Monstrously Feminine: Orientalism Embodied in 2017’s The Mummy

Introduction

Shrouded in swirling sands a form emerges—tall and lithe, beautiful, and seductive, she is a power hungry Egyptian princess intent on controlling more than men are willing to give her. For this transgression she is punished, mummified while still alive, lying dormant until a hapless Western man stumbles upon her resting place and she can begin to wreak her vengeance upon all the world. This is the story played out in previews for Universal Pictures’ 2017 reboot of The Mummy. Featuring a Western male seemingly rescuing the world from a seductive, and dangerous, Eastern threat, the previews traded hard on long-lived Orientalist stereotypes and fears. Most critics, however, failed to pick up on the movie’s trafficking in Orientalism. The review that appeared in Variety lamented The Mummy’s “busyness” (Gleiberman, 2017), while Empire’s review focused on the way the film’s mummy was transformed into a “needy man-chaser” (Jolin, 2017), and the review appearing in Vulture suggested The Mummy was a “lousy” movie with a lot of visual panache (Edelstein, 2017). A review appearing on Vox did engage with the cultural and historic importance of mummies while also acknowledging how the 2017 film perpetuated Orientalist understandings of the Middle East (Romano, 2017); however, it was the rare exception.

Framed as the cornerstone of Universal’s rebooting of its catalog of classic monster movies (meant to compete with the various comic book films on the market), 2017’s The Mummy featured a female villain for the first time. In a promotional video for the film, star Tom Cruise said of the film’s female mummy, “You find yourself … being attracted to her and wanting to run from her in the same breath, she just has tremendous power” (Flickering Myth, 2017). Alex Kurtzman, the film’s director and writer, said of his villain that:

When I decided to make it [the mummy] a woman it opened up a huge door for story. It did what I think is the most essential ingredient of all monster movies: you have to be afraid of the monster and you have to sympathize with the monster and I really feel connected to her story. (HeyUGuys, 2017)

The Orient and Its Monsters

When ancient cartographers created maps of their ever-expanding world, areas they had little to no knowledge of were often labeled in a way—such as with the phrase “here be monsters”—that indicated a fear of the unknown. For many Christians living in Middle Ages’ Europe, such monsters often lived in Muslim lands (Akbari, 2009). Arjana (2015) notes that “Muslims are the monsters of the present, phantasms that result from an imaginary Islam that has been shaped over many centuries” (p. 3). This shaping has led to Muslims being imagined as “permanent foreigners” who, despite their diversity, are “reduced and essentialized to a caricature of ridiculous proportions” (Arjana, 2015, p. 2). This caricature often suggests that Muslims, or people who might be Muslims, could pollute the West. There was a fear that engagement with what was seen as Oriental, the cultures and the peoples, might produce a mixture of religions, cultures, and races that could erase difference and notions of Western, Christian, superiority (Akbari, 2009; Mastnak, 2010). This fear was produced, in part, by the closeness of the Orient and the West to one another. Matar (2014) notes that during the Ottoman Empire, “Christians and Muslims lived cheek by jowl, learning each other’s customs and sharing in baths and markets, courts and sometimes shrines” (p. 40). Eventually, as European powers began to stretch their military might into the Orient, an enterprise spurred by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt (Matar, 2014; Trafton, 2004), Orientalist narratives framing the East as corrupt and deviant took hold. These were then used to help propel European colonial expansion and help empower the colonizers in their so-called civilizing mission throughout the Orient or Near East (Said, 1979).

In discussing the early development of what he calls a “clash of civilizations 1.0” rhetoric, Hobson (2014) points out that what is seen as “the barbaric Other constitutes a threat both to the world order and, above all, to Western civilization” (p. 76). However, where once the idea of a monstrous East grew out of a lack of knowledge of lands beyond Western borders, the monstrous East framed during Europe’s colonial expansion grew out of imperial familiarity. Here was a monster that the West could know and must conquer. One way of mastering the Orient and its monsters was to consume them. Parameswaran (2002) suggests that this consumption was designed to “contain the threat posed by the colonized and reinvent the Western Self through consumption of the non-Western Other” (p. 298). After Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt, Western consumers craved all things Egyptian (Meskell, 1998; Rice & MacDonald, 2003; Trafton, 2004), with Europeans during the Victorian era actually consuming ancient Egyptian mummies that were unwrapped and ground into powders at parties (Meskell, 1998). These unwrapping parties served as a visceral display of the power of the West over the East.

