Priestess, Martyr, Scapegoat

Understanding Nosferatu's Ellen beyond her sexuality

I saw Nosferatu on Christmas day, my viewing experience mercifully untouched by any online discourse or in-depth experience with Dracula and its many retellings. I loved it. Not only was it beautifully shot, well-acted, and dare I say funny, I also felt it spoke to something broadly true about subjectivity and mysticism in the post-enlightenment era. I was surprised, initially, to find that the predominant discourse that emerged around the film was about sex.

Foucault writes in The History of Sexuality that as sex became more “repressed” during the Victorian era, the tendency to speak about it actually increased, even if though polite veils of innuendo, scientific exploration, and religious confession. Its integration into institutions like science, medicine, and religion turned sex into an expression of subjectivity (something that spoke to a person’s psychological pathology, proclivity for sin, personal taste etc.), rather than just an act. How we experience pleasure became a way of understanding the self in relation to others, an identity marker—this is sexuality. Even in our attempts to merge with another or pursue transcendent pleasure, we are returned to ourselves.

This idea came to mind watching Nosferatu, not only because of its Victorian era setting, but also because many viewers seem eager to see a representation of their own sexuality (or ideas about sexuality) integrated into the film in a quite straightforward, socially-acceptable way. There’s the old analyst’s joke: for Freudians, religion is really about sex, for Jungians, sex is really about religion. Culturally we are perhaps more Freudian than we realize, funneling all meaning into sexuality, rather than understanding sex as just one part of the story.

Many viewers seem fixated on Ellen’s “dark sexuality” and how it flies in the face of the restrictive morals of her time. In their view, Ellen’s sexual union with—or at the very least her desire for—Nosferatu is liberating, while more traditional characters are deservingly punished for their inability to understand her and thus abet her liberation. Magdalene J. Taylor writes in her essay on the film that though it is tempting to see characters like Friedrich, who tie Ellen to her bed and treat her as a hysteric, as representative of patriarchal oppression, it is perhaps more accurate to understand them as flawed only in their inability to take evil seriously: “His crime, as is nearly everyone else’s in the film,” she writes, “is naiveté.”

Taylor goes on to write:

The destruction of this entire family is supposed to be a tragedy, a sign of what is to come of Nosferatu is not killed. And yet, there are those who see the institution of family as the true villain. Nosferatu’s entrance into Ellen’s life is connected to the family, too. She explains to Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz that she first called to him following the death of her mother, her father having become emotionally absent. Orlok took advantage of her loneliness, her innocence. It is in the absence of family that she became his prey. She is not some horny young woman oppressed by society’s unwillingness to let her indulge in sex: she is a victim to a predator who has been stalking her since childhood.

As Taylor outlines in her essay, many forget (or willfully ignore) that Nosferatu is supposed to represent true evil, and that Ellen spends the entire film resisting this increasingly seductive force in favor of preserving her relationships and protecting the people she loves. The insistence that Ellen is exercising sexual agency in her union with Nosferatu is a willing disavowal of the fact that we do not always feel aligned with our own desires; that often our desires are formed by trauma, mental illness, and even simply the time we live in; that true “agency” becomes mythic in these circumstances. The contemporary human personality is riddled with warped survival skills and unaccounted for mental and emotional residue that we must spend our entire lives managing in order to live according to our values and preserve relationships with the people we love. This is what Ellen contends with in Nosferatu—not the revelation of her “true” desires.

Though Ellen’s sexuality is formed by her intimate experience with darkness, it is not the genesis or limit of this experience. To be alive is to have experiences that fundamentally change you, and often these experiences are difficult, painful, and thus saturated with darkness. Fragments of the pain of loss or betrayal can lodge themselves within is us like shrapnel and scar over into totally new pieces of self. Pain, like love, is viral in this way. Taylor mentions that Ellen unknowingly calls out for Nosferatu due to the loneliness she experiences in the wake of her mother’s death. She then grows into adulthood with her knowledge of darkness crystalized into a legitimate part of her, one that threatens to sabotage not only her relationships, but her whole world.

I left the theater wondering if a self at war with itself was a hallmark of a traumatized subject or simply a contemporary one. When Ellen asks, ”does evil come from within us, or from beyond?” she acknowledges a then culturally agreed-upon binary between the self and the world that her situation itself completely obliterates, and in this way, her pain is prophetic. Von Franz theorizes that Ellen is a canary in a coal mine; preternaturally sensitive, she has become a vessel for unseen forces that have always given shape to our world. In the world of Nosferatu, these forces are overtly mystical (when a plague hits, it is because an ancient demon has swept into town), but they can nonetheless be understood as stand-ins for unseen forces that do legitimately structure our world, and by extension our individual subjectivities: economic and political systems, epidemics of scarcity and trauma, ideology, and the internet, to name a few. “Darkness” takes many forms, and not everyone can feel it percolating, even if most can understand it intellectually. So what happens to the ones who can?

Von Franz contends that in an ancient time, Ellen may have been a priestess, adept at revealing and channeling ancient forces such as evil for the greater good of humanity. But because she is a contemporary woman in a world where such forces are repressed and reproduced as discourse as a way to maintain order, she is better fit for a sacrificial lamb, someone who must offer herself up to the darkness in order to temporarily quiet it. Today, we’re more likely to call this type of figure a scapegoat.

Reading Nosferatu as a film about Ellen’s sexuality replicates this process, obscuring the truth of Ellen’s encounters with darkness (and the way this legitimately impacted her sexuality) with culturally-sanctioned narratives about female sexual liberation or even sexual shame. The idea that a fractured self, and in turn a fractured world, could be remedied by a casting-off of shame through an unabashed embrace of our every desire is a nice story, one that would allow us to ignore any burned cities and plagued graves left in our wake. But Ellen doesn’t “embrace” the parts of herself she is ashamed of, surrendering herself merrily to desire for desire’s sake. Instead she wonders where those parts came from, and what she can do about it.