Bubba Ho-Tep
The only pop culture mummy that gets it right.
In my last post for The Mummy, I mentioned my general dislike for mummies as movie monsters, in that it is distasteful and disrespectful to the people they used to be.
Bubba Ho-Tep is the only movie I know of that manages to subvert this phenomenon.
Since Bubba Ho-Tep is a less well-known movie than the rest of the ones I normally write about here, I’ll do a quick little plot summary: In a nursing home in east Texas, a man who believes himself to be Elvis (who traded places with an Elvis impersonator named Sebastian Half, that’s why he’s not dead), and another man who believes himself to be John F. Kennedy (he’s a Black man, because the CIA dyed him to keep him safe, where he got shot is filled with sand) meet and sort of become friends. There is also a mummy haunting this nursing home, sucking the souls out of the residents. So Elvis and JFK (who will be called Jack from here on out) decide to do something about this “Bubba Ho-Tep” that’s going on. And it is deeply, deeply, tragic.
One of the first things that happens is that Elvis’s roomate dies. Not because of the Mummy, just old age. As his body is taken out to a hearse, one of the men who is carrying him asks the other one if he ever wonders about who these people used to be. He is told to not be so sappy. Throughout the movie, there are two other sequences with the hearse and guys, which get increasingly more callous, the two men dropping one of the bodies in the third and final one of these scenes. Just before the third death, it is revealed to Elvis in a vision that the Mummy fell off a truck after being stolen from a museum.
There’s so much to unpack in that parallel alone. First, the comparison between the hearse and the truck is undeniable, but so is the comparison between the retirement home and the museum. All of the people in this nursing home have also been stolen in a way. Their youth has been stolen from them by time, and, as such, they are put in this sort of holding cell, where they’re mostly taken care of and occasionally visited, like the Mummy in his museum. Bubba Ho-Tep is the only movie to get The Mummy right, because it is about the mistreatment of the dead and dying. It is made clear that the Mummy having been in a museum at all was disrespectful, and even more so the way it was treated. The Mummy isn’t even quite a monster. Sure, it’s the thing they’re fighting against, and it’s trying to suck the souls out of the elderly, but it’s also very similar to both men - but especially Elvis - in a lot of ways.
The phrase Bubba Ho-Tep is broken down into definitions before the title card of the movie. It about translates to “A Southern Pharoah, or Egyptian king” (Bubba meaning a southern, usually unintelligent man, and Ho-Tep meaning Pharoah). The thing about this phrase is that it could be applied to either the Mummy or Elvis. The Mummy was a king in his youth, as was Elvis. We also see a vision of the Mummy from when he was alive, surrounded by adoring women, just like Elvis was when he performed. And the plot of the movie revolves around them both trying to acheive their former glory, trying to be the way they were when they were young. I feel it is also worth pointing out now that both Elvis and JFK are known for having died young. We never got to know what they were going to be like when they were old, what age was going to do to them, because it never got to them. Elvis and JFK are, in cultural memory, young forever. So is King Tut.
Now, I would like to point out a thing I haven’t specified about this movie as of yet: The Mummy spends the entire thing in a cowboy hat and boots. He is in costume the whole time, one put on him by the people who stole him in an act of almost unbelievable defilation and disrespect. He is no longer the King he was buried as, but is instead a charicature of a very different world. Elvis spends almost the whole movie in pajamas, never really leaving his bed. He is far removed from the rhinestoned pantsuits and big hairdoes of his youth, and is instead the epitome of a depressed nursing home resident. He is made to be representative of a different world than the one he’s used to, as well.
As sad as I’ve made this movie sound with all of this, and as sad as it is, it’s also glorious. Yes, it’s angry, yes it’s sad, but it’s also, in a strange way, hopeful. Because, my God, they did it. They went out in a blaze of glory. Elvis and JFK, old and decrepit and forgotten in this nursing home in middle-of-nowhere east Texas, went out and saved their friends souls by killing a mummy. The final scene of Bubba Ho-Tep sees them almost as they once were. Elvis in his sunglasses and rhinestone jumpsuit that he still has, JFK in his presidential suit hobble and wheel their way out in the middle of the night to fight a mummy. And they win. But they also die.
Jack is the first of them to get killed by the Mummy. He falls asleep and the Mummy attacks him, beating him over the head. The line he says before he dies is “Your President is soon dead.”, which is quite possibly the most impactful line in the entire movie. Because JFK never did get to say that in real life. But in this movie, he did. He knew what was coming, and he was ready. He wasn’t who he used to be, but he went down knowingly, fighting for his friends and his soul.
Elvis goes second, but not before he kills the Mummy. He rolls down a hill to fight it, exchanges some blows with it, douses it in gasoline, and lights it on fire. Then he lays down in the grass, and dies, looking at the stars. As he dies, he is Elvis, not some aging Elvis impersonator. He’s decked out in rhinestones, cape, and pantsuit, and he’s just killed the monster that killed his friend.
You’ll notice that throughout this post, I’ve referred to these men as though they really were Elvis and John F. Kennedy. And as far as I’m concerned, they were. As far as we know, their stories are true. Maybe Elvis really did switch places with an impersonator. Maybe JFK really did survive the shooting through surgery, but was hidden by the CIA for safety. I don’t know. All I know is that Bubba Ho-Tep is a tragic, angry, and glorious story about two men who died young fighting a mummy while trying to push past the disrespect shown to them in their advanced age and regain some of what they had in their youth. It is a brilliant musing on the way our society treats the dead and dying - ancient and otherwise - perfectly framed through the lenses of two of the most famous men to have ever died young.
