vampires we encounter in Dracula (as well as the pseudo-vampire in The Lady of the Shroud) are female, as also was the first vampire to be encountered in the original version of the novel, Countess Dolingen of Gratz. If The Mummy wanted to explore anxieties about gender, therefore, what better way than to draw on both Stoker’s kinds of monsters, his mummy and his vampire?

 

Given the fact that the film’s central character was a mummy, the debt to The Jewel of Seven Stars was unsurprising. This had already been the inspiration, as Glover acknowledges, for Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb (1971) and The Awakening (1980), not to mention Jeffrey Obrow’s 1997 Bram Stoker’s Legend of the Mummy and, subsequently, David DeCoteau’s Ancient Evil: Scream of the Mummy (2000). Some of these show more obvious signs of indebtedness than Sommers’s film, but there are clear parallels between The Jewel of Seven Stars and The Mummy. In each case, the mummy of an accursed individual who hopes for resurrection is buried in a hidden grave whose occupant is identified only as “nameless.” In The Mummy, the inscription on the tomb of Imhotep is “he who must not be named,” and Evie comments that the intention is clearly to destroy both his body and his soul–“This man must have been condemned not only in this life but in the next” (though this is also a detail found in Universal’s original 1932 The Mummy). In The Jewel of Seven Stars, Corbeck is told by the locals when he asks about Tera’s tomb that “there was no name; and that anyone who should name it would waste away in life so that at death nothing of him would remain to be raised again in the Other World” (96). In each, cats play a part in the story–in the case of The Mummy, in an episodic and ultimately unsatisfactory way which, in its failure to be logically integrated into the narrative, clearly suggests that an original source text has not been fully assimilated. (There was a cat in the 1932 Mummy, but it was Imhotep’s ally rather than his enemy.) In each, the natives show a fear not shared by the explorers, which in both instances proves abundantly justified by the fact that both tombs are booby-trapped. In both texts, too, a disembodied hand moves by itself, and in both the identity of a daughter proves to have been fundamentally constituted by an Egyptologist father. In Stoker’s novel, Margaret Trelawny proves to have been radically shaped by the explorations her father was undertaking at the time of her birth, whilst in The Mummy, Evie owes her very existence to her father’s passion for Egypt and his subsequent decision to marry her Egyptian mother. Even Evie’s employment in an Egyptological library is due to the fact that her parents were among its most generous benefactors. Finally, in each case the reanimation of a female mummy is partially achieved and then abruptly aborted, and in each this leads directly to the death of at least one of the main male characters: in the original ending of The Jewel of Seven Stars all but Malcolm Ross died, and in The Mummy it is because he is distracted by the fate of Ankh-Su-Namun that Imhotep fails to stop Jonathan from reading the incantation that will make him mortal and allow Rick to kill him. (In The Mummy Returns, it will, of course, be even more obvious that it is to Ankh-Su-Namun that Imhotep directly owes his death.)

 

That it should be the attempt to create a female monster which ultimately brings about the destruction of the male monster is, however, not a characteristic of The Jewel of Seven Stars–where those who die as a result are those whom we have by and large identified as “good” characters. It does, however, serve as a pretty fair description of both Dracula and its great avatar Frankenstein: in Dracula, it is the count’s vamping of Lucy which first alerts the Crew of Light to his existence, and his attempted vamping of Mina then creates a telepathic link that allows them to locate and destroy him; in Frankenstein, Victor’s refusal to complete the female monster leads ultimately to the deaths of both himself and the Creature, not to mention Elizabeth. There are also other crossovers that weave their way between Dracula, The Jewel of Seven Stars, and The Mummy, most notably in the scene in which Imhotep enters Evie’s locked room in the form of sand, a clear emblem of affiliation with the desert, before metamorphosing into a man who bends down and kisses her as she sleeps, just as Dracula does with Mina.

