“I Am Appetite, Nothing More”
Gender and desire in "Nosferatu" (2024)
By Craig Harshaw
“The person who dreads the vampire is the person really afflicted by guilt. This theme of guiltiness leads us to the perception that the two fundamental motives of love and hate, i.e. the sexual and hostile impulses, meet at the nodal point. To put the matter simply, love leads to hate and hate leads to guilt.”—Ernest Jones, “On the Nightmare” (1931)
Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu (2024) begins with a young Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) calling forth the demonic energy of the titular beast. We see Count Orlak (Bill Skarsgård) awakening from centuries of slumber in his castle nestled in the Carpathian Mountains, intercut with Ellen performing a kind of levitating and erotic dance that reveals a fine line between death and desire–her body writhing with both pain and pleasure.
Ellen becomes the dangerous force who brings destruction and pain to her community by focusing on her own sexual needs and desire. Her marriage to real estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) has brought her temporary peace, but once Thomas, compelled by societal norms to be “the provider,” decides to accept a mysterious assignment from his employer Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), this tranquility is shattered as Ellen realizes that she may have placed the entire world at risk.
Ellen has an ambivalent relationship to Count Orlok, reflecting Ernest Jones’s use of the vampire myth in his essay “On the Nightmare” (1931). Jones argues that the trope of being bitten in one’s sleep by a vampire is a way of imagining sex while simultaneously denying it by projecting one’s desire onto a supernatural being. In Eggers’s Nosferatu, as in the 1922 film of the same name and Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (see Nosferatu in Context below), that being is an undead Transylvanian count. Eggers’s Count Orlok, a personification of id, proclaims, “I am appetite, nothing more.”
Nosferatu is a technical tour de force and has already garnered a number of nominations for costume design and art direction; there will be many essays written about Eggers’s remarkable visual strategies in this film. However, for me what makes the film extraordinary is the way it imagines gendered life in an 1830s European context.
Ellen represents a 19th-century “New Woman,” one who is relatively educated and independent. This makes Count Orlok, who represents the feudal past, a fascinating object of her desire. He is physically repulsive, with a voice so raspy that it sounds like he is speaking from another dimension—the opposite of her handsome husband Thomas and his equally handsome friend Friedrich (Aaron Taylor Johnson), who is married to Ellen’s best friend Anna (Emma Corrin)—and yet he holds power over Ellen’s body and soul. Ellen’s strange attraction to Orlok is reminiscent of Émile Zola’s Thérèse Requin, of Henry James’s Isabel Archer from Portrait of a Lady, of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, or of George Bernard Shaw’s New Woman heroines who set traps–both for others and (masochistically) for themselves.
Consider Edith Wharton’s character Charity Royall from her 1917 novel Summer. Charity is adopted by a rich older man, Mr. Royall, after being born to poor parents who couldn’t afford to keep her. After rebuffing Mr. Royall’s sexual advances, she sets out to capture the most eligible bachelor in her small town, Lucius Harney, who is handsome, more age-appropriate, and even wealthier than Mr. Royall. After Harney impregnates her, Charity learns that he is already engaged to another woman. Wharton’s heroine has to decide which trap she prefers: becoming the mistress of a married man, becoming the lover of her adoptive father, having a dangerous and illegal abortion, or returning to poverty as a disgraced single mother. Charity is not constructed as a victim but as a woman with limited options who makes some choices that seem self-destructive.
Ellen’s situation in Nosferatu is similar. Who is the trap for Ellen? Is it Count Orlok, or, is it perhaps her husband Thomas? This is left ambiguous by Eggers.
In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, one reading of the character of Lucy, who is clearly a New Woman, is that she is being punished for her sexual transgression by becoming Count Dracula’s victim. Early in the novel Lucy jokes about having wild polyamorous desires, writing in a letter that she wishes society would simply allow women to have multiple husbands after she is proposed to by three suitors in one 24-hour period. Mina, who is also an emancipated woman of sorts, is portrayed as more able to resist Count Dracula because her liberation remains economic and intellectual but not at all sexual. With Ellen, Eggers and Depp create an entirely different character, not separating out the sexual from other forms of liberation.
