The Consummation of Everything - Nosferatu

There is a moment near the end of Robert Eggers' Nosferatu - and I will not pretend this is a film review, you will understand why shortly - where Ellen Hutter walks toward the darkness with the deliberate unhurried certainty of a woman who has finally stopped pretending. She is not being taken. She is not being victimised. She is arriving. At something she has always known was waiting. At the conclusion of a feeling that began before the film started, before her marriage, before her respectable daylight life assembled itself around her like a well-meaning cage. She walks toward Orlok the way you walk toward the only honest thing in a room full of comfortable lies. She walks towards - love, union, passion, pain, orgasm and death. I have watched this scene many times now. I watch it and feel something I have felt in very few other places. The specific relief of being shown the truth about something you had suspected for a long time but had been too socially calibrated to say out loud - All love stories should end like this.

Death by Orgasm

I mean that completely. I am aware of how it sounds. I have said it to a few people recently - in the way one confesses things one has been carrying alone for slightly too long - and received a wide variety of responses. But I find, at this stage of my life, that I am less interested in the responses that require careful subject changes and more interested in the questions that produce them. So - All love stories should end like this. Union and then death. The consummation of everything simultaneously. The peak of love reached and held and not survived because nothing that has genuinely peaked can also continue indefinitely - that is not a peak, that is a plateau, and plateaus are for people who have confused comfort with arrival.

Let me try to explain what I mean. Or rather - let me try to explain what Eggers showed me that I did not yet have the language for.

Orlok loves Ellen with a totality that has no diplomatic version. He does not love her conveniently. He does not love her within the parameters of what she can accommodate without disruption to her existing arrangements. He loves her the way certain forces of nature are described in physics - not because they choose to, not because the timing is ideal, but because the conditions exist and therefore the event occurs. Inevitably. Completely. Without negotiation. This is, I have come to believe, the only real description of love that exists. Everything else is a description of something adjacent to love. Something love-adjacent, semi-love. Something that shares certain features with love - warmth, attachment, the desire for proximity, the particular comfort of being known - but that operates at a fundamentally different temperature. Semi-love is survivable. Semi-Love improves your life while leaving your fundamental architecture intact. Semi-Love ends when it ends and you move through it and eventually the grief resolves and you are yourself again, recognizably, with perhaps some new understanding and a few memories that surface occasionally in quiet moments.

What Orlok feels is not semi-love thank god! Or thank Satan or lucifer or whatever demonic force guided Orlok. What Ellen feels - and Eggers is very clear about this, clearer than most discussions of the film acknowledge - is not semi-love either. She has felt it since before the film begins. It arrived before her husband did. Before her respectable life assembled around her. It arrived like a weather event that cannot be uninvited once it appears on the horizon. I recognize this. I recognize it the way you recognize a piece of music you have never heard before but that seems, impossibly, to be playing something you have always known. The feeling that preceded the vocabulary for it. Before we dive deep into the cosmic and poetic waters of Orlok & Ellen's love allow me dear readers to waste a few paragraphs on what I found to be absolutely unique and insane about some other aspects of this film.

A Jaat friend of mine - a man whose film criticism I trust precisely because it arrives unencumbered by any of the aesthetic frameworks that cause the rest of us to overcomplicate straightforward observations — watched Eggers' Nosferatu with me and delivered, approximately forty minutes in, what I consider the single most accurate description of Count Orlok that exists in any language -Yaar, ye toh Jaat vampire hai.

He said this with complete conviction and returned to his whiskey. I asked him to elaborate, because this seemed like a thesis worth developing. He did not look away from the screen. He said - the moustache. The property dealings. The absolute dedication to bullying anyone who comes within range. Blind pride for one's royal lineage. The sleeping for decades at a time. The singular, all-consuming fantasy of the reunion with his woman that has been running on a loop in his head for centuries. The complete indifference to what anyone else in the story needs or wants or feels. The way he crosses an ocean not through adventure or ambition but through the specific, implacable, slightly terrifying single-mindedness of a man who has decided a particular piece of land - in this case Ellen - belongs to him and is simply going to collect it now. The Jaat confidence of the cosmically entitled.

