Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht

Unexpectedly perhaps, we begin this film in a crypt of mummies. These are not the stoic regents of Ancient Egypt who know they will rule in the afterlife as they have on earth. No, these relics seem to have suffered horrible and painful deaths before their unwilled preservation. They are filmed in ascending age to show that death does not distinguish between old and young. Indeed, apart from their physical size the only differences among these cadavers is the unique agony shrieking across each face. Even the most ignorant moviegoer knows what type of beast has borne the moniker of nosferatu for more than a century, but we are not dealing with vampires. That is to say, we do not believe our mummies the victims of those bloodsucking fiends whose sleekness, pallor, and hunger have catapulted to new heights within the last ten years of young adult fiction (vampirism being an apt cautionary allegory for sexual desire). We will learn, however, that they are and they aren't Dracula's victims. The ageless Romanian Count has become synonymous with a far greater scourge: that of the Black Plague itself.

One amendment: we do not know whether this Dracula (an iconic Klaus Kinski) is actually Romanian or even a proper nobleman. True, he resides in a gloom-laden Transylvanian castle, surrounded and perhaps somewhat abetted by another set of outcasts, the Roma. Yet he is more the shiftless ghost than the dashing Byronic predator who has dominated the innumerable variations since Stoker's novel, imbuing them with sex appeal and courtliness untenable in Herzog's version. As with all first-rate works, Nosferatu's aim becomes clearer in retrospect. Multiple viewings enrich the film because there is so much to notice apart from what actually propels the thin dinghy of a plot forward (a first viewing will also inevitably distract those who have seen the original). So is it with the struggle between Dracula and our ostensible hero, Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz). Harker may have an English name, but he is German in speech, manner, and residence, his home Wismar closely akin to the Wisborg of Murnau's production, complete with canals and Hanseatic primness. Dreams of a giant bat plague his wife Lucy (Isabelle Adjani), who is visibly upset when her spouse announces a business trip to Transylvania that, he snickers, will be teeming with "wolves, bandits, and ghosts." Right before he leaves, they go to the beach where they first met and Lucy confesses that she is overcome by "a nameless, deadly fear." This would all be perfectly acceptable dialogue in any lesser film about impending atrocities, and Ganz and Adjani are, as always, excellent and subtle actors – but this is quite beside the point. What awaits the Harkers is evil, fathomable but unstoppable evil, although not tinged with glamour or seductiveness like so many modern-day children of the night. Herzog has no abiding interest in Gothic romance. His monster simply possesses irresistible power, most evident when Dracula approaches his victims, who can only stare back in horror like snake-bait rodents. There will be no enticement to collaborate with these dark forces, nor will anyone wonder long about the residue of humanity in the Count's soul. That he still assumes the general contours of a human will be understood as more of a convenience than a true reflection of his essence.

Does that mean that Harker is our knight, brazenly determined to thwart a thousand-year-old dragon (Dracul's meaning in his alleged native tongue)? Not quite, or, I should say, not at all. As opposed to other portrayals of Harker, Ganz's law clerk has nothing in the way of charm or elegance in his manners; in fact, all of him screams petit bourgeois (he longs "to buy Lucy a bigger house" even though they have no children and plenty of space). Like his adversary, Harker has only traces of humankind: his role is plain, simple, and terrifyingly banal. He will represent 'life' as understood by a mindless Philistine who has never really lived; Dracula will represent death as someone not allowed to die. He observes that Renfield (Roland Topor), the solicitor who dispatches him to Transylvania and the one person who appears to have been in contact with the Count, is at best mischievous and scheming, and at worst homicidally deranged, but accepts the task anyway for the money involved. Critics have commonly emphasized the loneliness – not so much the humanity as the pathos – of Kinski's vampire, a marvelous deception of directorial genius amplified by Harker's development. This contrast, coupled with the shift from vampiric infection as a means of enlisting an army of monsters to its allegorizing the Black Death, has fooled reviewer after reviewer into believing Herzog wished to portray a more human Dracula "who could not die." It gives nothing away to reveal that, towards the end of the film, Wisborg has been ravaged by the plague, and many of those afflicted decide to banquet publicly with friends and family, living out their last few days in full as an accelerated version of life itself. It also gives nothing away to mention that what Harker experiences in Castle Dracula has nothing of the Gothic nightmare and far more greatly resembles modern horror. Harker's steps become bold because the castle's inside is awake, white, and fully lit, like a gleaming skeleton. Vast cobwebs strangle chairs, recalling the Count's dagger-like fingers clutching at a hapless victim. As it becomes more obvious that he will never escape unharmed, Harker begins a journal to Lucy, whom he cannot reach by normal post. His confessions are tempered by a thick tome he receives in the inn at the foot of the castle's mountains that will also be passed down to her, a text about the whole legend that has become reality. And what is his reality? One identical to what screaming young victims encounter in contemporary slasher films: being trapped in a hideous maze with a madman whose only wish is to make you suffer for as long as your soul and body can endure.

