As a cinematic monster, the mummy seems less an embodiment of revenge against colonial forces than a figure invented by colonialism itself. On the one hand, the mummy represents mystery, romance, magic, and the East. His wrappings suggest to the imagination that he’s not just dead, but wounded—ripped from a lost time and a broken narrative. Conveniently for the colonizer’s psyche, the mummy actually longs for someone to violate his tomb and wake him—not least so that his curse can lay systematic waste to its victims. And that brings us to the other hand: the mummy as a scientific and historical artifact, an ancient puzzle which requires anthropological, archeological, and linguistic knowledge to solve. The very apparatus of the mummy’s tomb—his body locked in box upon box, his organs apportioned to canopic jars, hieroglyphic inscriptions on every surface—suggest the complexity of the undertaking. What might these two strands of the mummy’s DNA—in Shakespearean terms, part-Antony, part-Cleopatra—reveal about the relationship between colonizer and colonized, and about our own desires, fears, and guilt? Wes & Erin discuss the 1999 film, “The Mummy.”
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0:11 Erin: As a cinematic monster, the Mummy seems less an embodiment of revenge against colonial forces than a figure invented by colonialism itself. On the one hand, the Mummy represents mystery, romance, magic, and the East. His wrappings suggest to the imagination that he's not just dead, but wounded. Ripped from a lost time and a broken narrative, conveniently for the colonizer's psyche, the Mummy actually longs for someone to violate his tomb and wake him, not least so that his curse can lay systematic waste to its victims. And that brings us to the other hand, the Mummy as a scientific and historical artifact, an ancient puzzle which requires anthropological, archaeological and linguistic knowledge to solve. The very apparatus of the mummy's tomb, his body locked in box upon box, his organs apportioned to canopic jars, hieroglyphic inscriptions on every surface suggest the complexity of the undertaking. What might these two strands of the Mummy's DNA, in Shakespearean terms, part Antony, part Cleopatra, reveal about the relationship between colonizer and colonized and about our own desires, fears, and guilt? Today, we're discussing the 1999 film the Mummy. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I have two questions to start us off today. The first is, is this the silliest thing we've covered on the podcast to date, or was elf sillier?
1:41 Wes: That's a good question. It depends on what you mean by silly. Elf is sillier, but this is the most frivolous choice we've made.
1:54 Erin: I'm trying to figure out if you're mad at me for selecting this or if our listeners are going to be mad at me.
2:00 Wes: I hadn't seen it, except it might have been on in the background when I met my father when I was around 22, and he had hundreds and hundreds of the HS tapes of various movies that he had pirated. And there was always a movie on in the background when I was hanging out with my siblings. And I vaguely remember scenes from this because they were on in the background, but I had never actually seen the movie, and it didn't. I like mummy film. Horror films in general don't appeal to me, but mummy films especially, for some reason.
2:28 Erin: Oh, no.
2:30 Wes: So, yeah, it's not the kind of thing I would end up watching on my own, but it's an interesting. I could see, you know, I started. I saw immediately why it would be up your alley. Because of, like, screwball ish comedy. Right. It operates in two dimensions, so that was interesting.
2:45 Erin: This came out when I was 8 years old. We had this local video store that I used to go to to rent movies. When you walked in the door, there was a huge cardboard. I guess the technical term for it is a standee. You know, those big cardboard displays that they'll have in movie theaters or wherever to publicize a film? There was a huge display of the Mummy with different characters and right when you came in. So to me, it's sort of the ultimate summer blockbuster film because that was the thing you saw whenever you came in. And more often than not, you know, I was suggestible enough to think, oh, I could go for watching the Mummy again. Super fun to watch at a sleepover or on a summer night. So I love this film. I mean, I'm gonna try to expand our conversation to talk about the mummy in general, which I do think is kind of an interesting concept. And maybe we could talk about why you find mummies particularly uninteresting. But that leads me to my second question.
3:41 Wes: You can analyze me a little bit.
3:43 Erin: Leads me to my second question, which is, are mummies scary? And maybe this is why you don't like them. Because I think I have an answer to this, and I think yours is going to be the same. I don't know.