Sale Deed

And the moustache. My friend is right about the moustache. Eggers gave Orlok — this ancient, plague-carrying, rat-commanding creature of the eternal darkness — a moustache. Not a gothic flourish. Amongst all the previous renderations of Count Orlok in cinema, this was the first time he has a moustache. An actual, specific, distinctly Central European by way of North Indian agricultural community moustache. It is the moustache of a man who owns things. Who intends to own more things. Who considers the question of what he is owed to have been settled long before the conversation began.

I laughed for a long time at this. And then I stopped laughing because I realized my friend in a few sentences identified something that three hours of film criticism had been circling without landing on. Orlok is terrifying not only because he is supernatural. He is terrifying because he is a perfectly mundane type of man - the man who has decided, through some private calculus entirely his own, that you belong to him - given access to genuinely unlimited power and genuinely unlimited patience. The supernatural is almost incidental. The entitlement is the horror.

And yet. Ellen walks toward him. Which says something about Ellen. And about the entitlement. And about the specific, infuriating, completely irrational appeal of a man who has crossed an ocean and several centuries because he simply does not accept the possibility of not arriving. Jaat vampire. I have not been able to watch the film since without thinking about this. It has not made the film less romantic. If anything, it has made it more honest and unique. I myself have experienced this entitlement towards many things - things. Never a woman, fortunately or unfortunately.

I want to say something here about the other kind of vampire. The kind that has been produced for the past several decades by a particular strain of popular culture that I find - and I want to choose this word carefully - nauseous. Not morally offensive - Aesthetically offensive. Which for me is a more serious category. The Twilight vampire. The vampire as brooding, chiselled, clean cut, moisturised, high-school-attending, fair & lovely peddling, abstinence-practising romantic lead. The vampire who has been carefully sanded of every quality that made the vampire interesting and replaced with the qualities of a particularly handsome boy from a good family who has some emotional unavailability that the right woman can fix. A creature of eternal darkness who sparkles in sunlight. Who fucking sparkles. In fucking sunlight.

I need to stay with this for a moment because I genuinely cannot move past it without acknowledgment. Someone sat down and wrote a vampire who sparkles in sunlight and this was received not as blasphemy that it is - the vampire is the thing the sunlight destroys, this is not a detail, this is the entire bloody mythological point - but as romantic. As desirable. As something millions of people found themselves genuinely moved by. I was not moved. I was fucking disturbed. In a completely different way from how Nosferatu disturbs me. Nosferatu disturbs me because it is true. The Twilight vampire disturbs me because it is a lie wearing the clothes of a myth and calling the lie romantic.

The Bollywood romantic vampire - if such a thing were made, and I live in fear that it will be - would presumably arrive with flowers, sing about his centuries of longing in a picturesque European location, perform his vampiric nature as a personality quirk rather than an existential condition, and conclude the film by choosing love over darkness in a scene that his female fans would find redemptive and I would find a waste of perfectly good mythology. The vampire is not redeemable. That is the point. That is what makes him the only honest metaphor for the kind of love I am describing. Love at that temperature - at Orlok's temperature - does not redeem. It does not improve you or make you a better person or resolve your attachment issues or result in a healthier relationship with your family of origin. It consumes. It transforms through consumption. It is not safe and it is not meant to be safe and making it safe makes it nothing.

Orlok does not sparkle. He arrives like a plague. He is ancient and hideous and completely, unapologetically himself. And Ellen walks toward him. Not the sparkling boy. Not the emotionally unavailable high school senior with good bone structure and a complicated relationship with his own nature that he has spent two hundred years being sensitive about. The plague. This is the correct choice. This is the only romantic choice available in a story that is trying to tell the truth. And the truth is that desire at its most real - at its most pre-rational, pre-social, serpent in the body real - does not ask to be made safe. Does not want to be made safe. Is, in fact, destroyed by the attempt. The cute vampire is desire asking for permission. Orlok is desire that has not heard of the concept.

Back to the film.I watched Eggers' film twice in the same week. And I noticed, by the second viewing, that something was happening to me that I had not anticipated and could not entirely account for. My libido, for lack of a more poetic term, had gone to places that required a moment of honest self-assessment. Not just heightened. Recalibrated. As if watching a love operate at that temperature - that consuming, primal, entirely unapologetic totality - had reset something in me to a factory setting I had forgotten existed. The film had reached through the screen and turned something up. To a level I had not previously been aware was available on the dial. I sat with this for a while. Found it, as I find most things about myself that I had not previously known, interesting rather than alarming.