Two scenes in the film stand out for me in this regard. The first of these involves Ellen and Friedrich and comes after Anna has become infected with “plague” after spending a night in bed with Ellen. Friedrich, with as much dignity and politeness as possible, tells Ellen that she and Thomas (who is newly returned from Orlok’s castle and physically frail) must leave his home at once. Ellen is angered and frightened by his request and lashes out emotionally, defying the rules of decorum for communication between bourgeois men and women who are not related by blood or romantically involved. She speaks with a kind of intimacy that Friedrich simply can’t handle. Aaron Taylor Johnson and Lily-Rose Depp perform the scene impeccably. Ellen challenges Friedrich that “he never liked her,” and it becomes clear in this scene that her sexual awakening has had not only psychological but also political consequences. She can no longer perform “the masquerade” of femininity—to use a term from psychoanalyst Joan Riviere—in the way bourgeois society expects. She demands a kind of equity with Friedrich that he struggles to understand.
Later on, after tragedy has struck, Friedrich becomes emotionally “hysterical” and attacks Ellen as being responsible for his family’s suffering. He awkwardly apologizes for his lack of emotional control to Ellen and the entire group that is present. The gendered roles here have been entirely reversed from the way they are conventionally portrayed in period films about the 19th century. Here Ellen must remain rational in the face of male emotional fragility, including that of her husband Thomas, whom Ellen can never totally confide in because of his inability to imagine her putting her own life at risk to fight off the Nosferatu.
Ellen’s only clear ally in the film is the disgraced former professor Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe), who sees her for the powerful force that she is. He knows that she is the only hope that they have of surviving the brutal plague brought on by the presence of Count Orlok. In another breathtakingly acted scene, Professor von Franz tells a tearful Ellen that in another time and place she would have been a powerful priestess. Depp manages to somehow transform her tears of desperation and sorrow into tears of acknowledgment and joy—a beautiful but disturbing moment because we know that Ellen knows she must risk her to save the world. More tragically, she knows that she can’t tell any living soul other than this eccentric professor about her dangerous plans because no person in her life would allow it. Ellen and Professor von Franz are in many ways living in exile within their own lives because they can see the necessary transformations needed by their repressive society.
The repression of desire—addressed first artistically in literature, theater, and visual art, and then theoretically, clinically, and philosophically in psychoanalysis—can also be linked to aspects of capitalist development and the Western European imperial imagination. My only quibble with Eggers’s brilliant film is that he doesn’t find a way to bring these political realities more centrally into his adaptation.
Rereading Bram Stoker’s novel, I am startled at how perceptive the rather-conservative Stoker is about both class and the othering of the colonial gaze. In the first third of his novel, he juxtaposes Count Dracula’s utter dehumanization of the Transylvanian peasantry with Jonathan Harker’s exoticization of the Eastern Europeans he encounters and with Mina and Lucy’s far deeper engagement with locals in Withy, a small North Sea fishing port in Yorkshire. Jonathan has such strong judgments of the characters he encounters (including an obsessive need to discover each peasant’s exact ethnic background) that he can’t actually engage with them. He objectifies the exotic European peasant much as he objectifies women. Conversely, Mina and Lucy have long, haunting philosophical conversations with people they meet in Withy, even though they can’t fully understand the dialect or local references.
One could easily imagine Eggers tackling these realities—although in defense of the existing film, it is almost two and half hours long and I wouldn’t cut a single frame out of it. Perhaps this lack is actually a key to understanding the greatness of Eggers film, or almost any great work of popular narrative art: The audience should not be left fully satisfied. Great works often tap into the audience’s insatiable hunger for more in a way that replicates the vampire’s incessant longing for blood. Creating work that leaves enough space for interpretation—as in the novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton referenced above—instills a hunger in the audience for a classical narrative closure that will never come.