Orientalism’s Women

Historically, Orientalist media, art, and rhetoric have served to frame women living in the Near or Far East as victims—of their cultures, their histories, and the men in their communities. This has been frequently visualized in one of two ways: either in the connection of women to the harem or to the veil. Abu-Lughod (1989) notes that the gender segregation within Islam, as well as the division between the public and private spheres, has often created in people outside the faith an obsession with getting “behind the veil” (p. 289) of Muslim women. In her discussion of Orientalism and gender, Yegenoglu (1998) points out the linkage between discourses of sexual and cultural difference, both used in Orientalist narratives to mark the East’s otherness in relation to the West, noting that “the discursive constitution of Otherness is achieved simultaneously through sexual as well as cultural modes of differentiation” (p. 2). In the case of the veil, it marks cultural difference because of its association with Islam and it marks sexual difference because it is worn by women. The obsession with the veil and what it signifies—both for women personally as well as for nations and cultures collectively—has, in a way, united far-right politicians, some feminist groups, and other activists who all see Muslim women as individuals in need of rescuing from Islam (Farris, 2017).

In her discussion of the ethics, history, and context of the veil, Bucar (2012) has described how the veil became an object of focus during the colonial era, writing that “during this time, women came to be seen by both the colonizers and the colonized as the depository of all culture (including Islam) so that a nation would only be as modern as its women” (p. 71). The veil was seen by colonial administrations as a marker of unmodernity, with the “unveiling of Muslim women” seen as the “first step towards civilizing them” (Bucar, 2012, p. 72). The veil and therefore women’s lives have remained a site of conflict when it comes to debates over modernity and progress, with women who choose to veil or who choose to live what seem to be conservative lives seen as backward or oppressed (Bucar, 2012; Heffernan, 2016). Heffernan (2016) notes that the veil became a particularly racialized object for Westerners during the Ottoman era. Travelogues written by visitors to the empire portrayed the Turks as racially or morally corrupt, often connecting that corruption to the languid and loose women they imagined hid behind veils in Ottoman harems (Heffernan, 2016).

Orientalist art from the 1800s depicting women in harems often shows them lounging about half-clothed in various supine poses, seemingly bored in their gilded cages. They are reminders of the way that “fantasy and desire, as unconscious processes, play a fundamental role in the colonial relation that is established in the colonized” (Yegenoglu, 1998, p. 2). The women are often presented as victims of the languid environment in which they live as well as victims of their own hypersexual natures. When women were not being oppressed by Eastern men in Orientalist narratives, they were threatening the virtue of Western men (Arjana, 2015; Said, 1979). The women imagined to live in Oriental lands, particularly those of the Muslim Near East, were seen simultaneously as oppressed victims and as hypersexual vixens who embody the threat posed by the East to the West. The image of the “veiled Oriental woman” was meant to suggest not only the mysterious and seductive charms of the Orient’s women but also that the Orient, itself, was feminine, mysterious, and dangerous (Yegenoglu, 1998). The idea of an Eastern threat of some kind sits at the heart of any number of films set in the historic Orient.

The Orient on Film

The Egypt represented in media has been most frequently associated with its ancient pharaohs and gods, making it seem like a backward and unmodern place (Rice & MacDonald, 2003). This framing was produced and propagated by the early French Orientalists who followed in the wake of Napoleon’s army in the early 1800s (Lant, 1997). They helped produce Orientalism’s “imaginary geography,” trapping the Orient in the past (Said, 1979) and providing justification for Europe’s continued expansion into the East as the enlightened West had to save the Orient from itself. It is perhaps unsurprising that Orientalist narratives would make their way into film, Bernstein (1997) noting that “Western narrative and ethnographic cinema of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries inherited the narrative and visual traditions, as well as the cultural assumptions, on which Orientalism was based” (p. 3). Films as varied as Casablanca, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Aladdin all draw on an Orientalist understanding of the East to help viewers make sense of the worlds they see onscreen.