And then, because I am constitutionally unable to have an experience without it producing consequences that my immediate social circle eventually has to navigate, I entered what my friends & lovers - with a mixture of affection and something approaching clinical concern - came to refer to as my Nosferatu phase. It lasted many months. I want to be precise about this. Many months. Not a week of aesthetic enthusiasm. Not a passing influence. Many months of what I can only describe as a deliberate and deeply felt recalibration of how I moved through the world.

The wardrobe first. Blue or black. Only. Long Kashmiri kurtas - the ones that reach to the knee, the ones that move like something that has decided not to hurry - and dark jeans and my heavy duty all terrain woodland shoes. Every day. The decision was not conscious exactly. More like the clothes that felt dishonest fell away and these remained. I have friends & colleagues & students who will confirm that this is not an exaggeration. The colours of the deep water. The colours of the space between midnight and morning. The sunglasses at night. Yes. I know how this sounds. I am aware that sunglasses at night is the fashion decision of a man who has either watched too many vampire films or is actively auditioning for one. Both were arguably true. But they also served a function that I found, during this period, genuinely necessary. The eyes, when you are operating at that temperature - when you have turned something up to the level the film had turned it up to - give too much away. The sunglasses were not affectation. They were containment.

The perfumes were specific. Dark. Resinous. The ones that arrive in a room slightly before you do and linger considerably after you have left. TF Oud.Leather.Noir The ancient and the slightly dangerous. Nothing fresh. Nothing transparent. Nothing that announced itself cheerfully. Only the things that moved like weather through enclosed spaces and left a question behind them rather than an answer. The talking less - this was the one my loved ones found most alarming, I think, because I am not generally someone who talks less. I talk. I have opinions about everything and a constitutional inability to leave an interesting idea unexplored in public. But during the Nosferatu phase I found that words - ordinary words, the conversational kind, the ones that fill space and establish warmth and move the social moment from here to there - felt like a dilution of something I was trying to keep concentrated. So I said less. And when I did speak I tried to speak in the only register that felt honest during this period. The poetic. The compressed. The thing that meant several things simultaneously or did not bother being said. My students found it cool!

My close friends & colleagues - people who have known me long enough to recognize genuine change from performance - periodically asked when the phase would end. With the patience of people who have watched me go through Fuck IIT phase, Kashmir phase, Russia phase, Herzog phase, Oppenheimer phase, Reynolds Woodcock phase, Dionysian-Scorpionic women, they have learned that the phases conclude on their own schedule and external inquiry does not accelerate the process.

I met my lovers only at night during this period. If work did'nt demand it - I never left my home or office during daytime. This was not a rule I imposed. It was simply what felt true. The daylight world, with its reasonable temperatures and its transparent social surfaces, was not where this version of me lived. I lived after dark. In the hours when the city loses its daytime legibility and becomes something older and less administered. When the scent of things changes. When the light from windows is amber and specific rather than uniform and practical. When a person walking toward you out of the dark is still, briefly, a mystery rather than a known quantity.

The lovers who found me during this period found a version of me that I think surprised them. Quieter than expected. More concentrated. Less interested in the pleasant and the conversational and more interested in the true and the direct and the things that do not require negotiation before they can be said. Some of them found this extraordinary. Some found it, I suspect, somewhat too much. Both responses seemed correct to me at the time. The phase ended the way phases end. Gradually. The Kashmiri kurtas began alternating with other things. The sunglasses moved indoors only during daylight hours, which is their conventional function. The talking resumed its ordinary volume. The specific perfumes remained - some things you do not return from - but the architecture of the daily life stopped being quite so deliberately nocturnal.

Back to Normal

I want to talk about the sound. Nosferatu's sound is one of the most complete and most intelligent sonic constructions I have encountered in recent cinema. Robin Carolan's score does something that film scores rarely attempt and almost never achieve - it does not accompany the emotion on screen. It precedes it. The music arrives slightly before the feeling, like a scent that reaches you before the person does, and by the time the image confirms what the sound has already established, your nervous system has been prepared at a level below conscious processing. You feel before you understand. Which is, I would argue, the only honest sequence for a film about a feeling that operates below conscious processing.