There is an interesting parallel here to the need for psychoanalytic theory to remain open in order to fully explore the complexities of the unconscious mind. Much as some readers want authors to tie things up in their narratives and even express hostility when this doesn’t occur, analysands may desire the analyst to “just give me your damn interpretation.” Yet both the psychoanalyst and the modernist novelist tend to favor the opening up of complex questions rather than the closing off of interpretation that comes with an authoritative answer.
Stoker’s novel has often been read via a psychoanalytic frame, most literally perhaps by Ken Gelder. In Reading the Vampire (Routledge, 1994), Gelder described the doctors in the novel as “quasi-psychoanalysts, in so far as they are doctors of the mind; Seward is investigating madness, while Van Helsing, like the young Freud, practices hypnosis and admires the great neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot.” Eggers goes further in that he reimagines Ellen as a proto-analysand, living before the dawn of the psychoanalytic movement, who must embody the analyst and analysand relationship within herself. One could see Ellen as akin to Anna O. in that the doctors treating her, much like Breuer and Freud, are learning a new treatment process. Professor Von Franz has to take his lead from Ellen, whose understanding of her own possession he helps her clarify. He never tells her exactly to do but provides a context in which she develops the insight to resist the vampire.
Nosferatu in Context
The vampire is a central construct of European modernist literature. The first major articulation of this figure was in John Polidori’s novel The Vampyre in 1819, which was based on draft notes for a novel that Lord Byron had scribbled and discarded. The novel became an immediate financial success, but the exposing of Polidori’s plagiarism led him to commit suicide. The second successful major work of vampire literature was the serialized novel Varney, The Vampire, or, The Feast of Blood, which was published in 1847. Bram Stoker borrowed heavily from both of these works to create his iconic novel Dracula in 1897, along with narrative strategies culled from the work of the English master of suspense Wilke Collin, particularly his best-selling Woman in White (1860). Like Collin, Stoker constructs his narrative using ample selections from the diaries and personal correspondences of several characters.
Eggers’s aesthetic and narrative strategies are in line with the kind of bricolage that led to both Stoker’s novel and F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent classic Nosferatu becoming central works of global modernity. Murnau’s film and the other magnificent vampire film of the silent era, Carl Theodor Dryer’s Vampyr (1932), both borrowed heavily from Stoker’s novel and relied on its popularity—so much so that Bram Stoker’s widow filed suit against Murnau and won a ruling that ordered all existing copies of Nosferatu to be destroyed. Luckily many prints of the film managed to survive despite the court’s ruling.
Many reviews of Eggers’s film label it a remake of Murnau’s classic, but I think it is an entirely new work influenced by Murnau’s film, Werner Herzog’s brilliant 1979 homage to Murnau’s film (Nosferatu: The Vampyre), Bram Stoker’s original novel, and other works including Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981). (Eggers and Lily-Rose Depp have confirmed that Depp’s performance was inspired by Isabelle Adjani’s acclaimed performance in Żuławski's film.) Eggers has suggested that Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, a film adaptation of Henry James’s gothic horror novella The Turn of the Screw, was another key inspiration.
Egger uses such a wide range of influences because his interest in the Dracula/Nosferatu story is shockingly different from anything we have seen before: He anchors the story within the subjectivity of Ellen, played in a performance of staggering intelligence and courage by Lily-Rose Depp. In Murnau’s film, Ellen is primarily a victim acted on by the monstrous ancient vampire; Eggers makes Ellen’s body and mind the genesis of the curse of the Nosferatu, as well as its potential antidote.
Craig Harshaw is a performance artist, cultural critic, and theater director. He has taught or worked for Columbia College Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and MCA Chicago. He hosts DIVISIVE, a live radio broadcast exploring cultural work and politics.
Really great review with fantastic insights ! Merci et bravo 👏👏👏