Past and present
originally posted in 2017 [x].
Throughout The Prince of Egypt there are many effective, and affective, parallels to “Deliver Us.” While watching the movie the other night, I was struck all over again by this one:
[A few other angles are pretty similar, but I think this is the most obvious/direct.]
Soon after Moses recognizes the “River Lullaby,” he runs away, tracing parts of the path that his family took, with him in tow, about eighteen years earlier.
It’s interesting, especially when the scenes are placed side-by-side, to watch Moses the prince dash across the exact same place. The parallel really makes me feel (recall, reflect on) the peril of the family’s flight through Goshen, and Yocheved’s effort to preserve her son’s life. It helps emphasize something that has always impressed me about the well scene: how this initial meeting drags the siblings’ memories forward — we see in their interactions/dialogue the impact of their individual experiences of the morning they were separated — but also throws them all back to that time. Painfully, past becomes present… becomes past……
When Miriam sings their mother’s lullaby, Moses stops, and Aaron turns, and the frantic tension between the three of them just kind of shifts.
And for a brief moment, they are united, finally, for the first time in the entire scene. Around the song, around Miriam, around their mother. Their positions remind me of this:
[Also, Moses... leaves a lot — at the end of the prologue, at end of the well scene, after he accidentally kills the guard.]
I’ve always thought of Miriam as the guardian of the lullaby: the way it passes from Yocheved to her, the way she takes their mother’s place. With the song and her full memory of that day, she’s a guide, a maternal figure, to both Aaron and Moses. (Related to that: Aaron may not trust Moses in the beginning, but I believe he trusts Miriam fairly implicitly. I want to write more about this later.)
Truly, in this scene, the past becomes present, becomes past, in a very potent, confused, way. It’s one of the reasons why the reunion in this movie stands out and seems so realistic to me.











