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So let it be written—so let it be done

In keeping with the recent theme of ancient Near Eastern civilizations, Orientalism, and Jewish representation, this afternoon I saw Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956) for the first time in my life. The Somerville was screening a 35 mm IB Technicolor print, so I figured it was now or never.

At the intermission I staggered out and said to

derspatchel, "I feel like I've been clubbed with a Sunday-school primer."

After it was over, my mother (who had not come with me) asked what I thought and I said, "Well, I don't think it's going to change how I lead next year's Seder."

I am not sorry to have seen the movie. It's full of great actors, it's gorgeously filmed, it's a cultural touchstone and a truly monumental spectacle and I got to see it larger than life, which I think is the only way to treat DeMille's pyramids and Heston's beard. Everything about Yul Brynner's Rameses is terrific, from the amounts of clothing he is not wearing (but a lot of jewelry in which he looks very good) to the fact that he is actually giving a performance as well as pageantry: a beautiful, commanding man wasting his energies on envy and insecurity and cruelty he doesn't need to resort to; he breaks himself on the God of Moses as surely as Pentheus on Dionysos' smile. The matte-painted parting of the Red Sea stands up to its reputation, but I was really impressed by the simple practical effect of the commandments writing themselves in fire on the red granite of Sinai, sparking and roaring like a cutting torch of Paleo-Hebrew.¹ A lot of the smaller theatrical touches worked very well for me: the recognition token of the white-and-black-striped red Levite cloth that serves first as Moses' tell-tale swaddling, then as the ironic livery of his exile, and finally as the fulfilled reclamation of his heritage; the game of hounds and jackals between Cedric Hardwicke's Pharaoh Sethi and Anne Baxter's "throne princess" (because apparently you can't get away with depicting dynastic incest even in a movie with as impressive a third-act orgy as the Golden Calf) Nefretiri that ends when the ebony head of one of Sethi's jackals snaps off and skitters across the floor to be picked up by Rameses as he enters, unconsciously providing the final word in a discussion of birthright and inheritance; a scale balanced with silver weights and mud bricks with which Rameses maliciously underscores his charges of treachery against his cousin and Moses defends himself to his Pharaoh. When the Nile turns to blood, Rameses defiantly pours out water in a blessing upon it and the clear stream thickens and reddens mid-flow. DeMille's staging of the Exodus includes Moses' adoptive mother binding her fate to her son's and the mummy of Joseph borne on a palm-decorated bier, going home to be buried in long-lost Canaan. A lot of the bigger theatrical gestures did not work for me, especially once Heston shifts into really declamatory mode. The luminous green mist fissuring the sky and pouring in a smoke of pestilence through the streets, ankle-high, grave-deep, is a terrifying interpretation of the tenth plague, but I could not take seriously the passage of the Angel of Death over the house of Aaron and Miriam once it turned on the spot into the first Seder, complete with youngest child piping up innocently, "Why is this night different from all other nights?" Hearing a crowd of extras repeatedly shout "The Lord is our God! The Lord is one!" in English is really disorienting if you have ever said the Sh'ma on a regular basis. I appreciated the rabbi credited up front as one of the film's consultants along with archaeologists and scholars from the Oriental Institute and the Egyptian Department of Antiquities, but the overall effect of the movie is still a Jewish story being told for a Christian audience, through a Christian lens. To be fair to DeMille, I didn't go in expecting anything else. It was nearly four hours long and brilliantly colored and very loud. Edward G. Robinson looked like he was having a lot of fun. Any more intellectual analysis is going to have to wait until I feel less like a very intricately painted obelisk fell on me.

The Somerville was also screening Ben-Hur (1959) as the second half of what David the projectionist called the Charlton Heston Jewish Film Festival, but especially after seeing Spartacus (1960) last night,² I was pretty much epic'd out. I sort of reeled home and fed the cats and wrote a job application, which was exhausting. I don't know if I would feel differently toward The Ten Commandments if I had grown up on it as an Easter tradition, the same way we always watched A Claymation Christmas Celebration (1987) and the Alastair Sim Scrooge/A Christmas Carol (1951) for Christmas and Lights (1984) for Hanukkah; I never had a default version of the Exodus story other than the one my family told every year, which changed a little every year. I didn't even see The Prince of Egypt (1998) until well into college. At the moment I can't imagine how The Ten Commandments would even work on a small screen, when I think much of the effect it had on me was the cast-of-thousands enormity of the production and the friezelike, painterly compositions, as if the whole thing were a moving progression by Alma-Tadema or some other pre-Raphaelite artist specializing in the ancient world.³ I was delighted to come home and discover Arnold Friberg's concept art and costume design for the film, which look, and I mean this in the best possible way, as though they should be decorating the walls of a library à la John Singer Sargent. And now I kind of want to read something with Jewish characters written by actual Jews, which shouldn't be at all hard to find. Who knew that eating at Mamaleh's yesterday would suddenly feel like a cultural victory? This awareness brought to you by my epic backers at Patreon.