3:53 Wes: Yeah, I don't know. I was thinking about this film in relation to other horror films, including Alien, because we did that one. And. And I think it's a great film. And also the Exorcist, which I think is a great film. I was thinking, well, I'm not entirely opposed to horror. I'm not into horror films, but I'm not entirely opposed to it. And those two films have, like, a solid thematic essence to them involving relationships like, you know, Reagan on the verge of puberty and an absent father and then an alien. The relationships between the ship members kind of alienated. And then this lack of a paternal authority. Just. Just like there is in the Exorcist and the ship computer called Mother. There's always a mother thing going on. It's hard not to think of that with the Mummy as well. But. So I was thinking. I'm not into jump scare films. I don't get. Although, you know, I guess I went to see it. Is that what it's called? The Clown?
4:52 Erin: Yeah.
4:53 Wes: Terrifying movie. And I actually did enjoy the. You know, because the audience would jump and then we'd all laugh at being kind of taken in. So. So maybe I do. You know, this is not. It's not very. A very fruitful analysis. We're conducting here. I'm too conflicted. But. But mummies in particular. Let's get to the point. Are mummies in particular scary? I don't think so. Horror movies used to scare me as a kid, big time. The Exorcist scared the crap out of me because even though I wasn't religious at that point, part of me believed in the devil just, just in sanctuary and I couldn't deal with it. And then other horror films, it like got into my bones in a way they just can't do as an adult. So in general, I don't think I can be scared in the deeper way that I used to be scared when I was a kid. And then this, you know, because this is also romantic comedy, I find it hard to be. To find any of it scary. Exactly. So, yeah, say more what you mean about scary and whether mummies are scary.
5:48 Erin: I just don't think they're scary. And that's one of the reasons why I like this movie. Right. Is because it's not scary. I mean, I don't like horror movies either. Right. But I like that. I like the Mummy as a concept. It's interesting to think of it in the Universal monster movie context and the Mummy as a monster. You could approach that from a lot of different angles. It's, you know, it's a dead body come to life. I mean, I think there's elements of the zombie in the Mummy. There's elements of the vampire and the Mummy in certain ways much, much closer to the vampire. But maybe we could tweeze that out a bit. I think the Mummy as a monster figure is scary, if you really think about it, which is a way of saying that it's not scary. So that's why you need, you know, the accompanying curse. Though maybe you can't really separate the Mummy from the curse, but you know, the Mummy that can unhinge its jaws and become sand and at some point the emoteps little mummy army is climbing on the walls. That becomes a bigger part of the Mummy Returns, which is a truly bad film. I love it, but it's a truly bad film. So I didn't make us do that. Peeling the flesh off of people's bones and then also you have to throw in the scarabs. So you basically need this entire cast of supporting scary things, I think, in order to make the Mummy work as a horror film. I don't quite think of this as a horror film. I mean, part of it is also just the way that the CGI has aged Technically, of course, it has horror tropes, but it's just not that scary to me. Maybe what's kind of scary about it, in a thinky way, is related to the main reading of mummies that I'm interested in exploring, which are. Which is something like the mummy as a colonial fantasy. The colonizer goes into a place that doesn't belong to them, and then they start literally and metaphorically exhuming the culture that they've entered, either to leech off of it or destroy it. And then there's this curse idea. So they awaken this curse, which it seems anti colonial, like it's payback for disturbing the mummy. But in fact, it really kind of serves the colonizer in a way, because the mummy actually wants to come back to life. It actually wants you to disturb it. It wants you to fall into the trap of the curse. So the colonizer is kind of, in that sense, exonerated from the act of meddling in the first place and from colonizing in the first place by the psychology of this curse or the psychology of the mummy wanting to return to life. And then the colonizer has to also kill the mummy and restore order. So they cause the problem, sort of, but it's really more the mummy's fault or the mummy was asking for it. And so they caused the problem, then they themselves are the solution. And I guess that's a scary dynamic in itself for what it reveals about the colonial or the imperial psyche. But I also think that this dynamic can be extended in all sorts of directions. So it might reflect something in each of us about our own relationships to the past. Something silly like maybe we're all colonizers and we all have mummies inside of us that want to come back to life, and our job is to kill that part of ourselves and that desire to reenact the past or something like that. And maybe that. Maybe there's something scary about that, that element, whatever you want to call it, from something as. Maybe as simplistic as the return of the repressed to something like giving up on previous versions of ourselves or whatever the case may be. I mean, in this, in the mummy movies, it's a lost love that has to be ultimately abandoned or. Yeah, I don't know that that's scary, but that's the best I could do.
9:28 Wes: Well, I think once you start relating it to relationships, whether it's between colonizer and colonized or whether it's a love relationship, then it becomes scary.
