Nosferatu and Modern Critics

Not everything should make us feel like the enlightened ones

I am once again asking, "what is the point of art?"

me, the author, once again asking “what is the point of art?”

Cultural criticism has little appeal to me these days. Both reading it and writing it. It's a kind of work that's become like an old toy, broken by all the smart and clever people with keyboards. Clicks and giggles is the main point.

Still, sometimes I'm moved or excited by a work of art and I race to my own keyboard. There I'm invariably confronted by my exhaustion with opinionating and resign, saying "come on; who cares what I think anyway?" Such was the case after I left the theater having experienced Robert Eggers’ remake of Nosferatu. I was moved and excited and filled with thoughts, but I pushed the keyboard away and kept those thoughts to myself. I simply didn't have the will to add to the dreaded "discourse.”

But, as Michael Corleone so memorably put it, just when I thought I was out...

This week, I read two think-pieces about the movie and each made me wince just a little. Perhaps ironically, the essays took diametrically-opposed takeaways from Eggers film. And yet again I found myself representing a middle caught between two ends.

The Religion Unplugged blog posted an a priori dismissal of Eggers' affection for the past. The writer, Joseph Holmes, appreciatively nods to Eggers' aesthetic talents and also uniformly admires the film's performances. His complaint is focused on the filmmaker's preference for a pre-modern world. He (rightly) identifies Eggers as an artist seeking a way out of our dis-enchanted modernity. For Holmes, this is another instance of a contemporary movement to mysticism, which he largely equates with quackery (lumping Eggers in with Rod Dreher and New Age, healing crystal-collectors is a bit much, I believe).

Writing about Nosferatu, as well as Eggers' other films, Holmes claims: "He effectively recreates the environments and worldviews of the time periods he portrays. However, he rarely says anything to them." Implied in this is the image of the artist as moral scold, berating the past from a high position of enlightenment in the cozy present.

He closes the essay with a lament that Eggers doesn't sufficiently appreciate the wonders of science. He seems to wish Eggers would direct his estimable talents into projects that depict technology as a kind of modern enchantment. I imagine characters wearing lab coats like contemporary wizard cloaks.

Why live in a problematic, superstitions past, when one can modernize it with the wisdom of our (obviously) enlightened age? I mean, look around. Secularism, science, and technological advancement are only responsible for the positive outcomes of progress, right? Climate change and weapons of mass destruction? What have these to do with our triumphant progress?

(The last two lines are perhaps unfair. I take full responsibility for creating a straw man from Holmes' argument. I stand by my point, nonetheless).

But here's what baffled me this week and prompted me to write this. If Holmes is correct, then how did Jenn Adams, writing at Bloody Disgusting, arrive at the argument that Nosferatu "Became a Feminist Retelling of a Horror Classic?" Is that not the kind of modernization that Holmes was longing for?

To be clear, I think that Adams is also wrong. However, I don't believe her reading of Eggers' Nosferatu is off by much. (And at least she correctly admires the film). I wholly concur that Lily-Rose Depp's portrayal of Ellen is one of feminine power and, if you will, progress. Where I take exception to Adams' essay is mainly in her dismissal of the Murnau original with regard to these issues. Adams dismisses Greta Schröder's Ellen as a "traditional woman of the time," lacking full agency and humanity. Depp's Ellen aligns more closely with contemporary images feminist power, for Adams at least.

I simply disagree with her reading of the original. I would maintain that Schröder's Ellen is every bit as willful and dangerous as Depp's, only in a subtextual manner, encoded in the aesthetics of silent, German-expressionist cinema.

Adams' dismissal of the original performance paints her as a damsel-in-distress "who spends her time playing with kittens and mourning the death of freshly cut flowers." First of all, Eggers imports each of these moments into the film (and exponentially amplifies them to boot - she brings the pussy cat to bed, for Pete’s sake). This is because they are essential in establishing Ellen's bold, wild femininity. They serve to show her as an embodiment of Nature itself; just as Count Orlock is shown to be (see the Venus flytrap sequence in the original film). Kelli Weston, writing in the Nation about the new film, latches onto how Eggers carries this powerful exploration of nature over into his remake. An essential concept in horror is the idea of "The Monstrous-Feminine," which scholars like Barbara Creed have written much about. It undermines simplistic readings of women in (even very old, pre-modern) horror films.

When Eggers re-invents these images in his remake, he is fully aware of their powerful feminist context. This element of Nosferatu is a puzzling paradox to moderns like us. This antique thing is not what we thought it was. Contemporary society likes to think of itself as enlightened, and therefore as more perfected than people from the past. Eggers, in bringing these aspects out of the original, challenges that pretense.

In this way, though they disagree about the film at hand, Holmes and Adams are writing from the same assumption: that the pre-modern is necessarily less enlightened than the modern. This is an assumption that has launched a thousand think-pieces. I should know, I have written those kinds of pieces myself.

In the end, I do think that Holmes is correct in his focus on Eggers' attraction to the past and the metanarratives that once inscribed meaning onto life. This is what I admire most about his work, in fact. His films create worlds that shouldn't still exist. They are anachronisms. He re-creates the mind of the past, not just images. The confrontation with that mind, which is alien and beyond our modern comprehension, is part of what makes his art valuable.

In this way, Eggers brings Kafka to my mind. Kafka once wrote:

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

If Eggers' work causes us to feel that modernity is no longer enchanted, then that is what they are supposed to do. They “affect us like a disaster.” That is not something to complain about. It is what makes them great.