1. The only T-shirt I own with Paleo-Hebrew on it is the one

ladymondegreen sent me from the Archaeological Seminars Institute in Israel. I wore it for the occasion.

2. I still think Kirk Douglas would have knocked it out of the park as Judah Ben-Hur. So did he—being turned down for the part by either William Wyler or MGM seems to have been one of his major impetus for making Spartacus. I can't say that was a bad idea, especially considering what Spartacus did for Dalton Trumbo and the breaking of the blacklist, but Douglas would have brought the requisite intensity to the role, plus he was fit as hell and actually Jewish. It would have been fun.

3. I can't imagine how long it must run with commercial breaks, either. My reaction to the latter parts of the film was rather like a road trip version of "Dayenu": all right, the Lord has hurled horse and rider into the sea, are we done yet? All right, Moses has brought down the laws from Sinai, are we done yet? All right, Moses has destroyed the Golden Calf and divided the faithful from the idolators, are we done yet? All right, the people have wandered in the wilderness for forty years, are we done yet? All right, Moses is on Mount Nebo, are we done yet? Cecil B. DeMille, it would have been enough!

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I watched The Ten Commandments so many times as a child because my mother found Heston very attractive and I don't think I ever even noticed how long it was with ad breaks. But that's probably because I saw it so early and so often. It's such a great visual spectacle.

because my mother found Heston very attractive

This is also how certain actors (and characters) came to my attention. My father when he was a teenager had a crush on Antigone.

But that's probably because I saw it so early and so often. It's such a great visual spectacle.

I figure that's how many people feel about it. I do not regret seeing it on a big screen.

I've never seen it, but I enjoyed reading your description of it--and your "Dayenu" postscript made me laugh.

I've never seen it, but I enjoyed reading your description of it--and your "Dayenu" postscript made me laugh.

Thank you!

"I feel like I've been clubbed with a Sunday-school primer."

That's probably a fair assessment. I suspect I saw it on so many Easter Sunday afternoons as a child I simply stopped paying attention.

I suspect I saw it on so many Easter Sunday afternoons as a child I simply stopped paying attention.

In an anthropological way, I think it's neat that your family did that!

More a case of limited programme choice! Three broadcast channels through most of my childhood, and you could probably guarantee one of them would show it. It's not that I have any clear memory of it, more I know I've seen it, and I've got a feeling it was Eastertime.

I hope you have seen Ten Things I Hate About Commandments.

I hope you have seen Ten Things I Hate About Commandments.

I HAVE NOW.

(I like the timing of Yul Brynner's two-arm facepalm on the line "A comedy three thousand years in the making." Also Samuel L. Jackson's Principal Firebush.)

My God. I don't remember anything about it, though we must have been taken: a brother was inspired to play Moses and the idols, and broke a bust of Sappho. Good heavens. I think I've found her.

Nine

I don't remember anything about it, though we must have been taken: a brother was inspired to play Moses and the idols, and broke a bust of Sappho.

Well, I wouldn't call her a graven image, but she has received a fair amount of worship over the years.