In a very artistic way, Herzog ranks among the most political of directors (witness his turn in the last twenty-five years towards 'real life' documentaries) but his politics do not adhere to any ballot or banner. His champions are neither underdogs nor the gods of genius. What he enjoys is oddity, difference, and originality, even if, as in many of his duller non-fictional pieces, the fine line between originality and triviality is blurred. No one had ever bothered to make the Dracula legend into a severe indictment of life's randomness and meaninglessness, because that is not how the figure lives on in the popular imagination, a realm that Herzog openly despises. Herzog's accomplishment is to take the material completely seriously, without the slightest indication of kitsch (apart from the goofy silence of the gypsies in the inn, although that may be imputed to his fondness for non-professional actors). The fundamental problem of the Dracula legend, however, remains unsolved. No one, as it were, not even Stoker, has ever satisfactorily clarified why Dracula wishes to leave his ghastly ancestral home in the first place. Coppola's gorgeous version suggests the move is Dracula's destiny so as to reunite him with the love he lost hundreds of years before, the love that led him to forsake his faith. But all we find in Nosferatu is death. From the magnificent coffin gathering in the town square, to Dracula's appearance in Lucy's bathroom, to the oddest of scenes, that of a ghost ship sloshing into the canals of Wismar, we have no hope for redemption. Is that why, at one crucial point, we cannot but notice a stone high-relief frieze (a Romanesque carving of what appears to be a Barbary ape) by the fireplace precisely between man from vampire? A very odd form of evolution indeed.

Home

There is something about being a rootless cosmopolitan that makes those with undebatable homes and homelands shake their heads. Doesn't everyone need a home? Isn't a well-run, caring family the only proven way to remain happy all your life? The answer to both these questions is probably yes, but we should ask ourselves why that is. Postwar Western Europe emitted a romantic glow about it because the worst had been endured and now Europe was moving towards being a conglomerate of languages and nations that shared more or less the same recent history. That feeling – which could sublimate into heaven on earth as easily as it could lapse into kitsch – is what some of us call home, an affinity with a time and place, with wondrous memories coalescing into a crystal castle (for some of us, without a moat or drawbridge). Home is, in short, where you are unquestioned and unadorned, a full composite of all your selves, past, present, and future without the slightest fraudulence or embellishment. An appropriate segue to a work from this collection.

