The Mummified Extra

Last week I was travelling through Mexico. One of my destinations was the small city of Guanajuato, located between San Miguel and the even tinier Calderones. In Guanajuato I came across a museum that held scores of curious and somewhat frightening mummies:

As I walked around the museum I had the strong impression that I was in an exhibit of extras. Instead of a star on Hollywood Boulevard, this display seemed to be an hyperbolic example of being presesrved by chance. Not having your name eternalized but rather your entire, nameless, body. The idea that they are film extras is not too far from the truth, however. I first encountered these mummies in Werner Herzog's remake of Nosferatu. In the opening credits to the film, Herzog lets his camera linger over the twisted hulks of the deceased. Here is a still from that film:

                                            Film still from Nosferatu, Werner Herzog, 1979.

When Herzog made the film they were still in their original catacomb. When I entered the museum, I had a flashback to Herzog's film. There was a bizarre moment of recognition as I looked into the glass cases, and a question I have never heard asked: "Where have I seen this mummy before?" With stars, this question comes loaded with less doubt, even if we cannot remember the name of the film. Yet I greeted the return of these inanimate film extras into my midst with a strange double-take. The mummies were more than just relics: they were posthumous celebrities (posthumous not to life but to Herzog's film). I had never expected to meet these figures from Herzog's film in person. For me the museum was a kind of exhibit of extras. Their everydayness has been immortalized. One wall of the exhibit even looks like a group of wanna-be's waiting for an audition, their post-mortem poses easily mistaken for signs of boredeom or impatience, the slouch of the man or woman who dreams of getting into pictures:

How did these corpses turn into mummies, into representations? At the turn of the century, bodies in graves on which the families had lapsed in their payments were disinterred and the plots were sold to another interested (and decesased) party. The minerals in the earth around Guanajuato are such that buried corpses do not decompose. So the first mummies were the unclaimed, those abandoned by both the love and the funds of their family. They were still stacked in a catacomb when Herzog filmed them. Since these strange mixtures of semi-preserved flesh, hair, and skeleton have been moved into the museum. These mummies are preserved in a state of peculiar expression, something more than a yawn and short of a scream.

The mummies wear the clothes in which they were buried. This gives their appearance a strange and sudden relevance to our eyes, one that I imagine that overwhelms the grave robber. Chemical chance, rather than mortuary science, has intervened here. The mummies in ancient Egypt were the stars of their culture: Kings, Queens, their retinue. The figures in Guanajuato have been preserved, like people in the background in films from the 20's, by their literal environment, something no less bizarre than the light-senitive silver emulsion on early film stock.

The exhibit is very different from the dignfied preservation of Tutankhamen. The royal prince of Egypt was wrapped as diligently as a birthday gift. The mummies here by contrast seem like stragglers:

 

Like anthropological specimens such as "Lucy" these figures entered unwittingly into a bogus eternity as the cast for a museum. It's a fitting monument to the people who are subordinate to the opening credits of Herzog's film, but who give that film a documentary level of ghastliness. The mummy museum in Guanajuato is the official Tomb of the Unknown Extra.