The world seen in mummy films, in particular, has been framed as a mystical one, full of curses, strange gods, and monsters (Bernstein, 1997; Lant, 1997). Of course, cinema’s mummies had precursors in other media. However, they were not always terrifying as Deane (2008) notes “The typical mummy of Victorian and Edwardian fiction is a woman, and one who, perfectly preserved in her youthful beauty, strongly attracts the libidinous attention of modern British men” (p. 384). The men who appeared in these fictions “are less inclined to flee from a mummy than to marry her, to see in her a chance to be kissed rather than cursed” (p. 384). It is in the early 1900s that we see the mummy transformed from something delightful into something dangerous (Deane, 2008; Huckvale, 2014; Lant, 1997). As mummies moved from the page to the screen, theirs became a story of revenge and retribution (Huckvale, 2014) as the mummies sought to punish those who would violate their slumber. Although Huckvale (2014) points out that Boris Karloff’s mummy Im-ho-tep in Universal’s 1932 film, The Mummy, was not motivated by revenge; instead, he sought out his reincarnated “long-lost love” (p. 12). While Karloff’s lusty undead priest was not a security threat to the wider West, he did serve as a reminder of the sexual threat posed to the West by the Orient. Freeman (2009) also notes that the mixed English-Egyptian heritage of the main female character in the film is meant to “symbolize the struggle between the Orient and the West, and the threat posed to the rational world” (para. 29) by such mixing.

This fear of the Orient’s effect on the rational world appeared in some of the earliest mummy movies. Day (2006) suggests that classic films portrayed mummies as polluted or evil while also portraying Egypt as something which belonged to the West, while the mummy’s curse gave the West a reason for subduing the East. Lant (1997) notes that many of the early mummy films were concerned with transgressions of space and time, with the mummy framed as an unintelligible artifact from an ancient past who confounded modernity. One film, Lant (1997) details, involves an individual who becomes cursed by a mummy artifact they wear—the curse causes anything they touch to disappear. The mere association with the mummy in this case confounding the rational experience of space. In The Mummy’s Hand, an ancient pharaoh who comes back to life plans to inject himself and the woman he lusts after with a fluid that will make them immortal, thereby transgressing time (Weaver, Brunas, & Brunas, 2007). The idea of transgression also sits at the heart of the 2001 film, The Mummy Returns. In that film, the Western heroine is a fighter who wears trousers, not a demure damsel in distress. Her transgression of the norms of Western femininity turns her into a physical threat to the film’s villains, which leads to her being killed by one of them (Hopkins, 2002). Her killer is a female mummy, the former lover of the film’s main mummy villain. This female villain is not the kissable mummy of Victorian and Edwardian literature, but a deadly threat to the Western heroes.

In movies, the world of the East is often depicted as one ruled by sexual segregation in which women perform strange rituals, often in connection to what is seen as lax morality (Abdo, 2002). Writing about earlier depictions of the East that likely gave rise to cinematic portrayals of the Orient, Meskell (1998) notes that “the whole construction of the Orientalized Other became synonymous with a dripping and languid sexuality” (p. 66). This sexuality was framed on film as a danger to the West, with Shohat (1990) suggesting that white Western female viewers in the early 20th century were meant to understand just how good they had it in the West by comparison. The “imaginative world of Middle Eastern women” is one colored by sensuality, sexuality, and often violence (Abdo, 2002); the women who inhabit this world are not seen as having lives that exist outside an eroticized space. Such women are often portrayed as in need of a Western hero to save them (Abu-Lughod, 2002). Through this act of salvation, the Western hero proves he is the master of all that is monstrous in the other. Monster movies are all centered upon the promise of a similar act of salvation.