Our time is the 1950s and our hero is Robert, a young American father of humble origins. As the story opens Robert is standing upon an ocean liner deck tacitly resigned to having to behold, for the first time in a year, that unusual and iconic symbol of America that bears the simple name of Liberty. It was a fast, unforgettable year at this university, much like, we suppose, the year the story's author spent across the pond before embarking on one of the most productive careers in the history of American literature. Robert's wife Joanne gave birth to their daughter Corinne in a noisy, efficient ward whose curators had asked "healthy women ... to have their babies at home"; in a way, Joanne and Robert are the tired and weary who have headed the wrong direction. Joanne would cry a lot that fateful day, and "the welfare state ... [would] clasp her to its drab and ample bosom," and Robert, too, would cry, but the baby was perfectly healthy and soon enough his year away from all the parochial shabbiness that makes every ambitious youth cringe was over. Now he has two months, July and August, to split between his parents, whom we will get to know, and Joanne's family, who doesn't really matter anyway since Joanne's musings of what is truly home have been long since overtaken by an infant's constant needs. Robert gazes upon his parents and finds his mother little changed ("her face was wide, kind, flushed, tense, and touching – the face of a woman whose country has never quite decided what to do with its women"); no, it is the other parent that catches his eye:

It was his father who struck him as new, as a potential revelation. There had been nothing like him in Europe. Old, incredibly old – he had had all sixteen remaining teeth pulled while Robert was away, and his face seemed jaundiced with pain and partially collapsed – he still stood perfectly erect, like a child that has just learned to stand, his hands held limply, forward from his body, at the level of his belt .... His father was always so conspicuous. He was so tall that he had been chosen, on the occasion of another return from Europe, to be Uncle Sam and lead their town's Victory Parade in the autumn of 1945.

It would not be hasty to conclude that the "potential revelation" here is of a future self that does not appeal to Robert one bit; yet a careful reader will notice the juxtaposed "Europe" and "old" and wonder whether Robert views such a revelation as a choice or fate, which he might wisely interpret as the sum of all choices. He will later recall, as they all drive off towards his parents' semi-rustic Pennsylvania house, that "in the year past, his mother's letters had often seemed enigmatic and full of pale, foreign matter," a sentiment we might indeed expect from a small-town boy lifted and placed for a year at one of the greatest centers of learning in modern times. What do we not expect, however, is the brief melodrama that ensues during that car ride westward, along the emerald expanse that was once the only reality our protagonist knew – and curious readers will already have decided whether to pursue that lonely vehicle on its lonely path.

Reading Updike, who died six years ago this month, I am reminded each time I return to his lush and prodigious oeuvre, requires a lot of patience because his beginnings are invariably mild. His characters do not burst onto the scene; in fact, if there's any bursting to do, it is more often than not implosive. A slow accumulation of evidence, usually daily minutia or the blandest of dialogues, leads to subtle portraits, not of people we might happen to know (the calling card of second-rate literature), but of deep sensations and thoughts that we either know from life experience or through the enjoyment of books, film, music, and painting – in other words, the summits of artistic bliss. A sampling will suffice:  "Ah, the dear rosy English; he began, with a soft reversal of blood, to feel homesick for them"; "Shaken by more and more widely spaced spasms of sobbing, [Corinne] mercifully dragged her injury with her into the burrow of sleep"; "His father nodded, swallowing a fact"; "He released, like an ancillary legal argument, another spasm of lavatory-wall words"; and getting out of the car, Robert "felt his slender height, encased in his black English suit, unfold like an elegant and surprising weapon." Those who accuse Updike of being overly prolific – his fifty-two years of literary activity yielded just as many tomes – are simply greedy for the ease with which he constructs his microcosms. Moreover, the egregiously silly notion that Updike's works are somehow less profound because of his tendency to repeat motifs, symbols, and storylines is best countered by what this author (charged with the same crimes) said about genius and copying. And what about Robert and those "folds of familiarity" he comes to espy as the lonely vehicle passes emerald field after emerald field? Let's just say he will never forget that summer month. 

The Piano Teacher

Bark on, bark on, my most vigilant hounds!
Let me not rest when dark slumber abounds!
With my dreams I have reached an end,
No more time have I with sleepers to spend

                                                                    Franz Schubert, Die Winterreise

This composer, whom the titular character in this film describes in absolute terms as “ugly,” was uncompromisingly devoted to his art, perhaps in no small part because he saw little value in a material life of hedonism and wealth. Schubert's perception of an artist working night and day to achieve minor personalized goals in his lifetime that will only become global imprints well after death suggests not only a blind faith in the redemption of the soul, but also a disheartening contempt for this one life he has been given. 