 

Equally, though, there are some elements of The Mummy that appear to owe their genesis to Dracula alone. In The Jewel of Seven Stars, the alien being is female and, in an obvious parody of the contemporary popularity of “mummy” striptease acts, must submit to being stripped naked by the Edwardian gentlemen who have control of her corpse. In The Mummy, however, as in Dracula, these roles are reversed because the monster is male and poised to sexually prey on modern females. The increasing skimpiness of Imhotep’s costume, culminating in a pair of briefs and a cloak for his planned reunion with his lost love, makes this abundantly clear; the cape-like cloak further reinforces the echoes of Dracula, as does the fact that the fleeing soul of Ankh-Su-Namun clearly resembles a bat. Equally, Beni’s attempt to deter Imhotep by holding up a crucifix might serve to align Imhotep with a vampire–this is certainly how it is seen in Max Allan Collins’s official novelization of the film (Mummy 156). The way in which Imhotep sucks people dry in order to rejuvenate also directly parallels the way in which the count’s blood-drinking causes him to appear significantly younger when Jonathan Harker sees him in London, and indeed the curse on Imhotep’s tomb explicitly affirms that he will return initially as an “Un-dead.” The shared name of Jonathan Harker and Evie’s brother Jonathan Carnahan functions as a further link between the two texts, as does Imhotep’s ability to command the elements and predatory lower life-forms. Similarly, the idea of using a modern woman to resurrect an ancient one may be central to The Jewel of Seven Stars, but the specifically erotic inflection provided by the fact that in The Mummy it is not the dead woman herself but her long-lost lover who wishes to effect the resurrection is more reminiscent of Coppola’s Dracula than of Stoker’s mummy fiction. Also strongly echoing the basic situation of Dracula is the dearth of women in The Mummy and the subsequent fierceness of the competition over them.

 

Most interestingly, both texts share a fascination with Jewishness. As many critics have noticed, Dracula, with its bloodsucking, gold-grubbing, hook-nosed monster, is a clearly anti-Semitic text. The Mummy, meanwhile, shows strong debts not only to Stoker but also to Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, whose plot centers on the recovery of the Hebrew Ark of the Covenant. This is perhaps most obvious in the depiction of the hero, which is also where The Mummy departs most sharply from Stoker. Stoker’s heroes, with the notable exception of Rupert Sent Leger in The Lady of the Shroud, tend to be found wanting in moments of crisis; all too often, they are still worrying about what they should do long after they have lost the moment when they could have done anything at all. In this respect Rick O’Connell, singlehandedly five times more effective than the entire Crew of Light put together (not to mention the negligible Frank Whemple in the 1932 Mummy), clearly owes much less to Stoker than to Indiana Jones, of whom he is obviously a direct descendant.

 

There are a number of points of marked similarity between The Mummy and the Indiana Jones trilogy: the long-lost Egyptian city, locatable only by an antique map, which houses fabulous treasures; the transformation in the appearance of the hero, from adventurer-archaeologist to college professor in the case of Indiana Jones and from legionnaire to wild man and back again in the case of Rick O’Connell; the repeated hair’s-breadth escapes from danger; and our hero’s ultimate disdain of personal profit. (Though the camels on which Rick and Evie escape are in fact loaded with the treasure stashed in the saddlebags by Beni, which presumably finances the splendor of their house in The Mummy Returns, they are unaware of these riches at the time.) There is also the fact that Evie, like Marion in Raiders of the Lost Ark, has to make up to her captor to distract his attention from the doings of her true love; there is the presence of hideous supernatural peril and of parallels between The Mummy‘s Ardeth Bay and his followers and the hereditary guardians of the holy place in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; and at the end of both The Mummy and Raiders of the Lost Ark the villain’s soul is borne away to Hell. Even Imhotep’s nonchalant crunching of the beetle which enters his face through the hole in his cheek could be seen as a reprise of the moment in Raiders of the Lost Ark in which a fly crawls across the cheek of the French archaeologist Belloc while he is speaking, apparently disappearing into his mouth without him noticing. (This moment has been airbrushed out of the video version of Raiders of the Lost Ark but was clearly visible in the original film.)

 

