Nosferatu, or the Orgasm of the Tyrant

Still from Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, dir. F. W. Murnau, 1922.

According to Freud, one of the primary functions of dreaming is to protect sleep from external interference. But how does this defense mechanism work? Through the imaginary fulfillment of one’s desires. Desires, which are normally left unfulfilled, render the subject restless and frustrated, forcing them to work in the world to remove the obstacles preventing the realization of these desires. In dreams, however, desires are magically realized. The same can be said about cinema: films imagine the realization of our desires and, for that very reason, protect our sleep—i.e., maintain our acquiescence to reality, where desires remain unfulfilled, without us finding this situation unbearable.

The problem, of course, is that dreams are also an apparatus of censorship. To allow us to continue sleeping peacefully, they repress everything we do not want to know about ourselves—our unconscious desires that would disturb our tranquility. However, as is typical of the unconscious, these desires tend to resurface in unexpected and often distressing forms. Perhaps the best analysis of cinematic repression (and the return of the repressed) remains Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler. In this seminal work, the German philosopher analyzed how the films of the Weimar Republic foreshadowed the unconscious desire of the German masses for a leader like Hitler, well before his rise to power. According to Kracauer, German society, following the collapse of the German Empire, the country’s defeat in World War I, and the failure of the Spartacist uprising in January 1919, experienced a profound identity crisis. German bourgeois society at the turn of the century, unable to enact real transformation, began to neurotically and unconsciously desire a resolution to its own impasses, projecting these desires onto the figure of a tyrant.

Germany in the 1920s was incapable, even in its unconscious desires, of imagining an alternative to the binary of authoritarian order and chaos. (Even then, to paraphrase the Jamesonian saying, it was easier to imagine a tyrant’s rise to power than the end of capitalism.) If the imaginary desire for Hitler was already present in German cinema before being realized in history, the question we might ask today is: What kind of repressed desires are surfacing in today’s social imaginary? What are we imagining—or better, desiring—through our images? What unconscious desires lie beneath these images?

Kracauer’s analysis remains relevant, especially in light of Robert Eggers’s recent remake of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) is the quintessential film addressing the erotic fascination with the tyrant—the Freudian father of the horde who, being uncastrated, can enjoy all women. And for us to enter the symbolic order, this father must be ritually killed.

In Eggers’s film, as in Murnau’s, the story is set in 1838. The protagonist, Thomas Hutter, is a young assistant to a real estate agent who is in debt and—implicitly—sexually impotent. (In the opening scene, he avoids sexual intercourse with his wife, Ellen, played by Lily-Rose Depp, to go to work.) He represents the neurotic petit bourgeois whom Kracauer identified as the archetypal subject of Weimar Germany’s crisis, and whose incapacity to organize a revolution is phantasmatically displaced onto sexual impotence. Thomas’s employer, Knock, is a sinister figure who sends him on a business trip to the castle of Count Orlock, an enigmatic recluse living in the Carpathian Mountains who is revealed to be the renowned vampire Nosferatu.

Eggers’s remake, however, places the film’s sexual undertones, which are only implicit in Murnau’s version, at the forefront. Even before Thomas encounters Count Orlock, it is Ellen who harbors a sexual desire for the vampire, figuratively inviting him into their domestic space—which, though set in 1838, resembles a modern middle-class apartment. Her initial encounters with Nosferatu’s phantom are portrayed as masturbatory erotic trances. As the film progresses, her crises echo early twentieth-century hysterics, whose symptoms Freud described as the physical manifestations of repressed sexuality.

In short, Nosferatu embodies a deadly and destructive jouissance—an overwhelming pleasure that first appears as sexual energy uncontainable within the confines of bourgeois domesticity. Ellen explicitly states this in one scene—true to the didacticism of modern blockbusters, where everything has to be explained twice. Nosferatu is her unconscious desire: a female sexual longing that has no place in the distribution of roles in bourgeois society.

The end of the film is well known—and does not constitute a major spoiler, given it is the same as the 1922 version. Ellen sacrifices herself, deciding to engage in sexual intercourse with the vampire at the moment of sunrise. Her sacrificial death brings about the vampire’s destruction. Metaphorically, bourgeois society can only return to order and stability through the sacrifice of the restless and subversive dimension of female jouissance. Yet Eggers introduces a twist: Thomas arrives at the very moment when Ellen and Nosferatu die, coinciding with the orgasm of their shared jouissance. In a film rich with psychoanalytic undertones, this scene evokes a classic primary fantasy in which the subject, observing intercourse between their parents, witnesses the point of their own origin.

The specificity of Eggers’s Nosferatu, compared to Murnau’s, is that Thomas, instead of being an obsessional-neurotic husband incapable of effecting change, occupies the position of the son. He gazes enigmatically at Ellen and Nosferatu, the only couple in the film for whom sexual desire and jouissance genuinely circulate. Implicitly, he wonders: What is sexuality, and what is this jouissance about?

What does this shift tell us about our unconscious desires for the tyrant/vampire? If, according to Kracauer, the cinema of the Weimar Republic reflected an unconscious desire for Hitler, what does this remake reveal about our desires today? First, today’s tyrants—from Milei to Trump to Musk—are not classically authoritarian figures who phantasmatically transform impossibility into omnipotence. Instead, they are jouisseur fathers, shamelessly displaying uncastrated jouissance. They force us to assume the position of the son, observing a primary scene where jouissance and death overlap (as happens in our social media landscape today, where crimes in Gaza coexist with the hypersexualization of our collective imaginary).

Slavoj Žižek made this point decades ago when discussing Slobodan Milošević. Milošević was not merely an authoritarian tyrant, as many Western powers perceived him, but rather someone who staged a kind of permanent carnival. In Serbia, after the war, nothing worked, yet the tacit injunction was not to return to the ranks of a corporatized, rigidly organized society. Instead, there was an incitement to widespread theft and transgression: “Everyone can steal! Everyone can cheat! You can go on TV and spit on Western leaders! You can kill! You can smuggle!”1 This was not “dark terror” but rather a false and inverted explosive liberation. Doesn’t the same thing occur today with Elon Musk? Musk presents himself not as a despotic leader but as a transgressive, perpetual teenager—boasting about microdosing ketamine for work and, in an interview with Joe Rogan before the election, claiming to spend hours playing video games during his workday.

The problem, which goes far beyond the scope of Eggers’s Nosferatu, is how we choose to relate to this exhibitionist, uncastrated jouissance. Forced into the position of Thomas watching Ellen and Nosferatu at the moment of their orgasm and death, we watch Musk brag about playing video games in an ocean of death and precarity. Do we take the position of imaginary identification with the tyrant? Or do we perform the ritual killing of the father of the horde, entering the symbolic order? Or is there perhaps a third way, one that allows us to reconcile enjoyment with discipline, jouissance with the symbolic order, law with transgression?