This quandary – art versus life, sacrifice versus immediate gratification, profundity versus superficial banality – is as old as life and art themselves, and one that plagues Erika (the sensational Isabelle Huppert), a teacher and lover of music. Erika is extremely gifted in her field and, like so many artists, as demanding of others as she is of herself.  She is a recluse, living with her mother (Annie Girardot) and socializing with no one else, suppressing the quiet pain of having a father rotting away in an asylum (“the twilight of the mind,” she calls it), unpleasant with her students, of whom she can realistically expect little, and evasively bellicose towards her colleagues. So far, Erika fits an artistic stereotype all too well: the insufferable genius who demands perfection in everyone and everything and is left bitter by the gross negligence of a world sworn to mediocrity and passableness. There is, of course, a little more to her than that – and what exactly that little more entails has stirred up a great deal of controversy. Erika has a curiously unhinged side to her that manifests itself in pornographic and sadomasochistic whims, the likes of which have no real place in an artistic work and the reason why this film has been considered a bit of a hybrid.  No need to go into details, but suffice it to say that Erika cannot really relate to anything except her music (even her mother is just another obstacle to her routine). And her music is about endless practice, endless striving towards perfection, and the vast majority of life is spent chasing that perfection, with the possibility of attaining it seemingly just around the corner. If this description sounds like a metaphor for something else, then the second half of the film will make perfect sense.

It is precisely at the midway point of the film that she gives in to her desires for Walter (Benoît Magimel), a handsome young prodigy who also has feelings for her of a much more conventional sort. When she first plays before him, the long waits for Walter’s face to react tell you he will be a factor in the film. It is when he first plays, however, that we understand the twisted underside to Erika’s psyche: she cannot bear to look at him, not out of disgust but out of boredom. Erika, you see, has another aspect common to many artists: she is interminably bored when not engaged in her own artistic pursuits. It’s not even that nothing else matters, but that nothing else could possibly matter. But she has urges and physical lacunae that have never really been addressed, and her haplessness in that sliver of life called sexual interaction is as glaring as her art is elevated. When she hurts herself, it’s not for the trite excuse, “I hurt myself because I forgot what it was like to feel something,” but rather the “I don’t remember ever touching anything except piano keys.” At no point does Erika, who is a truly cultured and intelligent person, seem fake or conjured up from the back of some deranged and lonely mind. Yet at the same time she is also an abstraction, a piece of music that someone wrote and commanded to live, a Frankenstein sonata.  And when the film, based on a novel by this equally controversial Austrian Nobel Prize winner, asks her to live, it spirals swiftly down into a painful exchange of bruised egos and, well, bruises. 

Much has been made of the sex and violence in The Piano Teacher, directed by one of Jelinek’s most famous fellow countrymen, although it’s considerably less than the orgy of sexploitations and sexplosions scripted into your average action film. I have not read Jelinek’s novel and cannot say I am maneuvering my shelf components in anticipation of such a purchase, but the character names reveal a novelist’s touch. Walter’s last name is Klemmer, or, in German, “the one who clamps or traps,” and his first name, when pronounced in French (apart from some songs by Schubert, the film is exclusively in French but filmed in Austria with Germanic names, German street signs, and so forth) does not sound very different from “Voltaire.” Klemmer is also the surname of a famous jazz musician, whom Jelinek may have had in mind when she wrote her novel in the early 1980s, although this is debatable. More important is that another of Erika’s students is called Nápravník, who was a Czech conductor and was mentioned in this famous novel. In Czech (Jelinek is of Czech descent), nápravník is related to the words “correctional” and “corrector,” suggesting both a prison and a teacher, as Erika is certainly both. Yet Erika is not some sort of aspiring dominatrix, nor does she reflect Austrian society's alleged emphasis on discipline and excellence (you can foresee down what darksome path that leads), but a woman terrifyingly alone and closing the gap on middle age. Somehow her soul’s torment is supposed to be mitigated by a set of rather banal urges, when that is precisely her only quality that has nothing to do with art. But Huppert's performance is so outstanding that we try to battle through the film despite our repulsion. Maybe the last twenty minutes or so are best watched on fast forward; then again, perhaps there is no better way to experience Erika's slow burn than to endure what she endures down to the final frame. As one of her students sings (from Schubert's Der Wegweiser) in perfect summation:

But I have done nothing so wrong
That I should avoid the human throng.
What kind of foolish desire
Drives me tow'rd the wastelands' mire?