In the Jewish Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, however, the villains are Nazis, whom Indiana Jones, though not himself Jewish, detests. By contrast, The Mummy is not without its share of Jewish actors–Oded Fehr’s Ardeth Bay, Rachel Weisz’s Evelyn–but they play Arab characters (Evelyn is half-Egyptian, Ardeth Bay a Tuareg), and though the mummy (unlike Dracula) has no fear of the cross or of the image of Buddha, he spares Beni and indeed gives him gold when he brandishes the Star of David and utters what Imhotep terms “the language of the slaves” (Hebrew–which Beni conveniently happens to know). Later, what finally returns Imhotep to mortality is Evie’s utterance of a word which sounds suspiciously like “Kaddish,” and one might also note the film’s distinct animus against the redundancy of the British air force, in the presence of the emblematically named Winston, who have nothing better to do than fool around drunkenly and futilely in the Middle East–with, perhaps, the possible implication that this was effectively what they were doing when they later presided over the birth of the state of Israel. In this respect, the conjunction of Dracula with The Jewel of Seven Stars allows not only for a convergence of vampires and mummies, but also for another convergence which the film seems to find ideologically interesting: that of Egypt with Israel. (It is notable that the equivalent character to Beni in the 1932 Mummy, who is also identified as a hereditary slave of the Egyptians, was Nubian.)

 

Even more anxiety-ridden than the film’s depiction of racial and national identities, however, is its depiction of gender. Although O’Connell is far closer to the classically heroic status of Indiana Jones than to the beleaguered masculinity of Stoker’s heroes, there are also distinct differences from the Indiana Jones films in general and from Raiders of the Lost Ark in particular. In the first place, in The Mummy it is the heroine, not the hero, who is knowledgeable about Egypt, able to decipher hieroglyphic inscriptions and correct the obnoxious Beni’s translation of Imhotep’s ancient Egyptian. When Jonathan Hyde’s Egyptologist dismisses his rivals’ expedition on the grounds that its leader is a woman and therefore incapable of knowing anything, the camera immediately cuts to Evie expounding precisely what she knows. Conversely, although Brendan Fraser (who plays O’Connell) remarks in the film program that his character is “sometimes the brain and sometimes the brawn in a situation” (11), the element of brawn is far more pronounced, not least in the fact that whereas college professor Indiana Jones always preferred to try his hand with a rope, falling back on a gun principally for the sake of a gag–as in the famous scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where, confronted with a crack swordsman, he shoots him–O’Connell shoots (usually with two guns) at everything, whether it is animate or not. (At one point, Evie, being led to be sacrificed, hears a gunshot outside and says happily, “O’Connell!” Quite.) Even when he is standing against a wall at which bullets are being shot at regular intervals, Evie has to tug him out of what will obviously be the trajectory of the next one. His resolute preference for not using whatever intelligence he may possess seems all part of a reversal of roles that is completed when, in a direct inversion of a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, the build-up to a kiss between hero and heroine is interrupted by one of them passing out–only this time it is the heroine, not the hero, who loses consciousness, and it is through drunkenness, not excessive fatigue.

 

In one way, what seems to be at work here is simply a cultural shift which has ensured that the feistiness of Raiders of the Lost Ark‘s Marion has been replaced by quietist, post-feminist gender roles–it is notable that Evie, unlike Marion, cannot hold her drink and falls over when she tries to learn to throw punches. (Indeed one might notice that the Indiana Jones films themselves discarded Marion, and in fact never settled to a heroine, with Karen Allen’s Marion giving way without explanation or comment to Kate Capshaw’s Willie Scott in the second and no heroine at all in the third, since Alison Doody’s Dr. Elsa Schneider turns out to be a villainess.) Thus, though Evie may be clever, she is quite incapable of looking after herself (she even has an accident in her own library) and must rely on O’Connell periodically to rescue her. Indeed, one might well conclude that the film’s ultimate moral is that while half-naked hussies will only attract losers, nice demure girls will always find themselves properly taken care of.

 

Equally, however, there are clear traces of a counternarrative at work in The Mummy. In this respect, the most interesting figure is Evie’s feckless brother, Jonathan. The first time we see him is when Evie, alone in the Egyptological museum, hears a noise. Clearly scared, she goes to investigate and is horribly startled by Jonathan popping up out of a sarcophagus. Quietly but implicitly, Jonathan is thus initially identified with a mummy, though he himself seems immediately to seek to undo this by addressing Evie as “Old Mum.” In the next sequence, Jonathan and Evie visit an imprisoned O’Connell, whose pocket Jonathan had previously picked. Reaching through the bars, O’Connell punches Jonathan and kisses Evie, actions which, amongst other purposes, seem clearly to interpellate them in their respective gender roles. Jonathan, however, does not stay put in his, because not only does he prove to need rescuing by O’Connell nearly as often as Evie does, he also puts himself into her place in other ways: when O’Connell, having seen off Imhotep, asks Evie, “Are you all right?,” it is Jonathan who answers, “Well… not sure.” Not for nothing does he refer to O’Connell at one point as “the man” (assuming as he does so that O’Connell’s injunction to stay put and keep out of danger applies to him as well as to Evie). Most notably, when O’Connell sets off to rescue the parasol-carrying Egyptologist from Imhotep, he tells Jonathan, Henderson, and Daniels to come with him and Evie to stay in safety. The three men, however, are all too scared to come, while Evie is equally adamant that she won’t stay behind. Not until O’Connell scoops her up in a fireman’s lift, tosses her on the bed, and locks the door on her are gender roles restored–but even then it is visibly at the price of conceding that however firmly they may thus be instantiated, the majority of the film’s characters don’t actually conform to them.

