I say, jolly good show, chaps. And did I panic? I think not.
#the comic relief who is genuinely comic #and who makes the ‘incompetent bufoon’ trope actually work as an endearing quality as originally intended #well played movie - well played #john hannah #WHAT A FOX
#but! BUT!!!#THE GREAT THING ABOUT JONATHAN#IS HE’S NOT INCOMPETENT#he can read ancient Egyptian albeit not as well as his baby sister#he clearly has an interest in archaeology if only for treasure-related reasons#he had to go through intensive schooling to get the sort of permit required#to even have digs of his own#WHICH HE CLEARLY DOES#on a dig down in Thebes#he says and Evie believes him#Jonathan reads from the Book of the Living and he’s an excellent shot with a rifle and is clearly a boxer#Jonathan is SO COMPETENT and SO IMPORTANT#while simultaneously being plucky comic relief without JUST being plucky comic relief#u get me?
Jonathan, like Phryne Fisher, clearly hasn’t taken anything seriously since 1918.
And, I would suspect, for similar reasons.
^^^This. Jonathan being in World War I makes total sense. It’s almost impossible for him not to have been. Given his age and background, he probably volunteered in 1914.
Of course he’s going to not take anything seriously. Of course he can shoot. The drinking, the skittishness, the recklessness, the sense of ‘keeping your head down’, the scepticism about traditional heroism….
The one with more actual experience of death, carnage and fighting is Jonathan. Not Rick. Not Ardeth Bey. Jonathan.
When Rick says ‘I’ve had worse (situation/odds)’ and Jonathan replies “ Me too”. That’s probably true.
Drop The Mummy into the real world context and that’s a character who’s going to have seen a lot of his school friends die, along with the myths and tales of heroism they were raised on. Sort of makes the line where Evie’s scolding him for drinking/messing about a lot darker…
Evie: Have you no respect for the dead? Jonathan: Of course I do, but sometimes I’d rather like to join them.
I HAVE SO MANY FEELINGS RIGHT NOW
*record scratch*
Wait a minute. Why is it being assumed that Rick and Ardeth wouldn’t have fought in WWI, as well? Johnathan isn’t that much older than any of them–in fact, there is a good chance that he, Rick, and Ardeth are all of an age. Just because Johnathan’s hair is thinning doesn’t mean he’s a decade older.
It was a LOT easier to lie about your age back in the day. So much easier.
Johnathan is the soldier who fought in WWI and became disillusionsed with pretty much everything except wanting to live (most of the time) and live well–and where is the shame in that? He would have seen some of the darkest shit humanity has to offer, and he kept going. And the thing is, though, archaeological digs at that time were DANGEROUS. Not from curses (usually) but from assholes who would turn up with guns to try and steal anything you discovered. Johnathan never really STOPPED having to deal with dangerous pricks, it was just less dangerous than death raining down from the sky in bomb, bullet, and mustard gas form all the time.
Rick grew up in Egypt as an orphan. What paperwork? He joined the French Foreign Legion, which fought in World War I in some seriously critical battles on the Western Front in Europe. Rick is the soldier who quickly grew disillusioned with everything, but he didn’t know how to stop being a soldier. Johnathan had a career and schooling to fall back on. Rick had guns, the talent of not dying easily, and not much else. When the army finally left him behind because he was literally the only survivor of his last FFL battle, he literally didn’t know what to do. At all. “Looking for a good time” was code for “Please someone give me a fucking purpose.”
Ardeth grew up in the desert. He probably never enlisted…but if you think his people didn’t fight against invading forces during WWI, think again: that region of North Africa was swarming with soldiers on both sides, and they alll tried to claim everything they stumbled over even while in the midst of fighting each other. Ardeth spent his entire life fighting to protect what belonged to him, what belonged to his people, and trying to keep assholes from stealing things that didn’t belong to anyone (for good reason). By the time the war was over, Ardeth was disillisioned in everyone except his own people, and seriously fucking done with stupid idiots who stole in the name of archaeology. He is completely (justifiably) resigned to the worst when Rick the Magic Survivalist returns to Hamunaptra.
This has been another episode of “Actual History adding context and depth to character behavior”
I love when “The Mummy” fandom comes out to play. But it’s even better when the history side of tumblr is also in “The Mummy” fandom.
Every time this post comes around I am compelled to watch The Mummy again.
There is an explicitly nihilistic ‘old soldier’ in the movie too, just to drive home the point.
Winston: “Is it dangerous?”
Rick: “Well, you probably won’t live through it.”
Winston: “By Jove, do you think so?”
That “old soldier” is one element which jars with me. YMMV, of course.
“The Mummy” is set in 1926, so Winston is far too old to have been a pilot in WWI (actor Bernard Fox was 72 at time of filming). He should have been a “young soldier” or more correctly, “young airman” of about Rick or Jonathan’s age.
The script was also a wee bit confused about what he served in…
The British air arm was the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) until 1918, when it became the Royal Air Force (RAF).
His survivor’s guilt and heavy drinking is spot on, though: average aircrew life expectancy was between ten days and three weeks. In “Bloody April” (1917) when superior new German aircraft were introduced before the Allies had anything to match them, average life expectancy dropped to about two days. The RFC lost almost 250 planes during that month, the Imperial German Air Service lost just over 60…
WWI pilots didn’t have parachutes until 1918, and even then Allied pilots NEVER had them: the top brass, who of course didn’t fly, considered they would “impair a pilot’s nerve” to continue fighting.
