#seriously i wanna see more discourse focusing on the romanticism aspect of the movie

[like-tears-in-rain-storms]

Nosferatu is set in a purely Romantic universe

Or, from an external critical eye, a Romanticist one. But it lives and breathes in its time, the 1830s, the high peak of Romanticism. Enlightenment has lit up the universe, pushed God out of the limelight of reason and rendered tons of superstitions, folk knowledge and popular beliefs either redundant or obsolete. It set the human irrevocably as the center of the universe and propped him up as master of nature and fate. And yet, rationality also left people feeling adrift, in the way it suddenly left them alone in the center of the lit stage of the world - all responsibility in their own shoulders suddenly, all comfort circumscribed to the limits of a scientific rationality, ever-expanding but never fast enough, leaving huge swathes of everything in darkness, the illumination of the century of lights not reaching it and the future electricity of modernity not yet there to dispel the shadows away. Structures of centuries are flattened, and though the individual emerges as captain of their own fate, the well-tread protectiveness of church, feudalism, nobility and small community, of duchy, county, town and village gives way to empire, to capitalism and the free market, to overseas expansion and colonialism. Standards of life change in previously unknown ways - mass production starts, the Industrial revolution gets people out of their homes, their steads, their villages. Things and common knowledge changes at a previously unthought of speed, the universe, oddly enough, feels more uncertain than ever, now that man understands how little he knows, how much there is to discover - and while some, with optimism, bravery, perhaps even some kind of arrogance breathe deep the breeze of progress and dream of pushing the world forward, others retreat to the nostalgia of the old, feel keenly that that kind of arrogance is still unwarranted - that there is something in the human heart that cannot be sated with what the world knows of science, wealth and reason, and perhaps it might never be sated. New bourgeois society feels oppressive, the spirit of moderation asphyxiates them. They long for the erstwhile tempests of their humours, the awe of cathedral spires rising up to the sky, the comfort of millenia-old folk rites in big celebrations, the saints side by side with the maypole. Science is not magic anymore - it has asserted itself above gods, spirits and anything the mind can conceptualize, thus it is beyond man's hands now - science is not invented, it is discovered, it depends not on belief to be true, something only previously thought a trait of God. It causes a deeep instinctive fear, but there is no comfort there, no succor, no bargaining. Man is alone - that is, if he chooses to be. There is a dark chasm left by the retreating paganism of faith and not yet filled by the emerging dawn of fact. And people instinctively try to reacquaint and reconcile themselves with this darkness, sometimes to the point of reactionary opposition to the new world of scientific progress.

And instead of relishing the new chance of asserting themselves above the natural world, they surrender themselves to its power. They try not to beat, but to reconcile themselves with the irrational, the destructive outbursts of nature, they try to remember why their ancestors worshipped the sea and the sky, the lightning and the storm. They transform their fear into twisted pleasure - the more they feel small, the more joyful they are, the humility of measuring oneself against what is, and maybe forever will be, immeasurable, destructive, merciless leading them to a sort of esoteric peace, a dark kind of enlightenment. They look above when others look below, below when others look above. They seek not to tame, but to let themselves be swept away by their emotions, let them swell up to the point of (self-)destructiveness, of tragedy, of sacrilege. They find God again by defying His laws, His rage assuring them of His existence. They seek out the fair folk and the spirits of the undead hoping that their hybris will bring validation. They seek to be cowed, to be awed, to stick their tongue out at progress, mock "if you are so powerful, why are the people dying of the plague? Why does a young beautiful woman die a little before her wedding, a little after her child's birth, in the arms of the man who loves her? Why can you calm down the madman but can't tell what to do so he's not mad anymore? Why do you purport to be able to make man rise above his base self, overcome his passions, but can't make those passions disappear, can't transform the base self into a higher one? What if your power is smoke and mirrors, what if the crucifix above my door, the old woman's herbs, the hermit's parables are more powerful than you? What if you're leading us astray, where man wasn't meant to go? How dare you take away belief when you can't yet provide the certainty you promise?"

And Nosferatu exists in that world. Its landscapes are Friedrich's and Blechen's and Carus' landscapes, the people inhabiting that world are the new elite, the rich bourgeois, the people who rise up through learning and work, who are becoming rich as the old nobility of the land becomes poor, who get used in material comforts that would at one time only be available to kings and popes, who don't believe anymore than women are sinful because they carry the sin of Eve, but do believe that they are weak and unreliable because the moon communes with their womb, who can now cover themselves in so much fabric that they never spent a moment of their life uncovered, who look to the west with appetite and to the east with mistrust and whose sense of community is based not ignorance of the other, but on condescending apprehension, who try to shake those imaginary middle ages off them and go even further than the renaissance went - back to the white rational perfection of Greek statues and philosophy, drink from the source, who think manners and civility and temperance and sangfroid will guard them against all ills.....and these people crash and crumble against the plague and the night and the madness and the passions that they have discounted, and their experience leaves them fearful and destroyed, plunges them into excesses of despair as if to prove they are not invincible. The hybris of modernity is being punished, and the nemesis has the face of the old order, heavying down like a tombstone on the nascent infant individual, and the rotten, maggot-ridden heart of primal fear and even more primal desire, the beast of the human heart which cannot be explained except when in slumber, but defies explanation when awakened. And the only person who can kill that beast in the story is the one who submits to it, revels in powerlessness instead of power, submits to nature instead of mastering it, embraces the putrid horror of that which goes against human instinct even as she shudders in revulsion. She looks herself in the mirror and sees the monster, yet she knows a monster is not all she is. And by becoming one with the monster she becomes nature as she becomes her nature, what she was always meant to be and the most she could ever hope to become, perfect harmony by absorption and consumption, triumph of the ego even as it is annihilated. The hungry beast and the maiden of death complete each other, and like equal positives and negatives, they are balanced, annihilated, reduced into zero, which is not nothing. Together they are something new, more than the sum of their parts, even if it doesn't exist after that moment, nothing but an afterimage left on their nuptial bed. They are transubstantiated, or, in other words, sublimated. That sublimation is the meaning, and it's fitting that the highest ideal of Romanticism, the one that inspires both terror and delight, that embodies the awe of the human mind before that which rises endlessly high above it and is both terrible and beautiful, terrible because it is beautiful, beautiful because it is terrible, which cannot be one without the other, like a vampire cannot be without a maiden, or the opposite, is.....the sublime.

"Visitor to a Moonlight Churchyard", 1790, Philippe-Jacques von Loutherbourg, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, USA.