 

Moreover, intertextual echoes may well mean that, for some members of the audience at least, even O’Connell’s position is not fully assured. When he appears long-haired and unkempt in a Cairo prison, Brendan Fraser is obviously reprising his role as the eponymous hero of the 1997 Disney film George of the Jungle, while Evie’s “What’s a nice place like this doing in a girl like me?” recalls the chat-up line George proposes to use on Ursula, “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a plane like this?” In one sense George is of course the ultimate wild man, over whom all Ursula’s girlfriends swoon when they see him running with a horse, but he does also appear in a dress and, at the outset, has indeed no concept of gender at all, referring to the hyper-feminine Ursula as a “fella.” Since Ursula dislikes her official fiancé and runs off instead with the socially unacceptable outsider George, the possible intertext with The Mummy is doubly interesting here.

 

In The Mummy Returns, the note of uncertainty thus introduced in The Mummy is further developed, and new areas of anxiety are highlighted. The Mummy Returns opened, in Britain at least, to a barrage of distinctly lukewarm reviews that stressed the incoherence of its plot. The Independent reviewed it twice in two days and hated it both times, with Anthony Quinn demanding, “Are you following all this? I don’t think the filmmakers could care less if you do or not…. There’s nothing so old-fashioned as plot development here, just a pile-up of set-pieces.” Peter Preston in The Observer asked, “What’s going on here? Silly question, one beyond any computer’s figuring…. Summon the Raiders of the Lost Plot. Nothing in Stephen Sommers’s screenplay makes, or is intended to make, any sense,” while Xan Brooks in The Guardian more succinctly advised, “Forget trying to follow the plot.”

 

There certainly are uncertainties about its plot. “Why?” asks Imhotep when the Scorpion King hoists up the curator, and one can think of few better questions. What is the curator’s motivation? Why does he need Imhotep to fight the Scorpion King? What happens to Evie’s previously mortal wound when she is resurrected? What is the nature of the apparent feud between Ardeth Bey and Lock-Nah? Who is Patricia Velazquez’s character before the soul of Ankh-Su-Namun takes possession of her? Is Rick really a Medjai, and if so, does it matter? Where exactly would Anubis, a jackal, wear a bracelet? Perhaps most puzzlingly, who on earth are the pygmies? The only possible explanation for them seems to come from Rick’s remark right at the beginning about the shortness of Napoleon, together with production designer Allan Cameron’s observation, in The Mummy Unwrapped, that design for the film had relied heavily on a volume of Egyptian sketches produced for Napoleon.

 

A far deeper faultline, however, runs through the second film, and that is its representation of its characters. In the preview of The Mummy Returns included in the “ultimate edition” of The Mummy, director Stephen Sommers observes that his paramount aim in making the sequel was to retain as many of the same characters as possible, but to make their relationships “more intertwining.” He has certainly reprised for all he is worth: Cairo Museum in the first film is replaced by the British Museum in this, Alex collapses pillars in a domino-like fashion just as Evie did the bookshelves, and he can’t read the last word of the incantation just as Jonathan couldn’t in the first film (and it’s the same word). So close are the similarities, indeed, that Anthony Quinn in The Independent complained that “this didn’t look like a sequel. This looked like a remake… this is the worst case of déjà vu I’ve ever had in a cinema.” The debt to Indiana Jones, too, is not only revisited but extended, with the lamplit digging scene directly pastiching that in Raiders of the Lost Ark and the presence of Alex invoking the spinoff series Young Indiana Jones, particularly in the scene in which he runs through the ruins of a temple, with gunfire all around him, looking like a miniature version of his father in the legionnaire sequence of the first film. (This element is even more pronounced in the spinoff novelization Revenge of the Scorpion King, billed as the first of “The Mummy Chronicles,” in which Alex, now 12, bands together with Jewish refugee Rachel to prevent Hitler doing a deal with Anubis.)