Monstrously Feminine

Movie monsters serve as the embodiment of chaotic forces which mean to destroy or, at the very least, upend life as we know it (Beal, 1999). Kristeva (1982) has conceptualized the human reaction to such a breakdown of meaning as the abject. Discussing this, Creed (2002) notes that “the abject threatens life; it must be … propelled away from the body and deposited on the other side of an imaginary border which separates the self from that which threatens the self” (p. 69). The abject can be experienced through engagement with both bodily functions, those we do not wish to acknowledge or discuss, and the “symbolic (religious) economy” (Creed, 2002, p. 69). It helps produce an experience of horror which is circumscribed by what bodies do and what bodies mean and, in doing so, it “generates the borders of the individual and the social body” (Tyler, 2009, p. 79).

Criticisms of the concept of abjection have developed, largely focused on the ways in which Kristeva’s theorization of abjection has often been predicated on the framing of the maternal body as abject—as something from which life is expelled and as something which is both familiar and strange at the same time. Tyler (2009) has pointed out that, for Kristeva, abjection “is thus always a reminder (and the irreducible remainder) of this primary repudiation of the maternal” (p. 79). Conceptualizations of the abject have often focused on representations and repudiations of the maternal—reducing women to a biological function and possibly reproducing stereotypes instead of challenging them (Russo, 1994). However, abjection can be a useful tool when considering the ways that particular bodies or identities are othered and the ways they are forced outside the boundaries of what is considered normal, acceptable, or mainstream. Humphrey (2007) has written of the ways that Muslim identities have been made abject, positioned as existing outside secular modernity by particular legal proceedings or media coverage in Australia which construct Muslims as “trapped by tradition” (p. 25). Chakrabarty (2000) has also discussed how colonized places were similarly positioned during the colonial era, in a way serving as peripheral abjections to the imperial center. Abjects are things that “highlight the ‘fragility of the law’ and which exist on the other side of the border which separates out the living subject from that which threatens its extinction” (Creed, 2002, p. 70). Although, abjects can fascinate even as they frighten.

Creed (2002) suggests that horror films construct and confront us with “the fascinating, seductive aspect of abjection” (p. 70) in the form of monsters, such as vampires or zombies, who rely in some manner on the specter of the corpse—a corpse, like the maternal body, being a body from which life has been expelled. The monstrous feminine is a body that can both give life and take life away. It can sustain life or end it, with Creed (1993) noting it serves as a challenge to patriarchal law. Writing of the monstrous feminine in Lybeas Desconus, Salisbury (2014) shows how, in order for a mystery knight to be accepted into the Arthurian fold, he must throw off the name given to him by the mother who raised him in the wild and embrace a more masculine, a more civilized and patriarchal, mode of being. In her study of the differences between the Japanese film Ringu and its American remake The Ring, Wee (2011) suggests that the American film “codes the female as a malign force that is closely associated with the unnatural, the mysterious and the irrational, while equating the male with the benign, the rational and the logical” (p. 158). For Beal (1999), it is the ability of movie monsters to confuse distinctions such as those between inside and outside, “between self and other” (p. 198), and perhaps even between male and female, that make them so horrifying.

The horror film mummy, an animated corpse which seems to mimic life, blurs the boundary between the living and the dead. Its human-like forms suggest something familiar, while its reanimation reminds us of the unknowable void. The transgression of these boundaries would seem to be amplified in 2017’s The Mummy, which features the double threat of both the monstrous feminine serving as a challenge to masculine power and the monstrous Orient threatening the stability of the rational West.

Examining The Mummy

The Mummy is a monster movie. Monster movies have traditionally traded in a society’s most potent fears—transforming worries over societal and cultural change into vampires, werewolves, and mummies. For instance, concerns over “sexual difference” (Hollinger, 1989) or the “sexual traumas of adolescence” (Evans, 1973) have been suggested as providing potent fuel for monster movies; during the 1980s, this connection between sex and monster cinema seemed to exploit fears about the AIDS epidemic (Guerroro, 1990). Monster films have also been shaped by encounters with the other (Arjana, 2015), with Beal (1999) suggesting that “… monsters are horrifying precisely because they are, paradoxically, embodiments of otherness [sic]; they are in this world but not of it, eliciting an irreducible combination of desire and fear, attraction and repulsion” (p. 197).