I am not sure what you would think of the movie now. I didn't find that it rose (or sank) to the point of risibility anywhere other than the proto-Seder, but between the script's determination to cram in every possible incident in Moses' life from birth to death plus every possible facet of melodrama inherent or graftable into the story plus DeMille's directorial style which was only one level of naturalism up from a silent film with a dialogue track, I'm not sure it's possible to watch it with a perfect or even a moderate suspension of disbelief. I liked it best when it was being either human-driven (Pharaoh Sethi and his two heirs, the late-life meeting of Moses' two mothers, the hell that is the mutually Moses-obsessed marriage of Rameses and Nefretiri), numinous in a matter-of-fact way (the aforementioned first and tenth plagues, the rain of hail-fire which occurs while Rameses is reading a letter outdoors; he steels himself conspicuously to ignore the ice falling from a clear sky until it begins to burn like naphtha along the tiles and walls), or totally batshit insane (the Golden Calf, which you should imagine as a hammered-gold Apis bull before which Edward G. Robinson in a smirk and a leopardskin is leading the abandoned people of Israel in a vortex of lurid torchlight and just-deniable orgiastic writhing, drinking, and playing of tambourines and horns while wreaths of blood-red flowers are flung spinning across its horns and the half-naked unwilling sacrifice played by Debra Paget weeps at its gilt-shod hooves). Everything that fell between these modes was either tableaux vivants or really expensive cheesecake or just didn't work for me. The burning bush, for example, is done with a kind of overlaid golden glowing rather than actual flames, which is an interesting effect, but I found it much less visually or emotionally powerful than if they had used a practical effect or even the flickering double-exposed fires of the seventh plague—and then it speaks in a deep, stately masculine voice which I was later informed was Heston's own and while I like the concept (also employed in The Prince of Egypt) of the prophet hearing God as if he spoke to himself, it also knocks another level of reality off the scene because it is such a specific and to me now antiquated idea of the voice of God, the basso profundo beard in the sky. Nefretiri has lines like "Oh, Moses, Moses, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool!" I appreciate the nod toward inclusiveness when Bithiah's Ethiopian bearers are included under the safety of Miriam and Aaron's roof and when Nubians join the Hebrews in their exodus from Egyptian slavery, but of the main cast nobody is Egyptian or even handwavily Arabic and the only Jewish actors I could identify are Edward G. Robinson (Dathan, the traitorous overseer of his fellow Hebrews who sleazes his way to the governship of Goshen; he's reprehensibly great), Olive Deering (Miriam, who doesn't even get to sing the "Song of the Sea" in this version; John Carradine's Aaron is also sidelined except in the staffs-into-serpents episode and the making of the Golden Calf, which is a waste of John Carradine if you ask me), and slightly and ancestrally Yul Brynner, which makes the whole thing look again a lot more like a Midwestern church pageant than, you know, Nineteenth-Dynasty Egypt. Which is not surprising in a Biblical epic in 1956, but still: because it's what I expect from the time doesn't mean it doesn't still stick out like a sore thumb, especially when the script keeps thumping on freedom and equality and humanity and God, who if he is really God, cannot be the God of Israel alone, but the God of all men, dwelling like a light of truth and goodness in every heart and soul. Like, can we just get out of Egypt before we start with the supersessionism? The fact that I enjoyed this movie at all has to be a tribute to DeMille's powers as an entertainer (and Yul Brynner), but I really am not sure I need to do it to myself again.

Edited 2016-09-26 08:28 (UTC)

Have you ever seen Demille's earlier, silent Ten Commandments? It's basically DeMille trying to be Griffith, with bonus anti-Chinese immigration subtext, and it's even weirder than that makes it sound. Let's just say I really thought the script was setting up somebody in the modern story to catch leprosy-as-a-metaphor-for-syphillis, and I'm still disappointed that he didn't.

Have you ever seen Demille's earlier, silent Ten Commandments? It's basically DeMille trying to be Griffith, with bonus anti-Chinese immigration subtext, and it's even weirder than that makes it sound. Let's just say I really thought the script was setting up somebody in the modern story to catch leprosy-as-a-metaphor-for-syphillis, and I'm still disappointed that he didn't.

Wow. I didn't know this existed, but I'm definitely going to have to look it up.

Have you ever seen Demille's earlier, silent Ten Commandments?

No! The Somerville screened it last year, but I was unable to go. I knew it had a modern-day narrative, but nobody mentioned the weirder-than-describable anti-immigration subtext.

Let's just say I really thought the script was setting up somebody in the modern story to catch leprosy-as-a-metaphor-for-syphillis, and I'm still disappointed that he didn't.

I'm sorry. Knowing nothing else about the movie, I agree that would have been amazing.

I have a somewhat complicated history with this film. I saw it on TV at some point between the ages of 7 and 12, and I don't think I've seen it again since.

