Embodied Phantasms

While I must confess that I was not as scared as I imagined I might be when I walked into the theater, Robert Egger’s Nosferatu was a genuine joy to watch, full of creepy gothic ambience, incredible performances, weird sex that Freud would have salivated over the chance to analyze, and a monster that truly felt like it had dropped out of a long-forgotten Carpathian fairy tale. It has been a very long time since any vampire movie, let alone any adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, has combined these elements so well and with such gusto. I repeat that I was not especially scared by it, but here I mean [jump-]scared in a very conventional sense, and I (having watched the silent F. W. Murnau film on which it is based) was more-or-less familiar with the plot. It is not the jump scares you want to beware of with this film; it is the twists that add layer upon layer of dread as things keep getting worse and weirder. In this spirit, I’ve decided to approach my analysis of the film from the perspective of an equally oddball philosopher roughly contemporary to the (albeit fictional) events depicted in the film: that is, Max Stirner.

Central to Stirner’s philosophy, if one can call it that, is the idea of “phantasms” or “spooks” (Spuke in the original German). These are more recognizably described as “fixed ideas,” “idea[s] that have subjected people to [themselves]”; concepts that we consider untouchably sacred, and have thus wormed our way into every corner of our existence to the point where we forget the very purpose of their initial creation. A higher being which we must worship (Stirner’s archetypal example is God), a higher cause we must serve (the state, morality, etc.), a higher essence to which we fancy we belong (the “Fatherland,” or the idealized Human Being of so many Enlightenment tomes) – all of these are mere ghosts that haunt our minds and subject us to their whims, which by-and-large amount only to preserving the status quo of their own existences.

Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), then, is the ultimate Stirnerian phantasm embodied: a being so old its origins are nearly forgotten, and its nature so obscured by the march of history that most outright refuse to acknowledge its existence as part of the supernatural. Even those who recognize him and his ilk are ill-equipped to defend themselves despite the hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of collective human knowledge on vampires. He, quite literally, haunts his victims, who turn against him at their own peril. The structures of power in the film are either utterly useless against his inexorable appetite (religion, government, patriarchy, psychiatry, etc.) or serve to propagate his existence (e.g. Simon McBurney’s “Herr Knock” and his proprietary estate agency). The vampire expects nothing short of complete obedience, and goes so far as to admit that he is nothing but an “appetite”; the act of feeding is all that keeps him extant, and all that he “lives” for. Heroine of the film Ellen Hutter (Lily Rose-Depp), in order to defeat Orlok (even while herself being the object of his appetite) must turn to sources of information and direction increasingly outside the realm of “normalcy” (Willem Dafoe’s Professor von Franz); in doing so she must break every intricate web of power over and around her, down to the last atom.

Ellen progressively throws away all those causes to which a 19^th-century woman is chained, tosses out everything that is not her own. She must first contend with Doctor Sievers (Ralph Ineson), Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his wife (Emma Corrin), all of whom – while initially supportive – quickly begin to doubt her sanity and treat her as if she were completely infirm. She learns, though not so quickly, not to heed their insistences and to stand up for herself; eventually, Sievers realizes his error, Friedrich’s family is killed by Orlok, and the eponymous head of that family succumbs to the plague while in flagrante with the corpse of his dead wife. Good riddance! Gone is the stifling hand of propriety! Gone is her subjugation to the men so distantly involved in her life they might as well be china dolls on a mantlepiece! Gone is the only other prominent woman in the story, who treats Ellen so much like yet another of her children! They dismissed what they could not immediately understand, and paid for their foolishness, each in their own way. Her final break is with her husband, Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), by knowingly deceiving him in order to lure Orlok to his doom – the decrepit obligation of wife to husband, of woman to man, of early Victorian morality, melts like snow on a sunny day as she dresses in her wedding gown to await the vampire’s coming.

This “betrayal” lends itself to yet another dichotomy in Stirner’s work, that of revolution and insurrection. “The former consists in a radical change of conditions, of the prevailing condition or status…the latter indeed has a transformation of conditions as its inevitable result, but doesn’t start from it, but from the discontent of human beings with themselves…the revolution aimed at new arrangements, the insurrection leads us to no longer let ourselves be arranged…” The organized hunt of the vampire comes to little fruition in the sense that the hunters do not encounter Orlok himself, which was their ultimate goal, and they perceive the entire venture as merely putting Ellen in harm’s way by the end of it. Von Franz establishes himself and his alchemical-supernatural research as the new arbiter of authority, engaging in spats and lengthy arguments with the followers of “modern” philosophy and science (Dr. Sievers and Friedrich) to this end. Theirs is thus a revolution of sorts, a shift in the arrangement of worldviews and methods of approaching the foe (Orlok). On the other hand, Ellen consistently fights the “rationality” of Sievers, who for most of the film treats her as if she were utterly non compos mentis; yet von Franz admits that, for all his occult research, he does not truly know how to defeat the vampire, but believes instead that she is the key to it all. It is she who chooses her own fate from here, and it is clear that any semblance of meekness or deference towards any authority has left her – she does not submit to von Frank’s plan, but merely recuperates it as her own. Hers is an insurrectionary approach; “What constitution was to be chosen, this question busied revolutionary heads…The insurrectionist strives to become constitutionless.”

The fate Ellen prepares herself for is fascinating in its multifaceted nature. Ellen willingly gives herself up to Orlok, allowing him to feed on her – both nude – in her bedchamber. She does this so that Orlok’s resting place can be disturbed by von Franz & co. and ensure that the vampire has nowhere to flee when the sun rises. What is interesting is that, having hatched this plan with von Franz, she seems completely ready for it. Orlok, appearing to her in the night, engages in a highly sexualized feeding ritual; it is also heavily suggested throughout the film that the vampire’s victims experience a kind of sexual pleasure during feeding – thus she essentially accepts death by orgasm. One might call this a sacrifice, but that word imports some kind of higher cause to Ellen’s death, something I doubt she would ascribe to it. She sacrifices herself not for the cause of humanity, nor for that of science or medicine; instead, she does it for herself, content in the knowledge that she would otherwise never be free from Orlok, and that those whom she loves (love, as long as it is not something commanded of a person, being the most selfish and yet selfless emotion of all) will thereafter be safe. She recognizes her own abilities, her potential, and uses them to her own ends, dying in her full naked glory, bereft of the innumerable trappings of social norms, morals, or any other such phantasm.

Orlok dies naked, too, but becomes drained of all the blood he consumed in the face of the rising sun and returns to being nothing but a corpse: the phantasm is revealed for the ultimately inanimate thing it really is. There is as much “living” about the relations of power in our modern day and age as there is about the Nosferatu himself; it is that which the phantasms take over and consume from us that gives them any motive energy. In contrast, Ellen’s death is ultimately a reclamation, not a loss. She takes back what by means of its very existence is her property – that is, her body and lifeblood – and wields it as a weapon against he who had initially defiled it. She has tricked the vampire into his own death, beguiled him with her own Uniqueness, killed him with her refusal to bend entirely to his revenant will. She fashions a new life for the other characters – she will not be physically present, but her memory will live eternal. Ellen, in a very literal sense, becomes the Stirnerian “creative Nothing” (schöpferische Nichts).

“I am the owner of my power, and I am so when I know myself as unique. In the unique the owner himself returns into his creative nothing, from which he is born. Ever higher essence over me, be it God, be it the human being, weakens the feeling of my uniqueness, and only pales before the sun of this awareness. If I base my affair on myself, the unique, then it stands on the transient, the mortal creator, who consumes himself, and I may say:

I have based my affair on nothing.”