Universal’s revisioning of the tale of a mummy come back to life coincided with an increased political and social discourse perpetuating broad fears of the other. This was in part fueled by debates and discussions about immigrants to the United States and Europe and how they might change those societies as well as a more specific fear of the Orient—made most visible in the framing of Syrian refugees and in the creation of the Muslim travel ban in the United States, which restricted immigration from seven Muslim majority countries (Executive Order 13769, 2017). Casting for The Mummy began in late 2015 (Kroll, 2015), with principle photography beginning in early 2016 (Oxford Mail, 2016). The production of this film began at the end of a presidential election cycle in the United States that brought ancient and potent fears of people imagined as others to the fore. A textual analysis of 2017’s The Mummy was conducted in order to understand what it communicates about the meeting of East and West. This essay details three narratives that emerged from that analysis, narratives that were overtly Orientalist in nature, and considers what they tell us about how Hollywood understands cultures and peoples which seem to be from someplace else.

The Monstrous Ahmanet

We are first introduced to Ahmanet as a youthful, beautiful only daughter of a pharaoh. We see her training on a golden hill of sand and it is clear she is a woman who is not only strong willed but is also a strong warrior, the narrator tells us she is “beautiful, cunning, and ruthless” (Bradshaw, Daniel, Kurtzman, Morgan, & Kurtzman, 2017). She is being educated and groomed to rule Egypt upon her father’s death. That future, however, is washed away when her father’s wife gives birth to a baby boy. With his birth, Ahmanet is reminded of the precarious position of women in the world and how quickly power can be snatched away when the right man comes along. No longer the heir to the throne, Ahmanet slinks off to plot the overthrow of her father. “Ahmanet,” the narrator tells the audience, “understood power was not given, it was taken” (Bradshaw et al., 2017). And take it, she would.

Creed (1993) suggests that the monstrous feminine serves as a challenge to patriarchy—it works to upend the power wielded by men. In order to do this after the birth of her baby brother and the new heir to her father’s thrown, Ahmanet makes a deal with Set, who the film incorrectly labels the “Egyptian God of Death” (he was actually the god of deserts, storms, and war; “Seth,” 2017), and transforms into a being suspended between life and death. After making her pact with the god, Ahmanet looks into the camera as the irises of each eye split into two, similar to the way a cell divides, and as her body is covered in black writing. Not quite human but also not a god, this Ahmanet is an abject who not only “threatens life” (Creed, 2002, p. 69) but who ends it as well.

Even before she is transformed into the mummy, Ahmanet is monstrous simply because she is a she; when she is still nothing more than a princess, the narrator warns of her cunning and ruthless nature, suggesting somehow that these traits are unnatural for a woman to possess. Her thirst for power leads to her transformation into a monster; it is as the monstrous Ahmanet that she will punish her father for his abandonment of her, murdering both him and the infant boy who would reign in her place. As Wee (2011) suggests it happens to female or feminine forces in film, Ahmanet is coded as a malign and irrational force—hinted at before she becomes the monster, obvious as she makes her deal with Set. She is captured as she sits astride a lover, about to sacrifice him with the same dagger she murdered her father and brother with in order to bring Set into the world. Ahmanet’s capture while on top of her lover suggests the other threat she poses to the men in her orbit—this one sexual in nature.

Arjana (2015) has noted how women from the historic Orient, particularly Muslim women, were seen as sexual threats to the vitality of Western men and the Western world. Ahmanet’s sexual power is a weapon she does not shy away from. She is in control of the love/sacrifice scene after the murders of her family. Later in the film, when the mummy leaves Egypt and pursues the Western hero through England, she at times attempts to seduce him with visions of what she once was—a young, beautiful, attractive woman who would be his if only he would agree to do what she asks. When she gains her full strength, Ahmanet strides through London, where the second half of the film takes place, her wrappings barely covering her breasts, stomach, and hips. Ahmanet’s is a mummy which titillates as it terrorizes. She is an abject which is both fascinating and seductive (Creed, 2002), her presence threatening to destroy everything in her path. Ahmanet, the audience is told, is the “ultimate evil.” Her opposite is not the masculine hero of the film, but rather a blonde, beautiful female archeologist and monster hunter named Jenny Halsey.

