Ancient Egyptian Religion on the Silver Screen: Modern Anxieties about Race, Ethnicity, and Religion
This essay examines the depiction of religion, race, and ethnicity in four films: The Mummy, Stargate, The Ten Commandments, and Prince of Egypt. Each film explicitly or implicitly, deliberately or not uses ancient Egyptian religion as a foil to dramatize American concerns about race and ethnicity. The foil is the mysterious, and often false, religiosity of an often Orientalized religious and ethnic "other." This article is available in Journal of Religion Film: http:/digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol7/iss2/1 In the 1932 classic The Mummy, we first meet the heroine Helen Grosvenor twenty minutes into the movie as she sits on the balcony of the famous Shepheard's hotel in Cairo. Gazing out at the great pyramids, she sighs, "The real Egypt." Then the camera cuts to an urban skyline dominated by the domes and minarets of mosques, and she mutters, "Are we really in this dreadful modern Cairo?" In this brief yet revealing scene, Helen's character, her dialogue, and the film's cinematography work together to present a contentious theme that reverberates throughout this film and others about ancient Egypt: the intersection of religion, race, and ethnicity in the "Western" view of the "Orient." In this scene, dirty, modern, Islamic Egypt is contrasted to the classical civilization of old. But as the story progresses, the boundaries between primitive modernity and classical antiquity become blurred; the frightening superstitions of the ancient polytheists literally come to life and walk the streets of modern Cairo, enchanting anyone whose veins course with Egyptian blood. As the story is told, the ancient Egypt for which Helen longs is seductive yet dangerous. While it leads Helen and her British associates to great archaeological discoveries, it also draws them into the primitive and vengeful desires of the ancients and their superstitions. As differences between Islamic urban Cairo and superstitious ancient Egypt collapse, the film draws increasingly firm boundaries between East and West, science and religion, whiteness and non whiteness. Helen's personal struggle with her own British and Egyptian ethnicities is the medium through which The Mummy presents the 1 Schroeder: Ancient Egyptian Religion on the Silver Screen Published by DigitalCommons@UNO, political, cultural, and religious struggles of the soon to be "post" colonial age of the Orient. Hollywood's love affair with ancient Egypt did not end with The Mummy, and neither did its use of ancient Egypt as a vehicle for cultural commentary about religion and race. This paper will examine the relationship between religion, race, and Western culture through the lens of two classic Hollywood films and their contemporary successors: The Mummy and Stargate, and The Ten Commandments and Prince of Egypt. Each film uses religion and race or ethnicity to naturalize Western ideals e.g. democracy, science, "Judeo Christian" monotheism at the expense of an ethnic "other." The foundations on which the Western self and the "other" are built are religion and ethnicity (or race) The first pair of films explicitly participates in what Edward Said has called a discourse of the Orient which constructs the archetypal Western society in opposition to a superstitious and authoritarian East. The Mummy and Stargate use ancient Egyptian religion as the vehicle for constructing modern narratives about the conflicts between the "authentic" discourses of Western science and JudeoChristian monotheism on the one hand and "false" discourses of Eastern spirituality and polytheism on the other. Race is the visual codifier of these dualisms, in which the educated and cultured white Westerners fight against or seek to liberate the superstitious "Egyptians." In the second pair of films, monotheism functions as an 2 Journal of Religion Film, Vol. 7 Iss. 2, Art. 1 http:/digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol7/iss2/1 important cultural imperative over and against a socially dangerous false polytheism. Religion is mapped onto ethnicity in the construction of the figure of Moses. One might argue that these films concern dead religions the myths and cultic practices of the ancient Egyptians and thus can offend no one. Yet these films are quite openly about the present the disjuncture between religion and science, the triumph of democracy over tyranny, or the continuing struggles of Jews to maintain their religion and culture in the face of an often hostile dominant culture. Though many viewers (including myself) might find some of these modern lessons extremely valuable, in three of these films (Prince of Egypt being the exception) they are nonetheless made at the expense of a reiterative "othering" of an equally real, modern, and present East. As Said argued in his book, Orientalism, the intellectual, political, economical, and artistic cultures of the West have all produced a discourse of "hegemony of European ideas about