#the gothic is bound up in anxieties over what we lose to domesticating forces of ‘progress’

[grandwitchbird]

Seen a bit about ‘hysteria’ in Nosferatu (2024) but nothing really digging into what the film is doing with neuroticism. Let’s get Jungian. Spoilers and musings below the cut.

The central tragedy here isn’t that Orlok is a monster who cannot love or young lovers forever divided. The tragedy is love with the disturbing heart of passion cut out of it and passion that can only be fully embraced in death. The world itself is broken in a way we see reflected in the characters.

Ellen pursues. She calls out to the world with such a hunger that an ancient undead monster hears her and is irresistibly drawn in. She pursues Thomas. She initiates their sexual relations and begs for his attention and craves his company. He’s an acceptable outlet for her desires and the promise of a normal life, not just the man she loves. Orlok is the hunger itself. The cruelty of her dilemma rests in the fact that Thomas loves Ellen but is incapable of satiating her or even recognizing her desires, and Orlok is nothing but appetite and incapable of love. Ellen is love and desire, both embraced with ferocity and both rejected by the world. But she will not be denied or divided in herself. I’m paraphrasing loosely from memory, but it’s key that she tells von Franz that she’s never done any wrong, only lived in accordance with her nature.

Neurosis is social and cultural in this context. It’s embedded in the patriarchal domesticating interests of the setting. Thomas is nearly repression itself through no real fault of his own. He’s a husband. A decent man. In his figure we see the safe boundaries that hem in the potentially dangerous desires represented in Ellen and Orlok. He’s delighted to have “such a dirty wife” but shrinks from the real face of her desires. Thomas loves Ellen, but he retreats and denies and treats her libidinal qualities as ‘dirty’ and flawed aspects that must be repressed and avoided and sublimated. For all Ellen’s seizing and moaning and ‘hysterics’, Thomas is also neurotic in his retreat from the libidinal.

All passion is a challenge to fate, and what it does cannot be undone. Fear of fate is a very understandable phenomenon, for it is incalculable, immeasurable, full of unknown dangers. The perpetual hesitation of the neurotic to launch out into life is readily explained by his desire to stand aside so as not to get involved in the dangerous struggle for existence. But anyone who refuses to experience life must stifle his desire to live—in other words, he must commit partial suicide. This explains the death-fantasies that usually accompany the renunciation of desire. - Jung Vol. 5

We shouldn’t make the mistake of reducing the libidinal here to purely sex. Rather the libidinal is the all encompassing, messy pursuit of life: it’s the passion that drives creation, the desire for meaning, the wholehearted engagement with the entire range of human experience. Likewise the death drive exists here, but the desire for annihilation is simply the inherent negative to the libidinal positive. Hysteria or madness is the overwhelming outpouring of thwarted passion. It’s an attempt to live. Thomas’s repressed neuroticism is antithetical to the way Ellen moves and exists within the world but no less neurotic for that. His genteel repression and devotion to hierarchies are both attempts to live within a world that demands repression of the negative and retreats from passion that make him specifically ill-equipped to grapple with true darkness. The same darkness that Ellen is more than a match for.

And this is where we see clearly that these characters belong to two different realms that slowly converge over the course of the film. Ellen is trapped in a realm that has no space for her desires and so she is left to dream of death. Thomas hesitates until he falls from a literal ledge in a very literal partial suicide (poignantly still accidental to some degree: he must slip to take the leap). That he is revived by the church itself, a kind of resurrection by that ultimate domesticating force, highlights his distance from the realm occupied by Orlok and Ellen. His attempts to “launch out into the world” are to be as frustrated as Ellen’s in their own way. The world is already broken and must be remade. He is built for that other, more domesticated world, no matter how much he loves Ellen.

The power of God is menaced by the seductions of passion; heaven is threatened with a second fall of angels. If we translate this projection back into the psychological sphere from whence it came, it would mean that the good and rational Power which rules the world with wise laws is threatened by the chaotic, primitive force of passion. Therefore passion must be exterminated, which means, in mythological projection, that the race of Cain and the whole sinful world must be wiped out, root and branch, by the Flood. That is the inevitable result of a passion that sweeps away all barriers. […] As a power which transcends consciousness the libido is by nature daemonic: it is both God and devil. If evil were to be utterly destroyed, everything daemonic, including God himself, would suffer a grievous loss; it would be like performing an amputation on the body of the Deity. - Jung Vol. 5

What we see in Nosferatu is the fragments of what’s left behind when the libidinal drive is thwarted and abjected. We see divine amputations. We see it in the decent men who try to fight back a darkness they can’t understand or truly combat because they’ve cut it off and cast it out from themselves. We see it in Orlok, all the cast-off desires of the world reduced to pure destructive appetite. And in Ellen we see the cost of the abjection, in her passion reduced to ‘hysteria’. But only in Ellen does passion show its true and whole face in all its courage and devotion and madness.

So Ellen must die. She must die with Orlok because this world has already disfigured the divine body by rejecting and repressing that most fundamental of drives. But the repressed always returns, and it is always hungry. So Ellen plays the priestess. Unlike Orlok who has rejected death and thus impoverishes his desires into sadistic appetite, Ellen embraces her nature and her desires and death. No hesitation or halfway measures. She remains wholly and truly herself as she becomes the flood, a sacrament, a blood sacrifice, that wipes out the “chaotic and primitive forces of passion” leaving the world itself the poorer, if safer, for it.

Notes:

Ellen has “too much blood” both practically so she can play her role and metaphorically so that she can embody every nuance of the libidinal drive. Blood is life.

The virgin and the stallion, potent symbols of life, can locate a vampire.

Iron kills the undead (as it does fae and other undomesticated relics) because it is the symbol of man made power over the earth itself.

The blood sacrifice is also the marriage bed.

I could keep going, but you get it. The film is really consistent with all of this.

I won’t pretend to be particularly invested in what Jung intended with his framework. His intents are far less interesting than the artistic interpretations that give us films like Nosferatu. He certainly thought the soul was hermaphrodite, and we see that clearly in Eggers’s work here (particularly in the Wuthering Heights influence on our central romance/s).