9:36 Erin: Yeah, exactly.
9:37 Wes: Relationships are scary. But I think the key word There is preservation because the mummy, obviously, is a preserved. And I guess for the ancient Egyptians, it had something to do with preservation into the afterlife. Right. Why did they do it? Do you have firmer knowledge than me about this? Our research team was on vacation this
10:02 Erin: week, if I remember correctly. And see, this is. The other thing is, of course, I'm sure you had. Didn't we talk about this? You had an Egyptology phase, didn't you, as a kid?
10:11 Wes: Yeah, my grandmother was very into it and there were lots of books around, so I was very fascinated by it. And even today, one of the first thing I do when I go into a museum is go to the Egypt section. And the sense of being in contact with things that are that old and ancient, just crossing that gap is just very powerful for me. And you can look at the signs and it's, you know, this is 2500 BC, and yet these artifacts are so well preserved. And so you can think of. Try to place yourself back then. But the pictogram writing is so weird and alien. It almost is like aliens. And even I think some of the alien aesthetic. Right. Is in films from actual aliens is borrowed from ancient Egypt. So there's something about. Yeah. That combination of preservation and of artifacts and alienness that. That is really powerful.
11:07 Erin: Yeah. When I was a kid, I took a. I don't know if I ever told you this. I took a correspondence course on hieroglyphics from the Oriental Institute.
11:14 Wes: Oh, wow.
11:15 Erin: But, yeah, I was really into it, so another reason why I loved this movie.
11:19 Wes: Are you still. Are you fluent in hieroglyphics?
11:21 Erin: No, I can. I can recognize some things.
11:25 Wes: But apparently they did. They did speak actual, you know, reconstructed ancient Egyptian in the film. Yes, that's what I saw. Yeah.
11:33 Erin: You know, just one of the many great things about this masterpiece.
11:38 Wes: That kind of attention to detail.
11:40 Erin: Exactly.
11:41 Wes: You know, really lends itself to verisimilitude of.
11:46 Erin: The thing that always bothers me is
11:47 Wes: they say waking up and running around. Yeah.
11:49 Erin: The. The five canopic jars. And he's like, there are only four. That's such a basic thing to get wrong. But anyway, if I remember correctly, and I did not look this up beforehand, I'm sorry, but I believe that the Egyptians thought that you had three souls and that the preservation of the body involved needing a place for all of these souls to meet for you to become reincarnated.
12:12 Wes: Oh, right.
12:13 Erin: So that's funny.
12:14 Wes: We actually did a little bit of ancient Egyptian philosophy on the show. I'm part of the partially examined Life recently.
12:21 Erin: Was there anything interesting there?
12:24 Wes: Some stuff about. Yeah, there's these different souls. So we read something called the Instructor and one of the things we read was a dialogue between a man and his soul. One of the souls, the soul that was supposed to carry it off to the afterlife, I think. But it's just stuff taken from fragments of papyrus, basically. And I was surprised that so much writing survived.
12:49 Erin: I have some book on the Book of the Dead somewhere packed away in my. I have a lot of my library packed away right now. But, you know, a lot of the stuff like you can. You can read what's in there. And it's a lot of spells and a lot of protection type. It's not quite as interesting as it sounds. And of course, this is one of the controversies about, I think about the curse of the Pharaohs is that a lot of the supposed warnings about disturbing the body or else the curse will come for you were actually invented by newspapers in the 20s as a result of the fervor around King Tut's tomb. And the idea back then. Right. You know, I didn't. I didn't get the chance to actually research this further, but I was also reading that mummies were ground up and they were kept in people's like, medicine cabinets and they were actually. Yeah. And they were actually used. So. No. Another reason why I inherently love mummies. They're actually used as a coagulant. So Which I find so interesting. I don't know what the psychology of that is about or what that's about, except that they think that mummies are dried up bodies. So it'll dry up your cut or. I have no idea. But gross. It's also, you know, further like vampire connection, I guess, sort of.
14:04 Wes: Yeah, it's a good point. And now that, you know there's a preservation element in vampires too, right. Also to the point of eternal life. I mean, with preservation, I think we're gonna. We'll talk a bit about the love element, right? To this idea of everlasting love. I think that this movie brings in with it Imhotep in Ankhsunamon. How do you pronounce it?
14:27 Erin: Anax and Amun.
14:28 Wes: Anaksunamun. Anaksunamun.
14:31 Erin: Or Marta, you can call her either one.