However, it was the one film that my great grandfather ever saw, and in fact, took my mother to see, because he felt it actually had religious merit. This is not to say that my great grandfather was a stick in the mud. Periodically, a story emerges about him where my response is "really?" like the one about him perpetually lighting his cigarette off the shabbat candles. Somehow that strikes me as more deeply irreverent than going to the movies. That being said, his opinion of this film has probably colored my experience of it. Being his great grand daughter is an epic all on its own, complete with the fact that he still has name recognition in the Toronto Jewish community. My father is always coming back from synagogue and telling my mother that he met someone who knew her grandfather. It's a little weird, considering how long he's been gone. Also, the fact that we don't live in Toronto.

On a more personal level, when I was in college, and the school swapped my grades with someone else's (effectively flunking me out of my archaeology major, despite the fact that I was actually getting fine grades, they were just being credited to someone else) I wound up swapping my secular major to film, largely because I was told that anthropology was too close to archaeology and that I would just flunk again. By the time the mix-up came to light, I was most of the way through my junior year, and there was no going back. During this period of being a double-major in Bible and Film an innumerable number of people asked me whether I was going to remake The Ten Commandments. Oddly, almost as soon as I got out of college, one of my professors told me about a movie he'd been working on, called Prince of Egypt.

I think I already sent you this in e-mail, but for the benefit of your readers, here is Nina Paley's take on the Exodus story (warning, it's deeply weird).

I'm definitely with you on the seder scene. I remember that striking me as false even when I saw it as a child. Other parts seemed hokey, but that one was the real clunker. I did appreciate the user of paeleo Hebrew, and that has written the template for depictions of same in my brain. Well, that and a book I had as a child that has an encounter between the proto-Hebrew leters and the modern ones. Somewhere in my brain that has very thoroughly meshed with the animate letters from Lights (speaking of seeing the numinous in weird places) and the idea of the torah being black fire written on a background of white fire. I have a lot of ideas about the lives of letters, which definitely did not occur naturally.

Please feel free to pick my brain for midrash. I've been reading midrashically about Moses a lot lately, trying to get bits of the novel to make sense to me (it's always a weird feeling when something I have come up with independently turns up in a corroborating midrash).

Well, this was a long response, and could probably go on, but dayenu!

Edited 2016-09-26 12:47 (UTC)

However, it was the one film that my great grandfather ever saw, and in fact, took my mother to see, because he felt it actually had religious merit.

That's neat. Were you shown it by your mother in turn, or was it just on TV one time?

My father is always coming back from synagogue and telling my mother that he met someone who knew her grandfather. It's a little weird, considering how long he's been gone. Also, the fact that we don't live in Toronto.

Seriously. I am sure there is a non-supernatural explanation, but it really sounds like timeslip or a dybbuk situation.

when I was in college, and the school swapped my grades with someone else's (effectively flunking me out of my archaeology major, despite the fact that I was actually getting fine grades, they were just being credited to someone else)

. . . How was that allowed to stand? Could you not prove from coursework and your professors that they were your own grades and the school's error?

Somewhere in my brain that has very thoroughly meshed with the animate letters from Lights (speaking of seeing the numinous in weird places) and the idea of the torah being black fire written on a background of white fire.

I was just thinking about that last night! Long before I had ever heard of the Zohar, Lights and Phyllis Gotlieb combined to give me the image of Hebrew as a living language of fire. I should write up Lights when it gets to be the right time of year. It was my first image of Alexander the Great, too.

Please feel free to pick my brain for midrash.

All right! The Ten Commandments leans very heavily on a messianic interpretation of Moses, which is one of the reasons (along with a lot of the religious language and the above-mentioned insistence that the Israelites' God cannot be the God of Israel alone) it feels like a Christianized version. I assume there's a midrashic basis for the story that Pharaoh issued his murderous edict against the firstborn because it had been foretold that from among the enslaved Israelites would arise a "Deliverer" who would threaten his reign—rather than the version I always heard in my family's Seder, that Pharaoh, without any kind of foresight except the fear that afflicts oppressors, became afraid that the slaves who outnumbered his people who would someday also overpower and overthrow them—but when it went by in the script, I wanted to know who had invited Herod the Great to the party. Is this a much more common presentation of Moses than the one I'm familiar with? Somewhere early I picked up the story that he burnt his mouth on a live coal as a child and therefore stuttered and sometimes needed Aaron to speak for him, but that wasn't from my family, either.

Well, this was a long response, and could probably go on, but dayenu!

Heh. You are very much not in danger of pulling a Cecil B. DeMille.

