Why I'm wrong

I have no idea what Robert Eggers’ philosophy or faith situation is—I only know his films. Personally, I have a background studying theology, philosophy and, thanks in part to my obsessions with Carl Jung, James Joyce and (relatedly) J.K. Rowling, have spent more time than I care to share down the rabbit hole of alchemy and the occult. It’s for this reason that I would ask you to take another look at Nosferatu and at Eggers (and why I think that the contemporary horror scene is filled with so many legitimately great art films). 

For nearly 17 centuries, what we now refer to as “the occult” was simply the “thinking man’s Christianity.” For one, in a world with a centralized authority that would literally put a person to death for thinking the wrong thoughts, the only way for intellectually curious and intellectually honest persons in the western world to conduct research and communicate their speculations was through an obfuscatory symbolic language found in Alchemy, christian Kabbalah, astrology and the like. The Hermetic arts allowed mystics to practice and proclaim their findings without fear, or at least with enough of the trail buried under obscure symbols to give them a running start if the magisterium came hunting for them. There was an “invisible college,” as Jung put it, of mystics and truly spiritual truth-seekers who sought refuge in what seems like nonsense to us today and, for that, we are all so much the poorer. Good thing we have Jodorowsky and J.K. Rowling. 

When Rowling tried to resurrect this tradition, she encountered two predictable results: 1) She became the wealthiest person alive and she was condemned by the church. This is, after all, the story of the Philosopher’s Stone, that’s what it’s intended to do. Oddly, the organization whose teaching has been preserved and safeguarded by the hermetic tradition and the alchemists is the very organization that condemned this tradition as heresy. Same as it ever was, as it condemned its own Founder, once upon a time.

I was surprised to see that your reading of Eggers’ tale of the inverse messiah was fraught with the same misreadings that have plagued orthodoxy since the first Christmas, the same kind of misreading that led Christians to ban the most compelling allegory of Christianity ever written during Pottermania. I will admit that Eggers is engaged in something like viewing the images of our universe only through the negatives. His aesthetic in The Lighthouse and Nosferatu bear this out—the world is bereft of color. The experience of life in his films is the ever-encroaching shadow of the madness of evil and the evil of madness. However, whether this is his intention or not (makes no difference, he operates within the Christian universe and its menagerie of symbols), the depth and length of the shadow cast functions primarily as an analysis of the light. Or perhaps a longing for the dawn.

The key to Nosferatu, for me, is Willem Defoe—professor of the Hermetic arts. He is Carl Jung and he is Hermes. He is the interpreter, the translator and the one with the key to the myth. We are in his universe, although we (as embodied by Dr. Sievers) lied to ourselves and tried to affix ourselves to the world of materialism, reason, modernity, he is here to smash our illusions and to wake us from our collective slumber: He is not the mad scientist—he is the only one who is sane. Albin Eberhart von Franz’ God is not dead—he is engaged in open combat in the real world, despite the fact that everyone around him stops up their eyes and ears to this reality and thinks him mad for living in truth. The capitalist Knock is the madman, not the Alchemist von Franz (although Knock’s madness is also just an attunement to reality). The forces that the ancients and the medievals were terrorized by have not gone anywhere in modernity, we have merely closed our eyes and ears to the realities that surround us. (Here, I cannot help but think about how much of the resurrected Nosferatu project was forged in the crucible of the pandemic.)  This is a through line in Eggers’ work and I have to believe he is a reader of Jung, who devoted so much of his own work to this message. 

The world of Nosferatu is one in which the power of the Prince of the Air holds sway. It is a world where, if one is not always on guard, their very soul may be possessed by remote, unseen forces. The only hope against the creeping shadow is the prayer of the faithful (the nuns’ prayers, after all, effect much with Hutter). When all else fails, only the sacrifice of a spotless lamb can redeem the world and the fate of the universe hangs in the balance on one silent night, one act of faith, just before the breaking of the dawn. What is so stark about this is not that Eggers is a nihilist who dismisses the pre-modern world as mere superstition, it’s that he takes it so seriously. As though it really were all a matter of life and death. 

My experience of Eggers’ films is like that of Dostoevsky’s novels: the anxiety, pain, despair, nihilism, torment and darkness—the realism of it all—serves to shock us into that momentary experience that we ought to have all the time. Eggers, in my experience, does not seem to be saying that “God is dead.” He, instead, seems to be saying “You, the viewer, are dead. Perhaps this film can revive you.” The pure joy, the utter exceptionality of light, the miracle of life, can only be fully encountered by contrast. Or, at least, Eggers appears to be one artist engaged in a project using dark to highlight light, a sort of thematic chiaroscuro. I stand by this even if Eggers himself has other intentions. 

I had this same experience in The Witch—that is a world where, to be cast out of community is equivalent to being condemned to hell. That’s not a condemnation of pre-modern superstition—that’s an accurate description of contemporary reality. The point being, if there is a hell, there must be a heaven. The Dracula myth is an inversion on so many levels (just go through the details of the Christian mythos and see how many of its features are inverted in Dracula). This is what gives it the enduring power and resonance that only a lie can have. The lie is only effective to the degree that it apes the truth. 

That, I think, is the power of Robert Eggers’ films. 

Nosferatu takes place in the Christian universe, where prayers battle plagues, and only atonement can defeat evil. This is why it was rightly released on Christmas and the beginning of the Festival of Lights. It is a film about darkness that brings light into relief. “The light is winning.”

Bob R.

Based upon [your] recognition and buoyed by a long-time love of Miyazaki’s work, I convinced my wife to join me the other night to see The Boy and the Heron in the theatre. I’m sorry to say it disappointed both of us. It was filled with a thousand lovely images, it had some astonishing sequences, but overall it was, to me, nowhere near the top tier of his previous films and overall an unsatisfying moviegoing experience.

I found [Mahito] to be a pitiable, but ultimately unloveable, bordering on unlikeable character. The less invested one is in a character, the less interested you are in their fate, and therefore the stakes of the outcome are significantly lowered.  

Additionally, searching for logic or even meaning in a Miyazaki seems besides the point, and not required in order to love his films. But so many sequences, plot points, and transitions between scenes were confusing, at times incoherent, that I had to conclude the writing was poorly executed. That has never happened to me before in a Miyazaki. Had this been a projected film, I would have enquired with the projectionist as to whether he had omitted a reel or placed some of them in the wrong sequence.

I do believe you can have fantastical dream logic and keep viewers oriented at the same time. Spirited Away is a perfect example of this. I have never felt a moment’s doubt as to what was going on or what Chihiro was trying to accomplish. In The Boy and the Heron the (I think) mission to save his mother (?), the role of the Heron, and just the simple order and significance of events drained too much mental energy from my feeble mind to enjoy the show on this viewing, but I’m already looking forward to a rewatch.

Bryce Moloney