14:34 Wes: Oh, yeah. I know. It took me a while to figure that out.
14:37 Erin: But it's always an arrested development connection for us in every episode.
14:41 Wes: The thing that the Egyptians did with mummies is weird and gross. Right. We all know that.
14:46 Erin: Sort of. I mean, it's also kind of just Kidding.
14:48 Wes: Yeah.
14:49 Erin: Okay.
14:50 Wes: But it lends itself to the idea, okay, what are they being preserved for? Yeah, okay. The afterlife. Sure. But maybe they were being preserved for us in our museums. But also, I think, like the wrapping up in bandages, like a burn victim type thing, you know, it lends itself to the idea that, okay, well, maybe they could come back to life. And it connects to certain, I guess, folktales about the dangers of preservation. Right. Or fairy tales. I wish I could live forever, but then I live as a rotting corpse.
15:22 Erin: Or like, death becomes her. Have you seen that?
15:25 Wes: No, I haven't, actually. I know.
15:28 Erin: It's related to this idea. You live forever, but then you become disgusting and you have all these problems. Yeah, right.
15:34 Wes: It's like. It's like the. You know, the fairy tales where you have a wish and it's, be careful what you wish for. Because there's always a downside. Right. The wish is misinterpreted in some way or comes with a downside you didn't expect or something like that. But anyway, so, yeah, so there's the wish for eternal life, and then there's also the wish for eternal love, which I think this movie plays on.
15:55 Erin: It's interesting how the movie coalesces a lot of different things that are. I mean, it's almost a compendium of different symbols that the Mummy represents. So a really old idea about the Mummy is that they're a figure of pathos and a romantic figure, and they're actually a bunch of Victorian stories about people having romances with mummies or the Mummy being a figure of unrequited love. And I take this to be a really suggestive part of the Mummy's appearance, that the bandages suggest that he's somehow wounded or that he comes out of a wounded or incomplete or somehow interrupted past, or a narrative that he wasn't able to. To carry out and sort of wrenched out of that narrative. Right. So the wrapping seemed to suggest that interrupted life or that unrequited love. That was kind of where people's minds first went with the Mummy, this idea of the romantic lover separated from the beloved by death. And in the 1932 Mummy, that film also has the unrequited love thing with the Anck Su Namun figure and then Boris Karloff. I was really surprised by this when I went back and rewatched it. It's a really boring film. The beginning has a lot of interesting ideas about colonization, that the film then drops. But Karloff just kind of walks around, you know, trying to pretend to Be some normal guy even though he has really bad social skills. And he kind of hypnotizes the female figure in the film, the one who sort of lines up with Evelyn. He's almost like a Mesmer figure or very similar to the vampire where he hypnotizes her and draws her to him. And she is somehow. It's not really explained very well in the film, but she's somehow the reincarnation of Anck Su Namun, much like evelyn in the 1999 film. Something is made of the fact that she might be some sort of distant ancestor because she's also half Egyptian and half English like the Evelyn character.
17:54 Wes: So I think if some of that had been preserved, it could have made for a more powerful emotional content to the film. Right. Because in this case the threat is all just external to Evelyn. It's not like she is being possessed or seduced or something.
18:11 Erin: No. Well, he does kiss her at certain points and he does confuse her with an AK Sudemon. So I think they're trying to make that connection.
18:17 Wes: She kisses him too, I think.
18:19 Erin: Oh yes. To distract him.
18:20 Wes: The only completed kiss is she kisses him.
18:24 Erin: That's right. I don't want to know what a completed kiss is. Anyway.
18:30 Wes: He does get his tongue though back by then, I think. Sorry.
18:34 Erin: No, but she's supposed to be the human sacrifice for anoxynamon. Because one of the things that I guess I figured out about the the economy of this film is that Imhotep needs several men to become fully reincarnated. But I guess anoxynamon only needs one. It's just a one to one ratio for. For a woman. I really wonder about a lot of things in this movie and the logic. Like stealing the blind guys eyes and then the fact that the mummy doesn't need glasses.
19:01 Wes: But anyway, how about all you have to do is carry around the cat and you'd be good.
19:07 Erin: Oh yeah, exactly. Yeah.
19:09 Wes: And they don't. I mean the first thing I do if I found that out is round up a bunch of cats, go to the shelter.
19:17 Erin: Exactly.