 

There are changes, though. Perhaps the most noticeable of these is that almost as strong as the influence of the Indiana Jones trilogy is that of the Star Wars films, and most particularly The Phantom Menace, which opened in the same summer as the original Mummy and was thus its direct comparator and rival. Nicholas Barber in The Independent on Sunday scathingly listed just a few of the similarities:

 

The Phantom Menace introduced a mop-topped blond boy to the cast; The Mummy Returns does the same. The Phantom Menace used racial caricatures; The Mummy Returns has dozens of desert-folk machine-gunned and burned alive. And just as Star Wars had an archetypal fairy-tale clarity that was subsequently obscured by portentous back-story and pseudo-spiritual mumbo jumbo, The Mummy Returns is clogged up with complicated exposition and flashbacks that serve no purpose except to lay foundations for another sequel. It even blabs on about the sacred “Medjai” warriors – couldn’t Sommers have come up with a name that didn’t share four letters with Jedi?

 

Other elements of similarity between the two films could also be pointed out. The final battle of The Mummy Returns, where the warriors of Anubis disappear on the death of the Scorpion King, clearly echoes the final fight of The Phantom Menace, where the droids drop when the mother ship is disabled (and in each case the large-scale fight is taking place in the open air while the crucial smaller one is in a confined space). When the first vision generated by the bracelet of Anubis fades away, there is a noise just like that of a light sabre. There are also echoes of the earlier Star Wars films. The new character Izzy closely parallels Lando Calrissian from The Empire Strikes Back: both are black (something to which Izzy draws attention by referring to Rick as “the white boy”), both are introduced by the hero to the heroine as an old acquaintance but immediately react in an apparently hostile way, and both supply an aircraft. Thus Rick, having started his career in the first film as Harrison Ford in the Indiana Jones trilogy, seems now to have been reinvented as Harrison Ford in the Star Wars trilogy, a parallel made even clearer when Ardeth, having identified him as a Medjai and Evelyn as the reincarnation of Nefertiri, tells him that it is his preordained role to protect a royal woman just as Han Solo protects Princess Leia.

 

Most significantly, the incorporation of motifs and borrowings from the Star Wars series has helped The Mummy Returns become something which The Mummy, by and large, was not: Gothic. This is an element clearly present in Star Wars, where the ostensible opposition of Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker rapidly gives place to a paired and conflicted relationship in which the one sees the other in the mirror. In The Mummy, however, oppositions stay, by and large, opposed. There are one or two moments of doubling–Imhotep staring after his own soul-self as it is borne away to hell, the twinned books, Beni facing the mummy for the first time with matching expressions on their faces–but in general the film occupies a terrain in which the bad are simply bad and the good are simply good.

 

In the second film, however, identities and affiliations prove much less stable: it is after all, as Max Allan Collins’s novelization declares, an expedition for Evie “to discover not the history of the pharaohs, but the meaning of her own dreams” (16-17). We may, for instance, be disconcerted to find Ardeth Bay in the company of the baddies, and although we may guess that his motive is to keep an eye on them, Rick’s first response is to smash him against the wall and demand to know where Evie is. Most notably, although actions are directly repeated from the first film, as with the reading of the incantation and the demolishing of the pillars, they are not performed by the same person, as though identities are shifting. There are also other doublings and pairings. We learn for the first time that Evie was Nefertiri in a previous life (a doubling strongly reminiscent of that of Margaret and Tera in Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars). Similarly, Meela is Ankh-Su-Namun reincarnated and Rick’s tattoo seems to identify him as one of the Medjai. (Though this, unless it is leading up to a further sequel, proves to be a bit of a narrative red herring and is also complicated by the fact that the novelization for children describes the tattoo as proving that he is “a Masonic Templar” [Whitman 63] and the novelization for adults calls him a “Knight Templar” [Collins, Mummy Returns 96], even though common elements to both which do not appear in the film clearly indicate that both were based on the shooting script.)