I'm sure it's very different seeing it for the first time as an adult. I grew up with this movie as a kid -- it was my family's Passover tradition for a while, and I loved it as a wonderfully dramatic story. I haven't seen it for a decade or so, so I don't know what I'd think of it now. I have no doubt that your objection that it's "a Jewish story being told for a Christian audience, through a Christian lens" is a fair one. My parents were generally happy when Judaism showed up in popular or historical culture in a positive way and would promptly claim it as ours, so I grew up with things like this or Scott's (and Sullivan's) Ivanhoe or Handel's Judas Maccabaeus as part of my Jewish canon. I'm not saying it's a better or worse way of dealing with things; that was just how they did it.

I grew up with this movie as a kid -- it was my family's Passover tradition for a while, and I loved it as a wonderfully dramatic story.

I expect that to be true of a lot of people. It's a massive piece of pop culture that I'd never seen. I may have missed the imprintable window.

so I grew up with things like this or Scott's (and Sullivan's) Ivanhoe or Handel's Judas Maccabaeus as part of my Jewish canon. I'm not saying it's a better or worse way of dealing with things; that was just how they did it.

People find representation where they can; what works for some people doesn't work for others and sometimes people revise their opinions either way. I had a professor in grad school who violently hated Fiddler on the Roof. I understood his objections, but one of my childhood memories of my grandmother is of her playing its opening theme on the violin that my brother later inherited. Even if I hadn't memorized both the movie and the original cast recording as a child, it would matter incredibly to me that its music existed for my grandmother to play.

People find representation where they can; what works for some people doesn't work for others and sometimes people revise their opinions either way. --Truth (and there's wisdom in recognizing this).

Did any other audience members notice your Paleo-Hebrew T-shirt? I think that's very cool.

The water Ramses pours turning to blood midstream sounds very cool (and awful).

Let's hear it for handsome Yul Brynner!

It was nearly four hours long and brilliantly colored and very loud. Edward G. Robinson looked like he was having a lot of fun. Any more intellectual analysis is going to have to wait until I feel less like a very intricately painted obelisk fell on me.
--I'm very satisfied with what you've given us!

Did any other audience members notice your Paleo-Hebrew T-shirt? I think that's very cool.

Absolutely nobody noticed! And I thought it was the right crowd, too.

The water Ramses pours turning to blood midstream sounds very cool (and awful).

DeMille was great at effects! The rising city of Goshen is a combination of mattes and composites and model work and it looks terrific. Plagues like the Nile turning to blood and the mingling of fire and hail are convincing in part because they're naturalistic: they don't look like special effects—no strange colors, no swirls of light—just normal impossibilities. The churning stormclouds that signal the presence of the God of Israel are obviously an optically printed effect, but they are real clouds of something. The slight bleeding lines around human figures superimposed onto deserts or city vistas are a sign of the technology, but they actually work in the favor of the parting of the Red Sea: mountainous masses of water constantly pouring upward, haloed with an actinic blue glow like St. Elmo's fire; the signature of God who is cloud and stormwind and shooting stars, thunder and lightning and fire. People, and what they sound like when talking to one another, DeMille needed some work on.

Let's hear it for handsome Yul Brynner!

Okay:

(You really need to see this movie in Technicolor if you're going to see it. Nothing I can find online is as vividly unreal.)

--I'm very satisfied with what you've given us!

Thank you!

Oh Ramses. I would be reduced to self-concious grinning in your presence. At least, that's what the photos do to me. (This has been true since I saw him in The King and I when I was a kid.) Those colors really are **brilliant**. But him at the payphone is best--really does seem like an ancient Egyptian among us (which reminds me of your post on The Amulet)

mountainous masses of water constantly pouring upward, haloed with an actinic blue glow like St. Elmo's fire; the signature of God who is cloud and stormwind and shooting stars, thunder and lightning and fire. --Let the record show that Sovay can evoke the immanent power of the divine in a throwaway remark in a comment. Whoa.

(This has been true since I saw him in The King and I when I was a kid.)

I believe it to be a popular affliction. I am pretty sure I also saw him first in The King and I.

But him at the payphone is best--really does seem like an ancient Egyptian among us (which reminds me of your post on The Amulet)

He would have made a great Rekh-Marā! That photo in the phone booth is now my headcanonical casting. Thank you.

--Let the record show that Sovay can evoke the immanent power of the divine in a throwaway remark in a comment. Whoa.

Thank you.

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