The score is built from low frequencies and long tones and silences that are themselves a kind of sound - the particular silence of something very large holding very still. It does not resolve. It does not offer the conventional musical reassurances - the swell that tells you something important is happening, the diminuendo that tells you it is safe to exhale. It simply continues, at the temperature of the film, without apology or explanation. Like the film itself. Like Orlok. But it is the voice. I need to talk about Orlok's voice.

Bill Skarsgård as Orlok speaks in a register that I have spent considerable time trying to locate precisely on the frequency spectrum and cannot, which is itself remarkable. It is not bass exactly - bass is warm, has body, occupies space in a way that is almost comfortable in its solidity. Orlok's voice is something below bass. Something that seems to arrive not through the ears but through the sternum. Through the older parts of the body. The parts that were listening for predators before they were listening for music. He speaks with a Romanian accent that Eggers and Skarsgård clearly researched with obsessive precision - the specific music of Transylvanian Romanian, the particular way certain consonants arrive with unexpected weight, the vowels that seem to carry something ancient in them that translation loses. And then they processed this voice - subtly, carefully, in ways that are difficult to identify consciously but impossible to ignore physically - the perfect mix - the perfect grade - into something that does not quite belong to any register the human vocal apparatus normally produces. When Orlok speaks, something happens in the room that is not entirely acoustic.

There is one scene in Eggers' Nosferatu that is forever etched in my memory. Not the ending - though the ending is what I have been circling in this essay from the beginning. Not the plague ship. Not the first sight of Orlok from the carriage, which is genuinely one of the most startling images in recent cinema. Not even Robin Carolan's score doing something with low strings that I felt in places I did not know sound could reach. It is the magnificent scene when Ellen and Orlok meet for the first time.

She has gone to him. Across the dark. Into the room where he waits with the stillness of something that has been waiting for centuries and has learned to wait without agitation because agitation implies uncertainty about the outcome and he has no uncertainty about the outcome. He has always known. She has always known. The meeting is a formality that the universe is finally getting around to conducting.

And she says — I have felt you. Crawling like a serpent in my body.

This line. I need to stay here for a moment. This line is one of the most honest descriptions of desire I have encountered in any medium. Not desire as appetite, as want, as the socially presentable version of the pull toward something. Desire as invasion. As something that entered without asking and took up residence and has been living there, crawling like a serpent, in the body. Below the conscious. Below the managed. In the place that the daylight world does not have official access to.

Metaphysical Desires

And he says — It is not me. It is your own nature.

I have thought about this exchange more than is probably advisable. What Orlok is doing here is something that the romantic hero of a conventional pottywood love story or soap dramas never does. He is refusing to take credit. Refusing to be the cause of what she feels. He is pointing the feeling back at her - at the version of her that the feeling is actually revealing - and saying: this is not something I did to you. This is something that was already in you. I am only the occasion of its becoming visible. This is the most respectful thing anyone has ever said to a woman in a horror film. Possibly in any film.

Ellen says — No. I love Thomas.

And I find this heartbreaking every time. Not because it is false - she does love Thomas, genuinely, warmly, in the semi-love way that is real and human and worth having - but because she is trying to use one true thing to cancel out another true thing. As if the love for Thomas and the serpent in the body are in competition. As if only one of them can be true. As if she must choose which version of herself is the real one.

And Orlok says — Love is inferior to you. I told you, you are not of human kind.

Here is where Eggers' script does something extraordinary and does not pause to announce that it has done it. Orlok is not insulting Thomas. He is not dismissing love. He is saying something much more specific and much more devastating - that Ellen, this particular Ellen, with her depth and her weather and her capacity for the serpent in the body and the thing that operates below conscious choice - is more than what conventional love can contain. That the container is too small for what she is. That Thomas loves her as much as Thomas is capable of loving - completely, genuinely, within the parameters of what he can perceive - and that what he can perceive is not all of what she is.

She says — You are a villain to speak so.

And he says — I am an appetite. Nothing more.

I am an appetite. Nothing more.