 

The most notable instance of these doublings and slippages takes us back to Margaret Thatcher’s joke. When Evie goes with Imhotep in the first film, she turns back to Rick and says, “If he makes me into a mummy, you’re the first one I’m coming after.” In one way, the meaning of this remark and of the surrounding sequence is obvious: she loves Rick and is hoping he will rescue her before Imhotep can kill her. But it is also shadowed by other meanings. In the first place, what would she be “coming after” Rick for–because she loves him, or because, having been made into a monster herself, she would seek him as prey? There would certainly be a direct Stokerian precedent here in a precisely parallel situation: Lucy’s attempted vamping of Arthur. More troublingly, from the first time he sees her, Imhotep has identified Evie with his lost love, Ankh-Su-Namun. Every time he has met her subsequently, he has tried to kiss her (and on one occasion has succeeded). He has therefore clearly been established as an alternative suitor. Of course, there might well seem to be no contest: O’Connell is dashing, handsome, honorable, and alive, whereas Imhotep passes through a variety of stages of decay and proposes to kill Evie. Nevertheless, a different interpretation is offered in Max Allan Collins’s novelization of the film.

 

Collins–who, suggestively, also directed and novelized Mommy (1995) and Mommy’s Day (1997), in which an apparently perfect mother is revealed to be evil–seems several times to incriminate Evie. He develops the idea sketched in the sequence where she tells O’Connell and the Americans, “Let’s be nice, children. If we’re going to play together we must learn to share,” by having her think, “Men were such children” (142). He also makes Jonathan ask the Americans after the blinding of Burns, “Going back home to mummy?” (166). Again this develops a much fainter hint in the film, when Jonathan explains to Rick the meaning of a preparation chamber–“Mummies, my good son. This is where they made the mummies”–where sons and mothers are forced briefly but uneasily into conjunction. Most suggestively, Collins invents for the sleeping Evie a dream sequence in which she is having

 

nearly delirious images of herself and O’Connell fleeing from the mummy across the ruins of the City of the Dead, only at times she was fleeing from Rick and holding on to the mummy’s hand… it was all very troubling, which was why she was moaning, even crying out in her fitful sleep. (188)

 

For Collins, Imhotep here is less a monster than the handsome prince awakening Snow White (189). And after all, Rick has already had to demand of Evie, “You dream about dead guys?”

 

Can this really be true? When Evie says to O’Connell, “if he makes me into a mummy, you’re the first one I’m coming after,” can her words, at any level, really be gesturing at an alternative possibility in which it is Imhotep who becomes her successful suitor, going so far as to impregnate her, and O’Connell whom she would seek to destroy? On the level of common sense, this is patently absurd. But on the darker levels of the subconscious, perhaps the film does not find its heroine so biddable as it might like–it is certainly not hard to read her slamming of the suitcase on Rick’s hands as a snapping vagina dentata, while the scarabs which emerge from mouths clearly recall the Alien films, with their clear interest in the monstrous-feminine–nor is its mummy quite so repellent as one might expect. In The Mummy Unwrapped, producer Sean Daniel refers to Imhotep as “an extremely dangerous and extremely handsome man,” and Pete Hammond, whose role as “film analyst” introduces an interesting ambiguity, opines that “people want to believe in a life after death situation,” and thus sees the figure of the mummy as representing, however bizarrely, a wish fulfilment rather than a threat. Certainly when Ardeth and Dr. Bey explain that Imhotep must still love Ankh-Su-Namun after three thousand years, Evie observes, “that’s very romantic,” and in one sense, so it is. It is of course unusual for a mummy fiction to include a romance element at all. (Though it is true that both The Jewel of Seven Stars and the 1932 Mummy do, both are nugatory.) We might thus expect the initial concentration on the romance of Imhotep and Ankh-Su-Namun to continue to be the focus of interest and to be viewed more sympathetically than ultimately it is. We certainly could not predict at that stage that the initial kiss between Imhotep and Ankh-Su-Namun would ultimately be replaced by that between Rick and Evie at the close, and though Ardeth Bay obviously regards Imhotep as evil, we are not necessarily inclined to take his word for it since, in the first place, others of the Medjai have already tried to stab Evie, and, in the second, Ardeth Bey was actually the alias used by Imhotep himself in the 1932 Mummy. And it is also noticeable that The Mummy Returns seems to find Imhotep so insufficiently scary that it feels obliged to supplement the menace he offers with that provided by the Scorpion King (who, in another instance of these films’ perverse ability to find their villains rather than their hero attractive, in fact upstages Imhotep so much that he is now set to star in his own spinoff, The Scorpion King, due for release in 2002).

