Enkidu and Mud

            After I saw “Mud,” I kept thinking about Enkidu, the wild man in the Epic of Gilgamesh. So I read a summary of the epic and what did I find but more emblematic links. Was this just a coincidence? Or are the emblems so deeply archetypal that if one is employed in a story the others are constellated? What might the epic and the movie, taken together, mean for a viewer?

            First, a boat is presented (1) as a means of salvation, and (2) as left high and dry by receding floodwaters. In the epic, the gods are angry with mankind and send a great flood. Utnapishtim builds an ark and saves animals, people and artifacts of civilization. The waters recede and the ark comes to rest on Mount Nisir. Utnapishtim and his wife are rewarded with immortality. In the movie, Mud brings a boat down from a tree, repairs it, and escapes in it.

            Second, there is friendship between a wild man and a man of civilization. In the epic, Gilgamesh of Uruk is an oppressive and tyrannical king. His subjects plead with the gods to save them from him. They create Enkidu, who is supposed to kill him, but the result of their struggle is a lasting friendship. They share many adventures. Impressed by Gilgamesh’s exploits, the goddess Ishtar offers herself in marriage, but he refuses her. She sends the Bull of Heaven to kill him. Enkidu kills the Bull. The gods cause Enkidu to sicken and die. In the movie, Mud and Ellis become friends.

            Third, snakes underscore the reality of death. In the epic, Gilgamesh grieves over the death of Enkidu and sets out to discover the secret of immortality. He fails a test given to him by Utnapishtim. Out of pity, Utnapishtim tells him where to find the Plant of Life. Just as Gilgamesh reaches it, a serpent steals it. In the movie, Mud knows that antivenom treatment is good only once. After that, antivenom will kill a patient as surely as snakebite. Now Ellis, like Gilgamesh, is faced with the reality of his eventual death.

            This kind of exploration is what Johnston calls thematic criticism, in which themes from movies are compared with themes from other texts. In my last post I suggested that the unifying theme in “Mud” was, in a word, a boy’s growing pains. A comparison with the Epic of Gilgamesh implies the presence of at least three additional themes: salvation, friendship and mortality.

What kind of friendship do the two pairs of men have? Perhaps it is a symbolic one pointing to the integration of the lawless or instinctive part of the self with the law-abiding part. When Neckbone commiserates with Ellis, at the end of the movie, over the destruction of his houseboat home, Ellis says, “It’s the law.” Mud, on the other hand, goes out trailing clouds of lawlessness. He has killed a man “because he deserved it”; the man’s relatives have formed a posse to kill him in revenge; Tom Blankenship has saved his life by shooting down the posse. These events illustrate a more modern theme: frontier justice.

What does it all mean? Life is complex!

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