19:19 Wes: So that bothered me a bit. There's some few plot or in the beginning when like does she have to kill her? I guess she's trapped. So she does have to kill herself. Like that's the. That's the logical plan for him to resurrect her. Why couldn't they just escape together?
19:36 Erin: She so believed that he. See, this is like a perfect example of oh what, what do they say now? The opposite of he's just not that into you. Like, if you. If you. Oh, if he. If he wanted to, he would. That's the. The. The current dating advice. Right. So she was so assured of his love for her that she knew that all she had to do was kill her would find a way.
19:57 Wes: Oh, she's playing hard to get. Okay.
19:59 Erin: No, no, no. She's not playing hard to get. She's expressing full trust in his ability to overcome death, to rescue her. He's devoted.
20:09 Wes: You know, it's a love that's supposed to transcend everything. And as we know, that kind of love, there's a danger to it. Right. It can kind of blot out the world. And in this case, it could literally blot out the world once it's resurrected. So I think that's one of the ideas here, whether it's well thought out, is that this level of intensity in love can be destructive. And that's offset, of course, by the relationship, Rick and Evelyn, where they have a healthy level of antagonism. This is going back to Much Ado or screwball comedies. Right? The healthy level of antagonism that prevents you from trying to mummify and resurrect and get into all that creepy stuff. You know, keep it. Keep some boundaries. A little antagonism.
21:05 Erin: Well, they're together against the forces of death. Yeah. So in a way, they have a. They have a joint project of trying to. Trying to resurrect each other.
21:15 Wes: I'd like to see what happens if they. If Imhotep had succeeded and then 20 years into their relationship. I'd like to, like, a window in on that. He's sitting on the couch watching tv, and she's yelling at him about something. No, she's like, bandages on the floor.
21:34 Erin: Yeah, it's really good. No, no. She's like, I'm going out. And he's like, where. Where are you going? Just. God, I'm just getting drinks with my friends.
21:42 Wes: Leave me alone.
21:43 Erin: I'm allowed to spend some time away from you.
21:47 Wes: There you go. Ultimately, she ends up getting a restraining order on him. I resurrected you. You belong to me.
22:00 Erin: She gets half the contents of the tomb.
22:04 Wes: Yeah, there you go. So, you know. Yeah, it's all good until you succeed. Until then, it's tragic and eternal.
22:13 Erin: I like this idea that you're maybe the claustrophobia of this kind of relationship or this idea of preservation because it' related directly to the mummification ritual. You know, the loading up the tomb and trying to create the perfect conditions whereby you can survive. And somehow the effort expended on this is fruitless. One of the ideas behind whether or not there was actually a curse of the pharaohs specifically involved in King Tut's tomb. Whether or not people who entered the tomb were more susceptible to illness had to do with the fact that they would put food in the tomb, assuming that you would have to eat once you were reincarnated or after death or whatever. And so that food eventually, of course, went very, very, very bad. And there was bacteria found in the tomb that could cause a bunch of. A bunch of problems, including pneumonia and some of the people who entered the tomb. Yeah. But I think the idea is that there was this bacteria in the tomb, but that it wasn't enough to infect you or that it couldn't have survived for that long. You know, they found, like, the dead bacteria, something like that. But anyway, it was decomposing over thousands of years, releasing all of these acids and chemicals, and also the bugs that were eating these, you know, all of the. The fish and the. All those things that were in there, then those bugs themselves decomposing and creating really gross things inside this little lockbox. So, yeah, there's something, I don't know, maybe accidentally, metaphorically putrid. Right. About. About that whole concept of trying to preserve something unnaturally beyond its, you know, say it's sell by date.
23:56 Wes: Yeah. Like in Frankenstein, which we'll do eventually with. Right. He's reassembling, taking pieces of corpses and putting them together. And you almost say. Reminds me of high school when we did dissection, which I hated with a passion, in part because of the formaldehyde smell you get all over you. That you couldn't just do anything about this, you know, beyond the grossness of doing the dissections themselves. But it's, you know, I imagine, like the body of Frankenstein is sort of like a. Yeah. It's preserved, but it's not preserved in life. Right. It's preserved in death somehow. It doesn't decay. And you can do things with it, and maybe if it's your body, you can do things with it, but there's something dead about it at the same time. So the intention of seeing someone off into the afterlife, and I suppose it must have been largely symbolic, or maybe there was a. You know, did they literally believe they needed to eat? Or maybe it was a big controversy. Did they really eat the food or did they just symbolically eat. Right. The transubstantiation.