 

In one way, however, the Scorpion King proves unnecessary, because there is already an extra threat present in the second film, and it comes from Evie. However faint the hint of menace playing over her in the first film, it is far more clearly marked in the second. (The menace was also there in the 1932 Mummy, where Helen Grosvenor, pathologized from the outset by being under the care of the doctor, fed bromide when she puts on her make-up and tries to join Imhotep, and explicitly associated with the adulterous temptress Helen of Troy, is a reincarnation of Ankh-Su-Namun.) Indeed, while the treatment of O’Connell in The Mummy Returns is much as it was in The Mummy, the characterization of Evie has been fundamentally reconceived. Despite her hopelessness during the boxing lesson in the first film, where she displayed an inability to cope so profound that she even had to ask a blind man for help, she is now a superbly accomplished fighter and rescues Jonathan from Ankh-Su-Namun. She no longer needs her glasses, and she wears trousers. Most strikingly, toward the end of The Mummy Returns, there is an entirely unprepared-for narrative twist: Ankh-Su-Namun, on her way into the temple, turns and stabs Evie in the stomach, from which Evie shortly after dies, only to be restored to life by Alex reading the incantation from the Book of Amun-Ra. Since Evie’s death proves to be only temporary, the event may seem to have little narrative significance, but its thematic resonances are great. In particular, it is the first time that her son Alex, rather than O’Connell, rescues her. For him, at least, Evie is the mummy who returns.

 

Is she for the rest of us? Is Evie, in some bizarre sense, the monster we most fear? Ankh-Su-Namun’s choice of the stomach as the site of attack is certainly suggestive. (Rick, by contrast, is habitually attacked in the neck: the botched hanging at a Cairo prison, the Medjai grabbing him round the neck on the burning ship, Imhotep’s attempt to throttle him–almost as though he were the victim of a vampire.) In the first film, both Imhotep and Ankh-Su-Namun herself die from precisely similar wounds to the stomach (in Ankh-Su-Namun’s case twice), so that Evie is thus linked with them, as she also is when she is seen as Nefertiri wearing a mask just as Imhotep does before he is fully regenerated, and when Ankh-Su-Namun pacifies a group of gun-wielding men just as Evie herself did in the first film. Moreover, Meela adopts pseudo-maternal behavior toward Alex, and Max Allan Collins’s novelization even suggests that Imhotep does so too:

 

And Imhotep, grinning, almost as if proud of the boy, wagged a finger down at Alex.

 

“Naughty, naughty,” he said, and held out his hand.

 

Swallowing, reluctant, Alex got to his feet, brushed off his short pants, and took the mummy’s hand. (169)

 

A mummy thus merges with a mummy (and we might note that when Meela stabbed herself in the stomach and was then revived, she came back with a completely different personality, which could suggest that Evie too might do so). Ankh-Su-Namun’s thrust into Evie’s stomach can also, indeed, be read as a direct blow at the womb, with Ankh-Su-Namun, childless and with no sign of any other relatives, pitted deliberately against Evie, who is a wife, a mother, a sister, and a daughter both to Seti and to her Carnahan parents (with the name, according to the novelization, deliberately invoking a blend of Carter and Carnarvon; the first name of Evie’s father is specifically given in the book as Howard, and he is said to have discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun). It would be easy to see this as motivated primarily by the childless woman’s envy of the mother, while it would be equally possible to see it as also configured by the fact that, in the story as it is now told, Ankh-Su-Namun is also the replacement for Evie/Nefertiri’s mother, who is never mentioned and is thus her stepmother. (O’Connell too is now identified as motherless: both the children’s and the adult novelizations have him referring to having received his tattoo in an orphanage in Hong Kong, though in the movie itself he appears to say “Cairo,” while Revenge of the Scorpion King is equally the revenge of Rachel for the death of her mother at the hands of the Nazis, and immediately after the revelation of this Alex uncovers a cache of weapons and shouts, “We’ve hit the mother lode!” [Wolverton 71, 72].)