Pushkin, "Желание славы"

A work ("The thirst for fame") from the greatest of all Russian poets.  The original can be found here.

While still enthralled in love and bliss,
Upon my knees in wordless kiss,
Before that face thoughts swore was mine,
Do know, my love, for fame I pine.
Do know that I, still young, must toil
In search of poet’s timeless soil:
Against storm’s length, fatigue ignores
The distant hum of praise and bores.

Invective can’t incite alarm,
As tedious glances inflict their harm,
Your gentle hand my head shakes soft:
“Do love and bliss still sail aloft?
“Will you love others just as me?
“Will our love bask eternally?”
You whisper to my silent shame,
On pleasure gorged, I come to frame
A future day of separate fate
Where tears and pain shall us await.

Betrayal, gossip, all falls down,
So suddenly upon my crown ...
A desert nomad – I?  I stand
By lightning struck then darkest sands!
But now new thirst in me appears:
It’s fame I want, so that your ears
May bear my name at every hour,
Your prayers rise amidst my power,
And all shall sound in loudest tones
Of me.  And when your silence moans
In my true voice, you’ll think of fast
Our garden, night, and loving last.

Master Misery

One woman was particularly relentless. Ordinarily, her face would have had a soft commonplace sweetness, but now, watching Sylvia, it was ugly with distrust, jealousy. As though trying to tame some creature which might suddenly spring full-fanged, she sat stroking a flea-bitten neck fur, her stare continuing its assault until the earthquake footstep of Miss Mozart was heard in the hall.  

An impersonal and cold city, that Big Apple. Impersonal precisely because there are so many persons roaming about; cold because skyscrapers and lonely streets tend to be windy and tree-starved, reminding us at every corner of our mortal path. An especially affecting environment for a young woman from Easton, a small town "north of Cincinnati," even if Easton and Cincinnati probably do not trammel their winters. So why then would someone from Easton come to New York? Perhaps because growing up in a place like Easton makes some people dream of its farthest attainable opposite. Why attainable? Perhaps because a young woman of Easton must never relinquish the opportunity to move back to Easton, even if that would signal utter defeat. A quandary plaguing the heroine of this famous story.

Our heroine is Sylvia, who is young but likely not very beautiful – if she were, our story would have a very different arc of events. Having moved to America's most famous city "for whatever reason, and it was indeed becoming vague," she has been working a typist for an underwear company, which may not quite be the lowest rung of the career ladder although it may seem so. She lives with Henry and Estelle – they are very much a hendiadys for a single unit – a married couple with great aspirations once diligent Henry graduates law school. It is not strange to learn that one of Sylvia's motivations for quitting her hometown was "to rid herself of Henry and Estelle, or rather, their counterparts" (Estelle, in particular, is the type of blinkered narcissist who sincerely thinks she can encourage others by prattling on about her own successes); but it is strange to learn that Estelle, too, hails from Easton. In fact, Estelle and Sylvia's "childhood friendship" might explain why a married couple could endure a third residential wheel for more than rental purposes. Today, however, has been different: not only did Sylvia defy her roommates' daily advice and cross Central Park alone at dusk, she also knocked off work early and hastened to the offices of a certain Mr. Revercomb. His appearance may betray his formal education, although not to the degree that one could learn his motives, ulterior or otherwise:

Impeccable, exact as a scale, surrounded in a cologne of clinical odors; flat grey eyes planted like seed in the anonymity of his face and sealed within steel-dull lenses.

