82
Popular Culture Review
positive depictions. Perhaps the most notable example in the sequel lies with the
way Evie repeatedly returns to Rick’s arms whenever the recent threat they have
faced is repelled. Sommers may intend to show how intensely in love the couple
is, but by having Evie constantly run to Rick for comfort he undercuts her as an
independent lady capable of facing up to the crises life throws her way.
It comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with Sommers’s script for
The Mummy that Evelyn again initiates the conflict when she discovers the
bracelet of Anubis early in the narrative. In The Mummy Returns, the bracelet
becomes the relic the bad folks need to obtain in order to gain control of their
plans for domination. With this in mind, the story portrays Patricia Velasquez’s
Meela Nais, a latter-day Anck Su Namun, as a major player in the gang seeking
to restore Imhotep to life.
As the second lead female in the film, Nais is heavily involved with the
plot hatched by the representatives of evil to eventually gain power, for as
Ardeth Bey (Oded Fehr) tells us, Meela is the one ‘‘who knows things, things
that no living person could possibly know. She knew exactly where the creature
(Imhotep) was buried.” Handy with a variety of weapons, Meela initially plans
to kill Evie in front of Imhotep as a way to please her lover, although the plan
fails when Rick and Ardeth show up in the nick of time to foil the goings on.
Nonetheless, Meela is responsible for several deaths as the story unfolds and
Imhotep raises Anck Su Namun’s soul to inhabit Meela’s body.
As far as Evie goes, Sommers seems adrift trying to detemiine how he
wishes to depict her in this film. He appears to want to exhibit an equal malefemale relationship, evident by the playful banter they repeatedly engage in a la
Nick and Nora Charles from the Thin Man series. However, Sommers often
places his heroine in situations in which she merely portrays a typical damsel in
distress whose forte is screaming at the unearthly creatures that must be fought.
Evidence of this authorial confusion lies with the fact that several scenes in the
film show Evie screaming at the challenge presented by the forces of evil, only
to suddenly take up a weapon and enter the current fray the boys have walked
into.
Perhaps the seminal scene showing the dichotomy Sommers’s two
major female characters present in this film takes place during a vision Evelyn
has on the dirigible when she flashes back to Imhotep’s Egypt and finds herself
as the King’s daughter, Nefertiri. Here, Evie’s earlier self and Anck Su Namun
engage each other in what is little more than a “cat fight” for the amuse ment of
the dignitaries lining the King’s chamber. While Sommers may have intended to
allow his actresses a chance to display their skill as action heroines, the scene
plays more as something from the latest volume of Girls Gone Wild, with the
men leering like so many drunken frat boys as the women have at each other.
The women are thus merely objectified as objects of entertainment for the men
in audience of the spectacle, although the scene establishes a context for the
climactic fight between these two during the film’s denouement.