January 12, 2025
I saw the new reboot of Nosferatu with a friend yesterday afternoon, and thought it was a good but not a great film. Visually, it's stunning, and its handling of the vampire myth is provocative, if not unproblematic. The film follows earlier versions of the story, notably F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent expressionist masterpiece and Werner Herzog's 1979 take, in many respects, notably in its handling of the Count's destruction and in its portrayal of him as a ghoulish figure instead of the dashing if menacing aristocrat of 19th century British appropriations of the myth, Bram Stoker's chief among them. Where it differs from those earlier versions (if memory serves) is in its foregrounding of some of the subtexts of the myth. The film more explicitly blurs the lines between reason and unreason, conscious and unconscious, by portraying the Count as a shadow in many scenes, and (until its climax) suggesting that his interactions with Ellen, the main female character/victim, occur in dreams. The clear implication of these scenes is that the vampire is a product of repressed female desires. The Count all but acknowledges this in a later dream-exchange with Ellen when he declares, "I am appetite," and the film's graphic portrayal of his feeding -- the amplified sounds of his
jaws piercing the flesh of his victims, and of his gulping down their
blood -- emphasizes the physical, and minimally displaced sexual nature of his predation. The rational male world is of course powerless to combat the contagion that this repression produces, and the female characters, in particular Ellen, are given a more prominent role in the film's unfolding, and more agency in its outcome.
What I found problematic about all this was the film's evident unwillingness to interrogate more forcefully the fiercely gendered worldview that undergirds treatments of the vampire myth from the past two centuries. The cozy equation of rational/masculine || irrational/feminine has of course been deconstructed extensively in politics, art, and scholarship over the past half century. Klaus Kinski's portrayal of the vampire in Herzog's film as a weak victim of his own appetites -- a sort of blood junkie -- was a striking departure from the older gendering of the myth. Swedish actor Bill Skarsgård's vampire, arguably the the strongest presence in the film, is very much a traditionally masculine figure; and Ellen and the other female characters in the film, if featured more prominently in the storyline, are nonetheless conventionally feminine. Director Robert Eggers seems to have privileged recreating the mid-19th century Europe in which the film is set over engaging with the current political and cultural climate in which it is being consumed. This is a balance that any period piece has to grapple with; and while conscientious politics often don't go together with great art, art that sidesteps the hot button issues its subject matter engages with, it seems to me, will always in some measure be lacking.