In comparing the two main female characters in the film, the mummy Ahmanet and blonde, posh Jenny, star Tom Cruise suggested they represented “epic darkness and epic lightness” (Flickering Myth, 2017). Light, of course, represented by the woman with the white skin from the West and dark the once brown skinned mummy from the East. Ahmanet is evil because she is brown, she is evil because she is from the East, and she is evil because she is a woman who attempted to usurp power from men. The contrast between blonde Jenny and brown Ahmanet also raises the Orientalist idea that it was the job of Western men to protect Western women from Eastern threats. This is made most obvious in the film during an argument over what to do with Ahmanet once she is captured. As others argued that Ahmanet should be destroyed because of the threat she poses to the world, Jenny maintained that the mummy could help them understand what life was like in ancient Egypt. Jenny eventually approaches Ahmanet as she is held captive in London in order to speak to her, unable to stop herself from asking this Eastern threat for knowledge that Jenny cannot access. Ahmanet says that Jenny wants to know “what lies beyond the veil of death” (Bradshaw et al., 2017) and that she will know for herself once Ahmanet has killed her.

Tom Cruise’s character, Nick, spends much of the film trying to save Jenny from the threat Ahmanet poses to her. The idea that Western men need to save women—both Western and non-Western—from an Eastern threat is an old Orientalist framing. The Mummy’s use of this framing within a story about an Eastern threat to Western Europe also happens to coincide with the current use of such rhetoric by far right politicians in Europe (Farris, 2017)—both the historic and the modern Orientalist framings treating women as narrative props rather than people. The audience of The Mummy is never told why Ahmanet wants Jenny dead, just that she does. Ahmanet, the beautiful mummy from a country that now has a Muslim majority population, poses a threat to the West by virtue of her coming from the East and by virtue of her attempt to grasp power from men. She is evil, the audience is told time and again by the film’s narrator, but she is an evil that the West has brought upon itself.

Hidden Threat Within

Among the many narratives spun about the threat Islam poses to the West is the idea that danger is hidden in plain sight. This has been specifically focused on the threat Muslim communities pose to Western societies in which they are located (Akbari, 2009; Arjana, 2015)—with narratives circulating of a “Muslim tide” overtaking the West or of Western individuals falling victim to a dangerous Oriental contagion (Saunders, 2012). 2017’s The Mummy is awash in imagery suggesting such a tide, as the mummy’s monstrosity washes over London, that city imagined as the heart of civilization and rationality. At one point, Ahmanet stalks the city’s streets as she summons the sands of Egypt to destroy parts of London and even the Houses of Parliament are not immune from this dangerous tide as one shot shows a cloud of sand floating above the building, Ahmanet’s screaming face appearing in it. As potent as this imagery is, it is the idea of contagion that sits at the heart of The Mummy’s warnings about entanglements between East and West.

This contagion was first brought to England, not by the rash adventurer Nick Morton, played by Tom Cruise, but instead by English crusaders. The film’s narrator explains that, after the Second Crusade, these knights “invaded Egypt before returning to England” (Bradshaw et al., 2017). When they returned, they brought with them the very dagger Ahmanet attempted to use to bring Set to life. By doing so, they planted the seeds of England’s later invasion by Ahmanet as she needs the dagger to finish the ritual. Akbari (2009) has noted how much of the early concern over interactions between East and West had less to do with being militarily overcome and more to do with the idea that the West might assimilate parts of the East. There was the possibility that the encounter between the two might make the boundaries of East and West less clear. Abjects trouble boundaries (Creed, 2002), they challenge how we understand ourselves and our communities (Tyler, 2009). Their breakdown of boundaries is, in part, what makes movie monsters so terrifying (Beal, 1999). The crusaders, through their theft of ancient Egyptian objects, made such a boundary breakdown possible, but it is the infection of Nick that brings it to fruition.

