The Ten Commandments

I stayed up late yesterday to belatedly fulfil my most important annual religious obligation: a viewing of the Ten Commandments.

I missed it on network TV. Every spring to this day, the Ten Commandments plays on ABC. Not a reading of the tablets themselves, just the four hour 1956 Hollywood epic: The Ten Commandments, starring Charlton Heston as Moses and Yul Brenner as Pharaoh and alongside them a massive row of 1950s stars. Like so many religious epics, it's a movie that apes religious piety while providing pruriently sexy content through its many scenes of pagan idol worship. The loftiness of the subject matter is an excuse for scenes of the most massive spectacle, full of lavish costumes, gigantic sets, and scenes which are masterpieces of coordination involving 14,000 extras and 15,000 animals. It's rumored that the production resulted in multiple deaths.

It's not a good movie.

The script is full of the most lofty sounding bullshit, most of the special effects don't hold up in the face of modern developments. Many very skilled actors try the best they can, but the famed director Cecil B. DeMille was trained by the silent era and clearly instructed them to make all kinds of woodenly absurd gestures; completely unnecessary mannerisms in an era when stories may be told through words.

The interest in the movie, as always in Hollywood, is erotic. Moses and Pharaoh compete for the hand of the sex kitten Nefertiri--her name changed for obvious reasons from the historical NeferTITI, yet that doesn't stop her character from being fitted in the most boob filling ancient dresses. When Moses arrives in Midian, he marries the equally beautiful Sephora as a kind of consolation prize. Joshua and slave overseer Dathan compete for the beautiful water girl Lillia, a slave girl fitted in a golden gown when taken to the overseer's house for sexual slavery. The muscular chests of Moses, Pharaoh and Joshua are all paraded in undress, sometimes quite oiled.

It's the old trick of the preacher inveighing against pornography while holding his worshippers' interest by describing the acts depicted. If Hollywood has a biblical epic genre, this movie defines it with constant push pull between ersatz piety and ersatz sex.

And yet I love this movie to pieces. I love every stupid campy faux-profound minute of flowery excrement in this zit on the face of cinema. I've practically memorized whole scenes, I can impersonate Heston, Bryner, Edward G. Robinson, and Anne Baxter, and take particular joy in doing her famous cry: "O Moses, MOSES!"

Part of my love is sheer familiarity. My parents taped the final two hours of the movie on VHS, and through my childhood I wore it out. Did I enjoy it that much? I wouldn't call it enjoyment, but in our non-cable house, it's what we had.

I'm pretty sure what I felt was exactly the primordial awe this work is supposed to inspire. I was a naive kid, and as religion always understood: when you hook kids while they're young, Bible stories inspire a lifelong awe. The Ten Commandments tells the story of the Exodus, and for those taught to believe, it's Exodus come to life: our mind's eye image of how it all happened. Who now can imagine Moses looking like anyone but Charlton Heston? Who now can imagine Pharaoh without Yul Bryner's sphinx-like scowl? Who now can imagine the Golden Calf without women dancing around it, striking tambourines while carried on the shoulders of men? Who now can imagine the slaying of the first born without that blue mist that's clearly dry ice symbolizing the Angel of Death?

But all that happens in the second half of the movie. In some ways it's the first half of that's more interesting: centering on the sibling rivalry between Moses and Ramses in the prime of their youth, competing for fatherly approval from the Pharaoh Sethi (in a magnificent performance from the great Cedric Hardwicke--who was Bernard Shaw's favorite actor), and particularly for the hand and love of Nefertiri, promised to whomever is the new Pharaoh; and while it goes unmentioned, Nefertiri is presumably the blood sister of Ramses; as such brother-sister marriages were expected of a Pharaoh to preserve the purity of the bloodline.

Moses's early years at Pharaoh's court are the source of nearly as much speculation as the missing years of Jesus. If something like the Exodus did happen, one has to figure Pharaoh's hard heart was not just the machinations of a god who may or may not be there, but rather due to a deep animus born of some rivalry. There are many other parts in Exodus about which to speculate, no less an eminence than Sigmund Freud theorized that Moses was not even a Hebrew but an Egyptian priest. This might explain why Moses was 'slow of speech and slow of tongue'; perhaps he barely spoke ancient Hebrew.