Pilots who saw combat soon saw the results of that policy when a plane caught fire (gasoline, linen and canvas in a 120 mph draft makes a great barbecue). No parachute left three options: a long jump, a slow roast or the service pistol carried “in case of being forced down in enemy territory”. Seeing that happen, and the thought of experiencing it personally, would make anyone hit the bottle.
The pilot of this German aircraft is having a very bad day final few minutes…
Also, in WWI the only oil that didn’t thicken at altitude was castor oil - it’s where the “Castrol” oil company’s name originated - so aircraft engines were lubricated with that. Breathing the vapour had the same laxative effect as swallowing the stuff, so aircrew fought diarrhoea as well as enemy aircraft, trying to stun their insides with enormous amounts of booze. US ace Eddie Rickenbacker swore by cherry brandy. Pints of it.
Funny thing is that Winston could have been Biggles - not the silly subject of Monty Python skits, but the original character from WWI air-combat stories written for late-adolescents, before they were revised for children with the removal of serious adult elements like alcohol abuse and PTSD.
Biggles in those early stories was like many real-life WWI pilots, a chain-smoking, heavy-drinking young man of about 20, living on his nerves and skating along the edge of a breakdown, whose principal talents were killing the enemy, not being killed himself, and not letting the deaths of his squadron mates affect him. He wasn’t as good at that last one as he thought he was.
Left to right: Major James McCudden, VC, DSO & Bar, MC & Bar, MM, killed in action July 1918, aged 23. Lieutenant Arthur Rhys-Davids DSO, MC & Bar, killed in action October 1917, aged 20. Captain Albert Ball, VC, DSO & Two Bars, MC, killed in action April 1917, aged 20.
The unrevised stories suggest Biggles might well have turned out like Winston. By the time of “The Mummy” he’d have been about 27-28, and looking like this pilot painted by J.C. Leyendecker.
At a guess, that age casting didn’t happen because a young alcoholic pilot with haunted eyes and a death-wish wasn’t as automatically funny as an old alcoholic pilot with a pompous accent and a death-wish, and would have the wrong “tone” for the movie.
I think it says something about the American movie audience of the time. The Mummy was released in 1999. Bush’s disastrous Iraq War wouldn’t start for another couple of years. Americans were used to allowing veterans of WW2 and the Korean War their traumas, but veterans of every conflict since then were treated like their trauma was either unimportant, a joke, or attention seeking. You only have to look at how often “Nam flashbacks” were treated as a punchline, or how the “agent orange” business of the Gulf War was disregard by the rest of society. (It was a concerted propaganda effort by the people in power, of course, both so they could continue justifying imperialist wars and so they wouldn’t have to take care of returning veterans, but that’s a different discussion.)
American audience wouldn’t have known what to think about a young traumatized, alcoholic pilot. It didn’t fit the narrative of old heroes that they had been fed since the end of WW2.
This fandom conversation just gets better every time it makes the rounds.
I agree with the probable motivations for age adjustment of the character. Balancing the worldbuilding and the way the audience will most likely relate at the time any given story hits the public eye seems astoundingly challenging.
Its a little unsettling how 1999 feels a world away right now.
I should do a Mummy homage art at some point…
Winston I believe is a case of the character being much younger than the actor - I can easily see him being in his fifties. And while today fifty is not seen as an “end of life” age and it seems preposterous for a 70 year old (even one who looks as damned decent as Bernard Fox) to play one, for the time period it fits perfectly. This “youthful fifty” is a relatively modern invention, and it definitely was a very different matter before the postwar (II) prosperity (for a very stark example compare Hartnell’s 1st Doctor with Capaldi’s 12th - both actors were roughly the same age during their tenures). The RFC did have officers born in the 1860′s and later, so while it would have be career military, including air corps (which fits Winston to a T, including his old soldier persona) it is believable that he was an older First World War veteran. If he was serving for a large enough period before the name change, then yes, it would explain the word salad, especially as an older soldier well used to working under the RFC moniker. I suspect Ardeth very likely at least peripherally was involved with TE Lawrence’s shenanigans - you can’t tell me the Meiji weren’t keeping a bloody close eye on the Great Arab Revolt, especially since the whiteboy involved was a goddamn archaeologist who had previously been digging around an Egyptian necropolis…
@deadcatwithaflamethrower more history about The Mummy!
More history, and @fluffmugger pointing out that the “Youthful Fifty” years of age is SO VERY NEW, GUYS.
Example: Alec Guiness, in 1975, filmed his role with Harrison, Mark, Carrie, & Co. at the tender age of 57. In today’s terms of fifties, he looks like he’s in his late 70s to early 80s.
Peter Cushing, same year, same film: age 62, looked like a healthy and well-groomed modern era mid-to-late 80s.
Casting Bernard Fox was actually spot-on. The Mummy might’ve gone for comedy, but they didn’t fuck around when it came to acknowledging that all of these characters were PTSD-riddled from at least one major war, and also completely fucking nuts.
But if you wanted to give the character a background that would fit the actor, then you could really mess with the poor guy and have him enlist right before the first Boer War. Imagine starting off in the army by fighting in a loosing war, then getting sent around Africa for another 30ish years putting down one uprising after other. Finally this airplane business comes along and you’re given command of an air field where you send out batch after batch of boys to their deaths.