24:57 Erin: Yes. Yeah, they really believed that. Yep.
25:01 Wes: And there were factions and wars and. No. So anyway, yeah, the attempt at preservation, I think that, you know, your point is well taken. Can preserve something at the cost of its putridness. And then going to your colonialism idea. 19th century Egypt is a very different place than ancient Egypt. It's already been colonized, right, by a completely different culture. So the relationship is between the modern Egyptians of the time and that ancient culture, which is alien and also exploiters and, you know, like Napoleon and colonizers and conquerors who have that relationship not just to the local culture, but also to this ancient culture, which I think serves as a object of at least two impulses. One of them is just for the treasure and the other is this curiosity. And maybe there's a morbid curiosity there. What is it about our curiosity when we go into a museum? What's so fascinating about all of this stuff to us? And is there something a bit pernicious about it? Right, so there's something about the incredible preservation of a culture that's so ancient that is exciting and fascinating. But then we have to think about our relationship to that and what that's about, I suppose. Is it entirely well intentioned?
26:24 Erin: It seems to me. On the one hand, part of the intention is to feel a lack of difference or to feel some connection with this ancient time, with this culture that's really different from one's own. One wants to feel a connection to this. And that's a big part of the motivation for, say, going to the museum. But then also you want that difference preserved as well. You want to feel that this is thrilling and exotic and different from you. So you want to relate to it on the one hand and also don't want to on the other, or you don't want it to relate to you. You know, that push pull is also in the figure of the mummy. I don't know if I'm characterizing that in a way you would agree with.
27:06 Wes: We're looking into the past in a way. I think we're looking at our own origins. The origins are supposed to explain something about us, right? In a way they've given. They are not just our predecessors, but our progenitors. Right. Our ancient culture, you know, you remember in history class, it's kind of taught as if these ancient cultures were sort of the right. They're giving birth to everything that follows. We are who we are as civilized, supposedly people. Our civilization is built on top of those civilizations. So we look at those origins. It's almost like the fascination with parentage in a certain way. But also we can't overcome the alien ness of those origins. It's not unlike a relationship to deities and religion, where it's something about focusing on an origin. But also the concept of the alien is. Is ever a problem, or at least according to certain philosophers. Right. Hegel thought he was kind of solving that problem. Like faith in the Kantian sense leaves God too much of an alien presence because he's unknowable. And Hegel wants to say he's. Well, actually, he is noble. So in this case, it's the unknowableness of the. Of Egyptian culture. Culture because it does remain really weird and alien. It's like it's hard to get your mind. It's hard to. Just hard to imagine what it would be like to be a person back then in that kind of society. Maybe this feeling is superficial. Maybe, you know, maybe we shouldn't look at hieroglyphs and various other artifacts and the strangeness of mummification and think that it's all that different. Right. These are people who are just people and have the same everyday concerns as we do. But I think part of it has something to do with this idea of feeling like we're trying to come to terms with a kind of origin that is nevertheless alien to us. It's no coincidence that people want to say the pyramids were created by aliens and that in a way, it's another sort of creation myth. They want to. Alien style. Where did human beings come from? Well, from aliens. You know, never mind the theological questions that arise from that. Where did the aliens come from? Why don't we just go straight to the source? We really need the middleman.
29:23 Erin: But anyway, yeah, what you were saying, even before you connected it, I was thinking, oh, yeah, this sounds. You're exactly right. This sounds just like aliens. And that, I think, is something that we also covered in our podcast on Alien. The idea that this is maybe part of what the film was exploring was obviously was sex itself or something about the sex organs themselves. And therefore also this idea of parentage and who our progenitors are, and the Egyptians are sort of filling that same role. The aliens that placed us here in some way. Yeah. So I think that's interesting. I had thought about, you know, Mummy versus Zombie, Mummy versus Vampire, but I really think Mummy and Alien are really the closest relatives. And I should have thought of that because I was also thinking about this film in relationship to Picnic and Hanging Rock, or maybe even a mirror image of Picnic and Hanging Rock and the kind of lessons of colonization that that film has. Maybe we could start with that in part two and Then maybe transition to looking at the film a little bit more closely. Though I still have a lot to. I feel like, to say about just the figure of the mummy itself, but we'll. We'll try to dive into it a little more.
30:29 Wes: Yeah. And get into the romantic comedy aspect too.
30:32 Erin: Sure. Thank you.
30:34 Wes: Thank you.
