Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

But I am still disquieted by it. Jew . I don’t hear it that frequently in real life, but in the endless movies of my adolescence and young adulthood, I will hear it increasingly often, and it is rarely said with careless affection or clinical disinterest. The word Jew has sneer inside of it. It will become a word spat from the mouth of the brown-shirted Nazi, the Aryan street thug, the Mengele-esque concentration camp officer. It is a hastily stitched yellow star scar of a word: Juden, Juif. Jew .

There are no “Jews” in The Ten Commandments . 19At least, not in Cecil B. de Mille’s Technicolor, bombastic, bare-barrel-chested and heaving-bosomed 1956 version of The Ten Commandments . There are “Hebrew slaves,” there are “The Israelites” and “The Levites,” but to my nine-year-old self, watching this three-hour-and-forty-minute depiction of Moses delivering an Enslaved People from bondage in ancient Egypt, it takes me several scenes to piece together whatever history I have gleaned from all those nonsensical Passover Seders to realize: Oh , this is all about the Jews !

The Ten Commandments —a huge hit upon its theatrical release, and one of the highest-grossing films ever made — was first shown on network television in 1973, becoming a national, annual Easter/Passover event (the one year it didn’t show, the network received millions of complaints — angry Jews, angry Christians, or both?). I think that first year I sat down to watch it on television with my parents and brother. Or maybe I’m remembering the following year, watching with my grandparents, on one of those many sleepover nights. Maybe I’m simply remembering all the multiple viewings to come, Oh hey, The Ten Commandments is on, let’s watch! the annual wallpapering onto our lives of de Mille’s final epic, year after year after year — as with so many rituals, the singular moments blur, meld, and in doing so create a solid, if unspecific, foundation of experience.

Wherever I am, the opening, very Biblical-sounding Voiceover informs me how authentic this experience will be: “Those who see this motion picture — produced and directed by Cecil B. DeMille — will make a pilgrimage over the very ground that Moses trod more than three thousand years ago” (wow!), and that the movie has been written “in accordance with the ancient texts of Philo, Josephus, Eusebius, the Midrash, and. .” (here comes a new screen and a fancy font) The Holy Scriptures ! (God gets a screenplay credit.) The Voiceover continues: God saying there should be light, and then creating life on earth, including Man, who was given dominion over everything. But Man wanted dominion over Other Men, too, and the Conquered were made to serve the Conquerors, and so did the Egyptians cause the Children of Israel (that’s the Jews, by the way) to serve with rigor, and their lives were bitter with bondage (images of slaves pulling big Sphinxes with ropes) and their cry came up to God, so God decided to send them a Deliverer, upon whose mind and heart would be written God’s laws and God’s Commandments. One man, to stand alone against an Empire! (If God was just going to send a Deliverer at some point, I wonder, maybe He could have not created the Men who wanted dominion over Other Men in the first place? A whole people had to be conquered and suffer for centuries just to create that one job? Oy vey .)

And that one man, of course, is Charlton Heston (whom I recognize from a traumatic drive-in viewing of The Planet of the Apes when I was four or five. Oh, my parents. .) who begins as a Hebrew baby boy floated away for safety down the Nile, is adopted and reared by a childless Egyptian princess, and thus becomes a beloved Prince of Egypt, in love with Nefretiri (Anne Baxter in a Cleopatra wig, who includes a pneumatic Moses, MOses! in every line reading) and inspiring the jealous rival hatred of Pharaoh’s son, Rameses (Yul Brynner, bald with a side ponytail, and so hunky). Ramses wants the Hebrew Slaves to work harder to build their cities and not be distracted by rumors of a mythical Deliverer, so Moses is sent by Pharaoh to go deal with it, and we are shown our first images of these problematic Children of Israel, of which there seem to be only two types: Buff and gorgeous, like Joshua the stonecutter and Lilia the Water Girl, or old, decrepit, and stringy, but all of them in distractingly dark body makeup (is this Jew-face?), the naturally blue-eyed tricked out in dark brown contact lenses. Moses is clearly a Good Guy (he thinks the slaves should be given some food, and an old woman should not be crushed to death by a big rock), and even debates religion with Joshua:

MOSES

You do not speak like a slave.

JOSHUA

God made men. Men make slaves.

MOSES

If God is almighty, why does He leave you in bondage?

JOSHUA

He will choose the hour of our freedom and the man who will deliver us!

Again, if God can pick and choose this kind of thing, then why would He choose to allow the bondage in the first place? But perhaps this is a childish question. Or the too-simple inquiry of the simple child.

Moses is eventually outed as a one-time Hebrew baby and decides to own it; he cuts off his own side ponytail, dumps Nefretiri, and will now live with his true brethren

MOSES

in order to find the meaning of what I am! Why a Hebrew or any man must be a slave!

and we cut to the mud pits, where, the Voiceover informs us, the Hebrew Slaves have served in “bondage without rest, toil without reward. These are the children of misery, the afflicted, the oppressed, century after century. .” and again, I’m wondering: century after century? What in the world is God waiting for?

Moses’s true mud-pit and brick-making brethren all think he must be the Deliverer they’ve waited four hundred years for — he is both doubtful and modest (“It would take more than a man to lead them out of bondage, it would take a god!”), but Pharaoh decides to banish him to the desert anyway. Moses wanders through sandstorms and over rocks, sucking moisture from his robe and feeling tortured by doubt, and eventually finds a family of sheepherding Bedouins; he chooses from among the bevy of simpering, giggling, man-obsessed daughters (echoes of Tzeitel, Hodel, and Chava here, with nothing else on their girlish minds) to marry the wise and spotlessly-white-clad Sephora (Yvonne de Carlo, but she is, really, Lily Munster). Sephora tells him God actually lives just over there, on Mount Sinai (the image of a mountain glowing with orange smoke, looking a little like a school science fair exhibit), but Moses isn’t so quick to buy it:

MOSES

If this god is God, He would live on every mountain, in every valley. He would not only be the god of Israel, but of all men. It is said He created all men in His image; then He would dwell in every heart, every mind, in every soul.

SEPHORA

Why do you want to see Him, Moses?

MOSES

To know that He is, if He is. To know why He has not heard the cries of slaves in bondage. . how many of my people have died because He has turned away His face?

Yup. This is still my question and will remain my question forever regarding the existence — the theory? — of God, or a god, or gods. Sephora offers the “Oh, but us lowly humans can’t really understand God’s plan, just trust, believe, have faith, and it’ll all be okay” perspective, but Moses insists: