Films: Nosferatu (2024)
Spoilers, obviously ...
Robert Eggers' Nosferatu is a horrid, rancid, gorgeous sympathy-for-the-monster movie.
A young girl, Ellen, experiencing deep, agonizing loneliness, prays to a spirit for relief. She experiences a union with the unknown spirit that is at first blissful, and then becomes torture.
Years later she believes she's found love, closeness, and safety with her husband Thomas. The events of the movie spin out as Thomas is sent on a work trip to Count Orlok's castle, and the cast's battle with the Count begins. Ellen is now a grown woman, a haunted and striking and strange individual who seems both enraptured and tortured by her supernatural affliction. Throughout the film she seems as repelled by Orlok's monstrousness as she is drawn to it.
Much ado was made about Orlok's brief nudity in this movie, but his is not the only vaguely monstrous male body that appears in the film. The movie opens with Thomas Hutter's boss, Herr Knock, naked and engaging in an occult ritual to summon the Count. One of the earliest lines in the script:
The strange man digs a sharp QUILL into the vein of his arm, extracting BLOOD. It stings, but he seems sexually aroused by the pain.
This could very well serve as a thesis statement for the movie.
Herr Knock begins to masturbate, and "he is doing this as ceremoniously as everything else." He climaxes, and utters the words, "Lordship, I am yours." Possession, submission, willing submission, the desire to be owned, the monstrosity of that desire, and the question of how active of an agent you are in that desire of yours.
This question of desire and being possessed is as much an existential quandary of the husbands in the film as it is the wives.
Early in the film Thomas gives Ellen a bouquet of flowers, and she demands to know why he killed "these beautiful flowers," then shares with him the frightening dream she had. Thomas and his friend Friedrich are hardly in the somewhat powerless positions Ellen, and Friedrich's wife Anna, are. Yet for all their power and posturing, their worlds revolve around Ellen's interiority and moods. Ellen's depths form the nexus point by which everything else orbits.
The fact that she has this depth and darkness, and her compatriots explicitly do not, is a key part of the entire story. The script says as much even before any events have been set into motion. In one of the opening scenes, Ellen and Thomas's wedding, Eggers makes a point of highlighting the fact that Thomas, Friedrich, and to some extent Anna, are happy people firmly rooted in the known physical world.
Friedrich is "vain, but steadfast." Anna "shares her husband's affirming resilience." Thomas "doesn't match his bride-to-be's ethereal depth. Thomas seems entirely unaware of the darkness in the world." Ellen is the beautiful waif, but Thomas is the naïve ingenue, being possessed by the world's darkness and having it thrust upon him.
And so as much as Ellen is defined by her monstrous desire not just for men, but the most phallic men, the most animalistic men, the most deformed and vampiric and ugly and physical men, the very worst men that can possibly exist ... Thomas is defined by his captivated desire for someone who is the most unpredictable, the most interior, the most unknown, the most dark, the most stridently individual and strong, and the most emotionally unknowable. This movie is about sex, and it's about people's deepest sexed terrors which also form their deepest erotic desires.
The movie opens with Herr Knock making himself bleed and then getting off on it. Both Anna and Ellen writhe in torture or in seizures and seem both agonized and deeply existentially turned on by the experience. Even Thomas, early in the movie, is thrown off his game while trapped in Orlok's castle.
When he meets the Count, the Count is "magnetic." Thomas submits to Orlok's demand that he call him "my Lord," and falls into hierarchy extremely quickly: "THOMAS is very embarrassed, he's messing up already, he's so tired, confused, disoriented." He's nervous, and yet cares enough about the man who intimidates him to feel sheepish and self-conscious about his performance. (You could well argue that being scared often does elicit this kind of sheepish conformity in people. I'd still insist there's a shade of difference between terrified obedience, and a self-conscious rapture to please someone, especially since Thomas is more anxious than afraid at this early point in the film).
Orlok's silhouette is "strong, masculine, bull-like" at the table with Thomas. Orlok's animalistic desire for Thomas, his body and blood, is palpable, and Thomas is terrified, dazed, his world dreamlike. Later, he lets himself be led to armchairs by the fire. "THOMAS is sweaty, losing his grip on reality. He falls into the chair. THE COUNT stares at him hypnotically."
Even later, when Orlok has penned him in menacingly and is closing in on him, Thomas is caught in the very same kind of trance. The experience at the castle has made him feel physically closed in on, overpowered, violated by a larger force, and extremely vulnerable. And right when terrorizing attack from Orlok is most imminent, the film quickly cuts between erotic shots of Ellen's orgasmic panting, Orlok's bloodthirsty attack, and bloodied imagery of Ellen attacking in just the same position Orlok is in. Ellen's monstrous desire, Orlok's bloodthirsty violence, and Thomas's vulnerability are all explicitly linked in the film's visual imagery.
In other words, Orlok is hunched over Thomas drinking blood from his breast, nearly humping him, and far away Ellen is in a seizure-like trance, getting off on it.
In a cut scene from the movie, from the 2016 script, the Harbormaster is concerned about the "plague," and gives the following speech:
An essential means of preservation is to refrain from increased emotional passions. Please! These weaken the body to certain vulnerability. Immorality, depravity, excessive outbursts of sorrow, panic - even joy is ill-advised. Immoderate indulgences in carnal love are also to be restricted.
Strong emotions of any kind are linked in the text to lack of social control - lack of control over the social narrative, over what is real, over what is agreed to be possible.
The men in the movie, in their respective roles of social authority, in their assumed duties of placating and directing and maintaining some sense of safety and normalcy, want to believe things are fine. They believe they know, that they know what is going on, that they know what the danger is and how to stay safe from it.
Consequently it is Ellen, in her complex interiority, her terror and her ambiguous and monstrous desires, and her almost psychic awareness of the strangeness of the world - it is Ellen who knows more is at hand, and can speak it, as she does both to Friedrich and to Thomas: "I understand, I do! Who else could? Won’t any of you men speak aloud what is actually happening!"
... At the same time - lest I seem like I am too much on the side of Team Ellen (I am on Team Ellen) - she, in her rage, accuses Thomas of bringing this evil to Germany. She accuses him of trying to bring a child into an evil world, and being materialistic, and not listening to her, even though Thomas too feels as though Ellen cannot understand (and will not understand) what he has just experienced and what is happening to him.
The film's earlier scene of violence, terror, desire, and orgasmic union, finds its twin in this scene, in which their enraged argument turns into angry, passionate sex. They are both distrusting, both scared of each other, and both become symbolic images of what they most fear in each other and in themselves. She moans for him to take her, and he does, pounding into her on the bed while she bucks and wildly vocalizes. Like Orlok's attack on Thomas and Herr Knock's orgasmic self-torture, this too is a thesis for the movie.
It feels appropriate that in this scene - in which the man is a defiled, overly strong, predatory, brawny demon, and the woman is an insane, manipulative, childlike, ancient, feral, intelligent demon - they have unlocked their deepest-rooted fears and cravings for each other.
I get the sense, watching the ending scene of sexual union between Orlok and Ellen, that Orlok is as terrified of his hunger for Ellen's magnetic beauty as Ellen is of his monstrosity. You can only become so aggressive, dangerous, and armored before the desire for all that you've exorcised from yourself begins to make itself known. And like his own monstrosity is for Ellen, Ellen's bizarre brand of beauty is arguably the manifestation of everything Count Orlok has excised out of himself in order to become Count Orlok.
Ellen's sacrifice at the end of the movie is painful and agonizing. She has sex with the Count in order to save everybody, to pin him in place, as it were, so that he is unable to hide in darkness when the sun rises. She dies in the process, and it might seem like she's experienced a grisly female fridging. That interpretation of the movie is significant, and I think fair. Yet her own private, conflicted desire for monstrosity is a core emotional arc of the film, and in the text of the script, once they've fucked and die in the act of fucking, "ORLOK is no longer frightening in the light of day. He is just an empty shell. ELLEN'S glassy wide eyes are still open, and her face is calm - finally at peace. Finally fulfilled." This is how the script, and the movie, ends. The film reserves it's deepest climax of ugly, bloody, horrifying beauty for this ending scene. Its most fundamental expression of art and desire is reserved for the moment when Ellen and the Count get in bed together. The enormity of their respective desires, and the extreme ambiguity of them, is kind of the point.
Orlok cannot remain himself and have those traits, and so he is uncontrollably drawn to them. He hungers to consume these things which he cannot himself have, things that he can't have and retain his current form, his current state of himself and current power. You have armored so heavily that you cannot help crave vulnerability and beauty. Ellen herself has armored, armored in softness; Orlok's aggression is the shadow part of herself that she has tried to ward off and remove.
We want the vulnerability of being allowed to be monsters, and we want the vulnerability of being allowed to be vulnerable, and we want the relief of not having to pretend, and the relief of not having to try, and thus, isn't the effort of attempting to hide something also proof of that thing? Of the existence of it?
I am not saying Ellen and Orlok are the same. Obviously. I am not saying being drawn to monstrosity is the same as literally eating and murdering people. I am saying that "am I good or bad" is sometimes the wrong question. I am saying that this film sits precisely in a grey area of good and evil where actual desire lives and breathes.
In terms of masochism, sadism, terror, and torture, the pain itself is the vulnerability that these people can't help being sexually and inexorably compelled towards.
Sex is vulnerability, and pain and fear are ultimate kinds of vulnerability. Fear is horrific, but it's also often the opposite of stasis - the moment when we have stated the elephant in the room, when the vase falls and shatters, when we are not trying to dance around something, and reality once again becomes real.
That is the hole in reality we are compelled into, trying to fuck, trying to be fucked by. Over and over and over. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over.