Nick is an American soldier who, while serving overseas, loots antiquities. It is his desire to loot the tomb of Ahmanet, labeled haram, forbidden, on a map that sets the action of the movie in motion. While he and a friend are attempting to make their way to the tomb in Iraq, they come under fire from insurgents and call in an airstrike. The airstrike, while revealing their location and their intention to rob an ancient grave, also reveals the entrance to Ahmanet’s tomb. When the two men accompany Jenny down into the tomb, they find Ahmanet’s burial chamber, where her sarcophagus hangs suspended in a well of liquid mercury. Nick manages to figure out how to raise the coffin and, in doing so, is cursed by Ahmanet to become her new Chosen One who will help her bring Set into the human world. The curse links him to the mummy.

Throughout the film, he is tempted to give into Ahmanet as she fills his mind with visions of her as the young, beautiful princess she once was. She promises him the “power over life and death” with her as his queen if he will only “give in” (Bradshaw et al., 2017). The film’s narrator explains that Nick has been infected by his encounter with Ahmanet and that he has helped bring this contagion to the West. “Evil is a disease,” the narrator says, “a pestulant, pustulant infection burrowing its way into our souls, the world needs a cure” (Bradshaw et al., 2017). The cure for the irrational threat posed by Ahmanet and her ilk, the narrator suggests, just happens to be rational Western science.

The Rational Triumphant

In addition to the fight with the mummy, the film also revolves around a scientific group led by Dr. Jekyll (of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde fame), who also serves as the film’s narrator. Director and writer Alex Kurtzman, in an extended preview, said “It’s a science for them. And what I liked about that idea was, if we’re gonna ground the monsters in a reality then let’s ground it in science.” ¹ Nick is introduced to the group’s work in a lab located in London’s Museum of Natural History. Hidden behind exhibits on fossils and dinosaurs, the film suggests, are specimen jars full of vampire skulls and swamp thing hands. “Evil is the shadow that exists just outside our world, continually searching for a way to come in, a way to become flesh and blood,” Dr. Jekyll tells Nick (Bradshaw et al., 2017). Dr. Jekyll, through his medical management of his violent Mr. Hyde persona, serves as the embodiment of the West’s ability to conquer the dangerous and irrational.

A supposed conflict between a rational and scientific West and an irrational, emotional East has been central to Orientalist framings of the East since Napoleon first marched into Egypt (Trafton, 2004). Wee (2011) notes that “the alignment of reason, logic, and science with the male is a common practice in Western patriarchal cultures” (p. 160). Anything female or feminized, such as Oriental or Eastern cultures, was, therefore, seen as irrational and in need of the civilizing guidance of Western reason and the Western man (Yegenoglu, 1998). In The Mummy, even Jenny, the heroic Western woman, is subordinate to both Nick and Dr. Jekyll, both of them framed as more capable of managing the Eastern threat of Ahmanet than the intelligent, well-educated Jenny.

Interestingly, an early critique of this divide between a rational West and an irrational East came in another monster story. Lew (1991) chronicles how in Frankenstein Mary Shelley leveled a critique of the Orientalist thinking of the day, noting that it was concerned with “men who ‘conceive,’ ‘reconstruct,’ ‘assemble,’ and ‘craft’ in the absence of women; Orientalism, Frankenstein, and Victor’s unnameable creature are ‘born’ of this ‘hideous’ labor” (p. 278). The monstrous emerged in Frankenstein, Lew (1991) suggests, not from some transgression of the boundary between East and West but, instead, it emerged as a result of the boundary’s very existence. This is, in part, due to the male and rational West’s refusal to see the female and irrational East as a part of itself (Lew, 1991). However, when it comes to monster movies, Creed (2002) notes that

 … there is, of course, a sense in which the concept of a border is central to the construction of the monstrous in the horror film … [a]lthough the specific nature of the border changes from film to film, the function of the monstrous remains the same—to bring about an encounter between the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability. (p. 71)

Creed (2002) suggests that “abjection is always ambiguous” (p. 71) and there is something ambiguous about The Mummy’s ending. Ahmanet has been defeated, shriveled, and forced back into her sarcophagus prison, but the hero has not emerged from the encounter unscathed. The rational has won, but it has been contaminated by its encounter with the irrational threat. The victory is an ambiguous one, just as the boundary marking East and West is itself ambiguous. That continued ambiguity creates a threat to the cohesion of Western society. So, the Western hero leaves London to fight off other threats, other abjects, in order to ensure the West remains whole.