I have been turning this line over in my mind since the first viewing. It is the line I keep returning to. The line that, if I am being completely honest, produced in me a recognition so immediate and so specific that I sat in the dark after the credits rolled and simply stayed with it for a while. He is not claiming to be a lover. Not claiming to be a romantic hero. Not claiming to be good or noble or deserving or any of the things that the conventional romantic narrative requires its protagonists to be in order to justify the love they receive. He is claiming to be a force. A pure, undiluted, non-negotiating force of wanting. Without the social apparatus. Without the performance of worthiness. Without the management and the moderation and the careful presentation of desire within acceptable parameters. Just - appetite. The oldest thing. The thing before the social contract. The thing the social contract was built partly to contain. And Ellen - finally, after the entire film of containment - lets it reach her.

I am an appetite, nothing more - I have said this to myself in the mirror on certain mornings. Usually when wearing a dark Kashmiri kurta and the specific perfume. It is, I find, a clarifying thing to say. It removes a great deal of unnecessary complexity from the day ahead. It also allows me to consume and create - art - obsessively - shielding me from the guilt that modern societies try to impose on the impulsive people of my tribe.

I want to pause here and tell you something that disturbed me. Not about the film. About myself watching the film. Orlok kills people. Many people. He crosses an ocean on a plague ship and the entire crew dies. He arrives in Wisborg and people begin dying in their beds, in their homes, in the streets. Children are orphaned. A city is consumed by pestilence. The body count is not incidental. It is vast. It is the direct consequence of this love - this consuming, century-old, cosmically predetermined love - moving through the world toward its object. I watched all of this and felt - almost nothing. No moral horror. No grief for the dead. Nothing that could be called an appropriate response to mass death by a reasonable person. What I felt instead was something closer to impatience. A mild narrative impatience. The plague ship, the dying sailors, the bodies accumulating in Wisborg - these registered to me as the space between what actually mattered. The space between Orlok and Ellen. Between the feeling and its conclusion. I was waiting for the film to get back to the love story. The massacres were - and I say this with full awareness of what it reveals about me - inconvenient interruptions.

I sat with this for some time after watching the film many times. It disturbed me in the way that honest self-observation tends to disturb - not with shock exactly, but with the quiet discomfort of having seen something true about yourself that you would have preferred to keep theoretical. I am not, in general, a person without moral feeling. I care about the suffering of others. I find cruelty intolerable. And yet. Orlok's massacres did not bother me. Because Orlok was in love. I think what this reveals - and I offer it without flattering interpretation - is something about the specific gravity of the volcanic. When love operates at that temperature, at that totality, at that complete indifference to the ordinary parameters of reasonable behaviour, it generates its own moral atmosphere. Not a better morality. Not a justification. Simply a different field of gravity. The bodies on the plague ship exist in one field. The love between Orlok and Ellen exists in another. And I, unlike many of my friends who saw this, was apparently entirely inside the second field and could not feel the pull of the first.

Orlok lays seige

This is not something I am proud of. It is something I find - honestly, uncomfortably, with the specific fascination that genuinely disturbing self-discoveries produce - extremely interesting. The love had eclipsed the massacre. The romance had swallowed the horror. And I had watched it happen inside myself in real time and had not even noticed until the film ended and the lights came up and I sat there thinking - wait. A great many people just died. And I am sitting here relieved that Orlok finally got to Ellen. What does it mean that the most extreme love story I have ever seen on screen made me forget, for two hours, to be a moral being? I think it means that Eggers made exactly the film he intended to make. And that I am exactly the kind of person he made it for.

Very intelligent, socially adept and well hearted people with great convictions justify violence in our past and our present - mass violence in various political contexts, on ideological grounds, on philosophical waters or evolutionary necessity. I always found their reasoning inadequate and morally reprehensible. Violence for what? Some Land? Conquest? Politics? Survival? Revenge? At last, after watching Robert Eggers' Nosferatu I felt for the first time - Its worth it - Its tragic - So many innocent people dying - but maybe its the price that humanity has to pay for setting up the stage for Orlok and Ellen's cosmically violent love. If there was ever a good reason to look away from the moral & spiritual equations of violence - let that reason be love. Unreasonable Love. Lets move onwards dear readers.