the Orient" which then reiterated "European superiority over Oriental backwardness." The "Orient" tells more about the "West" than the "real" East: Orientalism is a system of political doctrines, economic policies, literary and artistic images, and historical narratives that create an "East" that is the opposite of "Western" virtues, and an East produced in the context of Western colonization and imperialism over the East. The Orientalism that has emerged from the political and academic landscape of the 3 Schroeder: Ancient Egyptian Religion on the Silver Screen Published by DigitalCommons@UNO, nineteenth century is "the distillation of essential ideas about the Orient its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its backwardness into a separate and unchallenged coherence." To Said's list of "essential ideas" I would add the Orient's perceived superstitions. Said was originally most concerned with the European production of a Near Eastern "Orient," but today the United States has an equally large political, economic, and cultural investment in the Orient Said deconstructs. These films reflect this American investment in the Orient. Although the geography may be Egyptian, the characters battle for particularly American values. It is, I am sure, no surprise to hear me argue that these films tell us more about American sensibilities than about ancient Egyptian religion. What I also argue, however, is that the ways in which ancient Egyptian religiosity is presented reflect not only American values, but American values about race and ethnicity in which the foil is the mysterious, and often false, religiosity of an often Orientalized "other." Some of these films explicitly draw on the colonial and Orientalizing discourses Said has identified to produce an East that serves only to support Western, and in this case American, imperialism over it. On the potentially explosive subject of religion, race, and cultural difference, all of the films produce celluloid dragons for Americans to slay. 4 Journal of Religion Film, Vol. 7 Iss. 2, Art. 1 http:/digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol7/iss2/1 I will begin with The Mummy and its ideological sequel, Stargate. The Mummy opens at a 1921 British Museum field expedition in the Valley of the Kings, where archaeologists Sir Joseph Whemple and Dr. Muller have discovered a mysterious mummy named Imhotep and an accompanying box. A young assistant secretly opens the box and reads the enclosed "Scroll of Thoth" which contains the spell by which the goddess Isis brought the dead Osiris back to life. Imhotep magically awakes, scares the young man witless, and disappears with the scroll. Fast forward to 1932, when an Egyptian man named Ardeth Bey, who bears a striking resemblance to the lost mummy, points the British archaeological team now led by Whemple's son Frank to the tomb of Princess Anksenamen, Imhotep's former love. Once the artifacts are ensconced in the Cairo Museum, Ardeth Bey attempts to revive Anksenamen's mummy with the Scroll of Thoth. Instead, he bewitches the young Helen, who physically resembles Anksenamen. Across town, Helen feels compelled to leave the Shepheard's hotel and join Ardeth Bey/Imhotep at the museum. Imhotep decides to revive Helen's ancestral Egyptian blood so that she becomes a reincarnation of the Princess. He plans to kill Helen and then resuscitate her as a mummy with the scroll. Young Frank Whemple, in love with Helen, interrupts, distracting Imhotep long enough for the heroine who thinks she is Anksenamen to appeal to a nearby statue of the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis. Isis comes to life and destroys Imhotep, saving Anksenamen and restoring Helen to "herself," Helen. 5 Schroeder: Ancient Egyptian Religion on the Silver Screen Published by DigitalCommons@UNO, Throughout the film, East and West are compared through the elements of religion and race. Egypt is a place of dark mystery and superstition, contrasted to the West's allegiance to the clarity of science and logic. Dr. Muller, called a "master of the occult," plays the believing foil to the skeptical and scientific Joseph Whemple. Upon the discovery of the mummy and the scroll, Muller warns Joseph to investigate no further, "The Gods of Egypt still live in these hills..The ancient spells are weaker but still potent..Put it back. Bury it where you found it. You have read the curse you dare defy it?" Joseph replies simply, "In the interest of science, even if I believed in the curse, I'd go on in my work for the museum." Muller leaves the site, refusing to condone an "act of sacrilege" with his presence. Despite the subsequent mysterious disappearance of the mummy and the scroll, Whemple maintains his faith in the logic of science and ultimately dies because of his failure to acknowledge the Egyptian "ancient spells." Muller's warnings draw our attention to one of the main narrative devices of the film: the collapsing of ancient and modern. The Mummy contrasts Western science and rationality with not on