Conclusion

Universal Studios’ attempt to launch what it was calling its Dark Universe slate of films was a global box office flop and led to the studio’s scuttling of its monster movie plans. (Although, as of this writing, there are whispers the studio is once again looking for someone, and some monster, to helm a classic monster movie renaissance.) We may never know what other monsters, or what other stereotypes, Universal would have relied on to frame its stories of science clashing with something more primal, and less rational, than itself.

2017’s The Mummy reboot came as fears of a revenge of the other raged in political and public spaces. Fueled in large part by the campaign rhetoric of now President Donald Trump, from 2015 onward, a neo-Orientalist and Islamophobic discourse about Islam, Muslims, and the wider Muslim world began to become ever more visible and prominent. This rhetoric, of course, predates Donald Trump and his backers; however, his campaign did help make this long-lived framing of Muslims and Islam more visible and more potent. Even Muslims who were born and grew up in the West were treated as though they were individuals to be feared. At the same time, an anti-immigration rhetoric also ramped up, aided by coverage of the Muslim travel ban as well as the plight of refugees traveling to the United States and Western Europe. This focus on both the threat of Muslims and the threat of immigrants made visible Orientalist and xenophobic ideas about the danger posed by those considered outsiders to Western nations. Muslims and immigrants were positioned as types of abjects who threatened what is imagined as the traditional “social body” (Tyler, 2009, p. 79) of the West and so must be kept out with a travel ban, closed borders, or a wall.

In writing of the construction and the perpetuation of the idea of Muslims monsters, Arjana (2015) notes that “the imaginary violence perpetrated by Muslim monsters, as well as the figurative harm inflicted on these villainous characters, affects real Muslim bodies” (p. 3). The belief that there is something monstrous, or simply unmodern, about what is considered the Muslim world fueled not only the colonization of Muslim countries but also their framing in political and media discourse as enemy states to be feared. Fantasy is not so far removed from real life, with media shaping the way we understand our world. Those we see as heroes and those we see as villains on our TVs, in films, or on the internet end up being the people we imagine are heroes and villains when we encounter them as we go about our everyday lives. Much of the framing of Muslims, as well as other cultures once labeled Oriental, is shaped by a clash of civilizations (Hobson, 2014; Huntington, 1993) rhetoric which suggests that Eastern cultures are incompatible with Western ones. Within this framework, Muslims or others who appear to be outsiders or foreigners are almost always framed as villains; as people to be feared. Creed (2002) suggests that “the horror film brings about a confrontation with the abject (the corpse, bodily wastes, the monstrous-feminine) in order, finally, to eject the abject and re-draw the boundaries between the human and non-human” (p. 75). This redrawing takes place in 2017’s The Mummy as it reproduces the imagined clash between a rational West and an irrational East in the conflict between the female mummy and the male Western adventurer. The characters embody Western and Eastern stereotypes, with the rational West triumphing in the end, although changed by its encounter with the East. This change has tainted the West, but also given it access to information and knowledge that, the film suggests, may help it ultimately tame and conquer the East. And, so, we are left where we started, a rational Western man sets off to conquer some aspect of the irrational East, only now he is armed with information he culled from the Eastern threat itself.

Yegenoglu (1998) has argued that Orientalist representations of the East are really meant to reflect the West back to itself. In 2017’s The Mummy, the West is positioned as a place of modernity and rationality, whereas the East is positioned as ancient and irrational. The transgression of the boundary between the two is meant to fill the audience with dread. Although The Mummy’s creators tried to market their film as a fresh new take on the classic mummy tale because its villain was a woman, the film is not the modern retelling the writers, producers, and stars thought they were helping bring to life, but rather a dead and dried up story which positions those living in the East as somehow less human than those living in the West. It was developed and produced at a time when the United States and Western Europe were seeing a rise in xenophobia and Islamophobia and, yet, the film failed to find an audience, underperforming both domestically and internationally. Suggesting that, perhaps, audiences are not as scared of boundary transgressions between East and West as imagined.