Here is the problem with almost every romantic film and novel ever made. And I say almost because there is one exception which I will arrive at shortly, and it is not a romantic film in any conventional sense, which is precisely why it is the only honest one. Most romantic narratives - the films, the novels, the stories we tell each other about love - are compressions. They take what is, in real life, a decades-long or sometimes centuries-long experience - the full duration of a love, from arrival to conclusion - and compress it into two hours or three hundred pages. And in the compression they make an editorial choice, conscious or not, that quietly falsifies everything. They keep the peaks and the lows. They discard everything between them.

The first meeting. The falling. The crisis that threatens separation. The reconciliation. The consummation. These are the events that make it into the film. These are what the story is made of. And they are real - genuinely, these moments exist and they matter and they contain real feeling that real people recognize from their own lives. But between these peaks there is - everything else. And everything else is where most of the actual relationship lives.

I know this from experience. Not from watching films - from living. The space between the highs and the lows in a real love is not cinematic. It is not scored by anyone. It does not have the quality of light that makes emotions legible to an audience. It is - and I want to be honest about this even though it is not a flattering thing to say about oneself - frequently boring. Sometimes frustrating. Occasionally suffocating in its ordinariness. The Tuesday evenings. The particular silence that has a texture you have learned to read but that is not communicating anything particularly interesting. The small frictions that are too minor to be called conflict and too persistent to be ignored. The breakfast. The logistics. The long stretches where nothing is happening except time passing and two people existing in proximity and the love neither growing nor diminishing but simply continuing, which is perhaps what love mostly is and what romantic narratives have collectively agreed not to show us.

I find this - and I say it with complete honesty - very difficult. I am someone who lives at high gain. Who processes the world through the channels that operate at the peaks. The between is where I am least myself. Where the ordinary duration of things asks me to be a version I find genuinely hard to maintain. Where I most acutely feel the absence of the serpent in the body. Where appetite without apology becomes appetite waiting for permission. The guitar helps. Art helps. The between is more survivable with the guitar. But in a relationship? In the between of a relationship? I keep wanting to be somewhere that still has a peak to reach.

Between the Peaks

Ingmar Bergman showed us the between. This is the exception I mentioned. Scenes from a Marriage - which is not a romantic film but the only honest film about what love actually looks like across time - is six hours of exactly the space that every other romantic narrative has edited out. The between. The ordinary friction. The slow discovery of what two people actually are to each other after the falling has finished and the existing has begun. It is one of the most difficult things I have ever watched and one of the most true. It does not look like a love story. It looks like an argument that lasts six hours and contains two people who are very tired.

This is what love looks like between the peaks. Nosferatu solves this problem in the most radical way imaginable. It removes the between entirely. There is no ordinary time for Orlok and Ellen. There is no Tuesday evening. There is no breakfast. There is no long stretch of proximity without event. Their love exists entirely at the peak - the peak of longing, the peak of recognition, the peak of the consuming and the final. The film does not show us their life together because they do not have one. They have only the approach and the arrival and the consummation. Everything that romantic narratives compress out of a long love, Eggers simply does not include.

Jim Jarmusch understood this too. Only Lovers Left Alive - which is the other vampire film that should be discussed in any honest conversation about what Nosferatu is actually doing - arrives at the same truth from a different direction. Adam and Eve have been together for centuries. They have survived the between. They have survived the Tuesday evenings and the long stretches and the small frictions of an impossibly extended coexistence. And what Jarmusch shows is that they are still - after all of that, after the centuries of ordinary time that would have flattened anything human into mutual indifference - still completely fascinated by each other. Still finding in each other the thing that no amount of time and proximity has made ordinary. Still, in the deepest sense, in love.

For humans the between is the test that most love fails. Not dramatically. Not through betrayal or crisis or the catastrophic events that make it into films. Through the slow, undramatic accumulation of ordinary time.

So my dear readers, lovers and art thieves, do you agree? Every love story worth its salt - In the imagination, but more importantly - in reality - must end like this - The union and then the death. The peak of love held completely and not survived because what survives is never the peak - it is the descent from the peak, which is a different and quieter and ultimately more liveable thing, but not the same thing, not the thing the love was actually pointing toward when it arrived and announced itself through the body before the mind could assess its suitability. Better to die at the peak than live at a plateau. And maybe the death after orgasm - can finally quench the appetite.

Happily Ever After???