 

But though Ankh-Su-Namun’s attack on Evie could be read as the rage of a childless woman against a mother, it is by no means clear that the film as a whole does regard motherhood as an enviable state. “Run, you sons of bitches!” screams Henderson in The Mummy to O’Connell and Jonathan, casually indicting all mothers as he flees. “Mother!” screams the Cockney lackey in The Mummy Returns when he first sees Imhotep. “Mummies!” says Rick in the first film disgustedly, adding, “I hate mummies!” in the second. This is unfortunate, since Evie’s dying words, “Look after Alex…. I love you,” in a sense constitute him as a mummy. Moreover, Rick is at first prostrated by grief at Evie’s death and, though he goes to fight Imhotep and the Scorpion King, he is soon knocked to the ground again and raised only by the unexpected sound of her voice. The effect is of a resurrection from the dead, something that is repeated when Evie pulls him up from the abyss: in one sense, then, it is now he who has returned from a symbolic grave. That his reprieve is, however, conditional is clearly indicated by the fact that the classic hand-over-the-edge shot here has the suggestive variation that Rick’s hand has a wedding ring: the suggestion is clearly that Evie comes and pulls him up because they are properly married, whereas Ankh-Su-Namun leaves Imhotep to die because they aren’t.

 

Rick’s survival, then, is contingent on his status as a family man. But, as he himself says, “Sometimes it’s hard being a dad,” and the film does indeed make us clearly aware of the pressures of having children (not least since Jonathan, to whom Rick says sternly, “I thought I said no more wild parties?,” in effect functions as a substitute teenager, while Collins’s novelization makes quite clear the extent to which the pygmy mummies are also conceived of as hideously threatening children [228]). Indeed, the very casting of Brendan Fraser as Rick creates ripples, since two years before The Mummy he had appeared in Ross Marks’s Twilight of the Golds (another film with a highly conflicted view of Jewishness), playing a gay man whose sister is appalled to discover that the son she is carrying is likely to share his sexuality: in the end, she keeps the child, but the decision breaks up her marriage. (Not to mention Fraser’s even more recent appearance as Ian McKellen’s lust object in Bill Condon’s 1998 Gods and Monsters, where he once again sports a tattoo which allows another man to guess his past and appears too with Kevin J. O’Connor, who was to play Beni in The Mummy.) In The Mummy Returns, Alex’s repeated “Are we there yet?” seems only partly parodic; he and Jonathan both groan whenever Rick and Evie kiss (and it is also during a kiss that Alex manages to get himself kidnapped), and it is in fact only when Rick and Evie are without Alex that they are actually able to reprise the first film. The first two dangers Rick faces in the film come from his own family: Alex creeps up behind him, and Evie throws a snake just as he enters. Most notably, although the second film seems to be deliberately less frightening than the first, it still received a 12 certificate in the U.K., so that if you actually have a child like Alex, you can’t go to see it without a babysitter. Gothic is often predicated on the loss of a parent; here, though, the ultimate, darkest fantasy may well be the loss of a child. It is played out in safety (you can of course retrieve your own offspring from the babysitter later), but, just briefly, you can acknowledge that the role of mummy is the enemy, and kill it.

 

Works Cited

 

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• Bram Stoker’s Legend of the Mummy. Dir. Jeffrey Obrow. Perf. Louis Gossett Jr., Amy Locane. Unapix Films, 1997.
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• George of the Jungle. Dir. Sam Weisman. Perf. Brendan Fraser, Leslie Mann, John Cleese. Disney, 1997.
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• The Mummy Unwrapped. Dir. Christopher Sliney. Perf. Rachel Weisz, Brendan Fraser, Stephen Sommers. Universal, 1999.
• Quinn, Anthony. “You Can’t Say Pharaoh Than That.” Rev. of The Mummy Returns. The Independent 18 May 2002 <http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=73090>.
• The Phantom Menace. Dir. George Lucas. Perf. Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman. Lucasfilm, 1999.
• Preston, Peter. “Mummy, What’s Anthea Doing on the Floor?” Rev. of The Mummy Returns. The Observer 20 May 2002 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4189085,00.html>.
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• Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Ed. A. N. Wilson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983.
• Stoker, Bram. The Jewel of Seven Stars. Intr. David Glover. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.
• Whitman, John. The Mummy Returns. London: Bantam Books, 2002.
• Wolverton, Dave. Revenge of the Scorpion King. London: Bantam, 2002.