This remarkable passage makes far more sense as an echo of Sylvia's sentiments regarding New York City itself ("Anonymity, its virtuous terror; and the speaking drainpipe, all-night light, ceaseless footfall, subway corridor, numbered door"). Who could fail to see these "steel-dull lenses" as that famous image (from a mediocre poet) of a skyscraper? More remarkable still is that New Yorkers congregate like so many "patients" to spend time, valuable time, as it turns out, with Mr. Revercomb. And what does Mr. Revercomb seek from this anxious, motley crew, held in check by the "green-pale hands ... as strong as oak roots" of his secretary, Miss Mozart? Nothing, strange to say, that they couldn't dissemble or fabricate. Because for a tidy sum Mr. Revercomb will pay you to tell him your dreams.      

What Mr. Revercomb – a French valley of dreams – does with these recounted visions ("all typed and filed") is not ours to ponder. Sylvia also gives the matter little thought, which cannot be said of another frequent dreamer, Oreilly. Sylvia first lays eyes on Oreilly when Miss Mozart seizes him by the necktie and casts out of the offices of Mr. Revercomb, and not only because of the alcohol on his breath (all the other "applicants," save Sylvia, "laughed delicately, admiringly"). Oreilly does have a sad, drunk air about him, but he persists in his belief in the human soul, for dreams "are the mind of the soul and the secret truth about us." His uncanny resemblance to a clown, if one whom spirits have long since mastered, makes the ridicule he suffers oddly fitting. Unhoused and ever on the lookout for his next drink, Oreilly befriends Sylvia by reminding her at once of childhood's innocence and the vices of the city that has rejected them. A desperate gambit towards the story's end reveals that neither one of them has been in close contact with reality for some time, a scene preceded by another, even more harrowing exchange between two childhood friends who have been living on the fumes of a distant past. But the best passage in Master Misery, Oreilly's term for the dream-filer, comes when Sylvia intrepidly takes Central Park in a very impractical pair of high heels:

The real trouble with Henry and Estelle was that they were so excruciatingly married .... Enough to drive you loony. 'Loony!' she said aloud, the quiet park erasing her voice. It was lovely now, and she was right to have walked here, with wind moving through the leaves, and globe lamps, freshly aglow, kindling the chalk drawings of children, pink birds, blue arrows, green hearts. But suddenly, like a pair of obscene words, there appeared on the path two boys: pimple-faced, grinning, they loomed in the dusk like menacing flames, and Sylvia, passing them, felt a burning all through her, quite as though she had brushed fire. They turned and followed her past a deserted playground, one of them bump-bumping a stick along an iron fence, the other whistling. These two sounds accumulated around her like the gathering roar of an oncoming engine, and when one of the boys, with a laugh, called, "Hey whatsa hurry?" her mouth twisted for breath. Don't, she thought, thinking to throw down her purse and run. At that moment, however, a man walking a dog came up a sidepath, and she followed at his heels to the exit.

If you ever had any reason to doubt Capote's genius, this paragraph would immediately dispel such foolishness (with the children's chalk drawings being one of his most unforgettable images). Yet there are many other instances of this brilliance: "You could hear the tough afternoon voices of desperate running boys"; "Her head fell back, and her laughter rose and carried over the street like an abandoned, wildly colored kite"; "She put her arm through Oreilly's, and together they moved down the street, but it was as if they were friends pacing a platform waiting for the other's train"; "There was an enormous commotion in the hall, capsizing the room into a fury of sound: a bull-deep voice, vulgar as red, roared out"; "His voice trailed to a mere moth of sound." It is no wonder, then, that of all his stories, Capote named the tragic tale of Sylvia the dreamer his favorite. And what of the Master himself? Why does Oreilly claim the dream collector is the same being who "lives in the hollows of trees" and whose step "you can hear ... in the attic"? Perhaps because there are so few trees and attics in the Argus-eyed city.