Not only did Freud speculate that Moses was an Egyptian priest, he speculated that Moses was a priest of the sun god, Ra, and a follower of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, who declared that Aten, an aspect of Ra (don't ask, I dunno...), was the only god--presumably upending Egyptian society irrevocably. It was only fifty-seven years from the end of Akhenaten's reign to the beginning of Ramses II, surely Akhenaten's followers could maintain a faction for that long.

But where did Akhenaten get the idea for monotheism? Did he get it from his slaves? Did his slaves get the idea from him? Did the Egyptians enslave the Hebrews because the Hebrews were the decisive element that destabilized Egypt?

One can also look at the list of plagues and see that many of them are caused by one another. It's much tougher to explain the last two plagues, but perhaps the others can be explained, if you want to...: according to the internet, the Nile is known on occasion to turn red to this day due to certain types of mud, which may cause certain semi-aquatic animals like frogs to vacate, who can bring with them all sorts of bugs like gnats and flies, some of whom may carry diseases that affect livestock and cause boils on human skin. All this would be most likely to happen during the wet season, and if there's enough rain, surely hail is possible too, even in a river country surrounded by desert. All of these scientific coincidences are partially depicted in Ridley Scott's filmed dramatization of the Exodus--called Exodus, as it happens.....

The other part of why the movie works in spite of its longueurs is the sheer scale. Not just scale of the production, but the Shakespearean scale of its characters and relationships: it's obviously far from Shakespearean as an achievement, but it's Shakespearean in its ambition--and part of why we love this movie is how hilariously it fails to grasp nearly so high as its reach. There are twelve major characters in this epic, each of whom has a larger-than-life combination of emotions, motivations and sentiments. For years, when my musical ambitions were vastly greater than my talent, I wanted to make an opera from this movie. It's the perfect subject: a mixture of world-aspirational themes and soap opera tawdriness.

But even bad entertainment posing as art can move us just as good art can, and if The Ten Commandments can stay fresh to someone who's viewed it once every year or two for nearly forty years, there's something much better about it than we give it credit for being.

Viewing it this Passover is a particularly jarring experience. As always with art, different people will take different meanings from it. Some will take the Jewish slaves to mean the threat to the Jewish people in all times and places, particularly now as the war against Hamas renews itself and the world circles its wagons against Israel's Gaza operations and the millions of Jews who believe in them. Another enormous segment of the world would view the modern Jewish people as some of today's Egyptians, all but enslaving the people of Gaza and the West Bank so as to maintain their own prosperity. Many others will see Trump as a stupid hard-hearted tyrant like Pharaoh who deserves comeuppance on the most massive scale, with all who collaborate with Trump punished along with him. One can particularly see Trump in Pharaoh's treatment of Nefertiri. Still others would, inexplicably, see in Trump a Moses liberating his people from liberal tyranny. Many would look at the modern American people and see slaves, many others would look at us and see taskmasters getting their just deserts.

This Passover is a fraught one as much of the world presses on Jews to view themselves as Pharaohs. Even some Jews view us that way. Others among us feel the pressure of it, and even if we have a litany of reservations, we fully understand the legitimacy of the argument, and for us, this Passover was a deeply complicated holiday as we wrestle with a moral issue that cannot be easily solved no matter how much pressure is brought to bear on us from either side.

The world is very different than 1956, when America was ready to tell Jewish stories as though their own. The Shoah was still fresh, and even if many didn't know the details, they certainly remembered the Nuremberg laws and Kristallnacht well enough. Hollywood made a movie about Moses five years before they made a movie about Jesus. Objectively, the Western world was more antisemitic in 1956, how could it not be when still crawling with Nazis? But one of the great priorities of the era's liberal project was hearing the Jewish story, empathizing with Jewish feelings, supporting the State of Israel, telling Jewish 'truth'.

If it was the fashion of a lifetime ago to hear our story, it is the fashion of today to hear other stories, even if those stories are at our expense, even if the telling is simplistic and sloppy, even if the expectations of those who follow fashions are always unrealistic.

The world is a complicated place: much more complicated than myths in an old book. If this is ever to end, one side has to kill the other the way the Israelites annihilated Amalek. Either that or there has to be a place for the Palestinian story, and all Middle Eastern stories, alongside the Israeli story, alongside the Jewish story, with every side getting their place in the stories among the nations.