Mummy, oh Mummy!

My "author DNA" took a surprising turn when I wasn't looking, but to be fair, I was drinking a lot back in the 90s

Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!

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What’s your “author DNA?” That writer or story that sits at the heart of your inspiration and lights the way through the long, dark nights of your (character’s) soul?

I have recently come to the surprising realization that my current storytelling DNA is the 1999 movie, The Mummy.

Previously, I would have sworn up and down that my storytelling DNA was the book Dune by Frank Herbert, which I read when I was about ten years old. It became the inspiration for the type of story I wanted to tell: sweeping, epic, and chock-a-block with world-building. I would point to Dune and say, “that’s what it all boils down to. That’s what I want to do.”

To be clear, Dune is not my favorite novel, nor is it the most influential one in my life as a reader or as a person. It was just…DNA. The source code.

But somewhere along the way, my storytelling DNA shifted (not very far, admittedly) from the classic, well regarded SF novel to some cheesy cult favorite star studded adventure yarn from 1999.

It's honestly weird how ingrained this movie is in my psyche. If you asked me whether my parents enjoyed it or not, I would tell you they absolutely loved it. And then I'd stop. I'd think about it. Then I would (re)realize that they both died years before the movie came out.

Yet to me, it's such a fundamental part of my creative soul that I can't imagine a world where it doesn’t exist, despite the fact that I spent the first 30 years of my life existing without it.

The What of It

In fact, The Mummy has affected my writing style so intimately and deeply that I didn't even grasp that anything had changed until recently.

I could go into a deep dive about the cultural elements that resonated with me at the time that The Mummy came out, about how it gathered together all the influences from books, movies, and television shows I had imbibed over the course my life by that point. I grew up on James Bond and John Wayne; the Black Stallion books; Star Trek Wars; Agatha Christie; pulp fiction and westerns and cozy mysteries and Ann McCaffrey and James White.

In short, I was primed for The Mummy.

Look, I'm not trying to argue that the movie is a stunning cinematic achievement. What I'm saying is that all the elements fit together like puzzle pieces to complete the image in my mind of what the acme of storytelling should be. Not the great literary triumphs or the cinematic tour de forces which have shaped art and fashion and culture. Nope. The Mummy, 1999.

And this came to me not when I was watching the movie, but when I saw a meme pop up on Tumblr, and one I'm already familiar with, at that. It’s nothing new! Just a post that shows the major characters of the movie with the text “my sexual orientation is cast of The Mummy.”

In that moment, as I looked at that silly meme, I thought of the characters in a story I’m currently re-writing.

The tumblers fell, and the lock snapped open a window in my mind: Oh, that’s my ur-story, the source, the DNA of all the stories I’m writing. That’s it.

The Why of It

The characters.

That’s it, that’s why. Not the setting or the plot or the costumes or the world-building. None of that is special, certainly not in the way many of those elements were in, say, Dune.

But it’s also why the movie continues to be cult-popular nearly 25 years later. All the characters are    out-sized in their own ways, yet empathetic and relatable. They aren’t perfect but they are perfectly suited for the adventure they are on, and I love that most of all.   

There's something universal to Evie Carnahan’s desperation to prove herself to an establishment that doesn't respect her and never will, and the way she’s buried her sense of adventure under the drudgery of being “a good girl.”

Rick O'Connell is the most out-sized of the out-sized characters, and the “Handsome Sassy Hero” everyone loves to love. Yet his (unexplained) experiences of warfare, his background as an orphan, and how he's desperate for human connection yet also runs from it (as epitomized in the stereotypical trope of him having joined the French Foreign Legion, presumably, like so many others in history, after getting out of WWI alive) make him a character that people both want to be and want to know.

Ardeth Bay epitomized the classic and, yes, stereotypical “mysterious warrior of the desert” whose life is sworn to guard all of humanity against an ancient evil and who, as a result, lives a half-life of service. But he’s played with panache by Oded Fehr who brings both gravitas and whimsy to what could have been a throw-away role. As a result, it’s obvious that Ardeth Bay suffers from a real inner conflict: a desire for his own adventures (I mean, why else would any sane person follow Rick and Evie anywhere?) vs. his sense of duty. He uses the latter to feed the former, but it’s all part of his mystique, isn’t it?

Then…THEN! *clutches chest* Then there is Jonathan, who appears to be a very simple comedic character until you actually think about him for a little bit and realize, oh shit, he was a World War One veteran! It explains both his drunkenness and his incredibly skilled sharp-shooting talents. In this light, a lot of his quips which seem hilarious on the surface take on a much deeper meaning, such as this scene where a lot of people are in a square off, pointing guns at each other:

Beni: Since there is only four of you and fifteen of me, your odds are not so great, O’Connell!

Rick: I’ve had worse.

Jonathan: Yeah, me too! [exchanges knowing look with Rick]

Finally, there are the surprisingly complex villains.

Yeah, I said it: the villains in The Mummy are not just good antagonists but great characters.

They are not good people and probably never were: an adulteress-slash-murderer and an evil wizard-slash-priest. Their love is forbidden but exists beyond space and time (a true staple of romance stories in general) but their tragedy is of their own making. There's no way to paint them as wronged in the sense that they were definitely not innocent, but you can have empathy for them and understand that they were trapped in their roles as pharaoh’s servants. Maybe they were always going to be terrible people, but it’s possible the cage they lived in warped them first.

So there you have the characters who imprinted on me like a soul tattoo, building on the foundation of all the movies, books, and television shows of my youth. They fed on the tropes and the cliches which layered up in my psyche over the years.

The Result of It

This insight about The Mummy made me look back over all of my writing with an eye towards what influences I could pick out. My contemporary M/M romances reflect this the least in structure, but here and there I see reflections of the tropes and character types which come from that tradition of adventure stories.

Sure, it goes back further than The Mummy — Dune, and before that, The Black Stallion and Jack London. Star Trek and Star Wars and Indiana Jones. The Three Musketeers (book, and 1973 movie). The John Wayne westerns my parents loved and Silverado. Was it an “adventure story”? I loved it.

Most of those I cannot stand to re-read/re-watch since they are dated and are, in common lingo, so very, very problématique. But The Mummy????? …okay yeah, it’s not perfect either. But whenever I need a laugh, or a pick-me-up, or inspiration, I can and do re-watch The Mummy.

(Although I’m here to say Silverado is remembered less than it should be.)

Anyway, it's important that I’ve clearly identified this inspiration, this source-code that is a ridiculous romp of a movie from 1999, so I can be consciously aware of it. It prevents me from creating shabbily-coded fanfiction, which I don’t have any problem with, but readers might. (To be honest, when I want to write fanfic, I write fanfic, and when I want to write original fiction, I write original fiction. I can separate the two.)

But this updated, improved understanding of my own influences is going to give me fodder for mining in the future stories I write. It gives me clarity and inspiration to pull on the threads of tropes and characters which are already a part of my psyche. I know Dune and more recent inspirations like MDZS, Nirvana in Fire, and Hands of the Emperor are there too, but I feel a lot more empowered knowing what my current author DNA consists of, and has helped me focus more on writing action-adventure stories going forward.

As Theodora Taylor would (maybe) say: It’s the BUTTTAHHHHHHHH!!!!

How about you?

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