Nosferatu (dir. Robert Eggers, 2024)

“Every Woman Adores a Fascist”

I’ve laid awake recently, thinking about a story I've started working on. It’s a story about a married woman who is beckoned by some invisible force to escape her home. The wind tapping on her window works as a beacon, a mystic calling, and she appears before the night with her palms up facing some superior power outside herself. When thinking about this story and character, I look at the dark corners of my bedroom, hear the hum of appliances in my kitchen, and remember the true meaning of catharsis: pursuing purification of self through release. I have written many stories of women plagued by some compulsion or instinct pulling them at their core in a destructive direction. Maybe it’s my deep fascination with martyrdom, but the void is a common character in my work and life. What is this companionship to the external, the pull of the void, the unconscious quest to ecstasy?

A notorious line from Sylvia Plath’s 1965 poem “Daddy” arises whenever I try to understand this inclination:

“Every woman adores a fascist.”

I read the poem when I was thirteen and over ten years later, I am still haunted by it. The poem’s language moves darkly through a twisted web of metaphor and hyperbole, and attempts at deciphering each individual line of it have plagued Reddit threads and literary scholars alike. The name of the poem flirts with themes of perverse and obsessive devotion, but the text illuminates the poem’s overly dramatic (and insensitive) rhetoric on feminine submission.

As I left the theaters after watching both Nosferatu and Babygirl, the sentence came to the front of my mind: “Every woman adores a fascist.” I do not believe that every woman adores an omnipotent force that suppresses them. But I am interested in women’s sexual agency and the ways culture can impact desire formation, in these cases the desire for mortification (an exercise of masochism). I take particular interest in the notion of total devotion as an expectation of femininity and how it appears in eroticism.

There are two definitions of the “erotic” that both films provoke: Audre Lorde uses eroticism as a metric of power, and Georges Bataille states eroticism is a method of self knowledge—in both cases, erotic endeavors are not necessarily about sex. A recent film hasn't prompted the idea of eroticism and submission as interestingly as 2024’s Babygirl and Nosferatu (the last time I thought of Plath's declaration in relation to a film was after rewatching 2002’s Secretary). Despite the woman protagonists of each film existing in very different contexts (19th century Western Europe and modern day New York City, respectively) with their own sets of defined gender expectations, both Ellen and Romy seek forms of submission through a spiritual authority or created authority. 

While one of our heroines dies at the end of the film, the other is liberated. But in both, there is a configuration of submission and catharsis. As modern post-feminist puritanism is on the rise socially and politically, conversations around submission and agency can conflate systemic suppression and unconventional eroticism. Babygirl and Nosferatu offer transgressive narratives of sexuality and desire while embodying themes of sado-masochism. This may seem contradictory, but by each film’s end, the protagonist’s masochistic ventures eradicate the confines of femininity presented distinctly in each film.

Nosferatu

Docile to Insatiable

In Robert Eggers’s 2024 remake of Nosferatu, the classic tale comes to life in his emblematic gothic vision. Nosferatu, or Count Orlok, is a vampire who requests Thomas, an unknowing real estate agent, to travel to the Count’s distant residency to finalize realty paperwork. While Thomas is away, his wife is taken care of by their neighbors, the respectable Hardings family. Thomas weakly returns with a vampiric bite and the Count follows him into the town. With his weapon of choice (an army of rats), Nosferatu brings a deadly plague, assumed to be the Black Death, but it is really the Count’s machinations to devour the townspeople and get closer to his infatuation: Thomas’ wife, Ellen. Unlike in previous versions of the film, Ellen is central from the start of Eggers’ remake, because she meets Nosferatu years before her husband enters the story. She is the driver behind Nosferatu’s entrance into their town.

The first scene introduces spiritualism and devotion as erotica: the film begins with a young Ellen begging for a master as she prays for religious inclination, something to devote herself to. She is scared of her want, petrified of her own mind. The darkness of the night she calls to is grand and home to spiritual powers beyond herself. Unknowingly, the spirit she connects with is not benevolent and holy. She is guided to her garden by Nosferatu, a distinctly masculine force of dark magic. The answer to her calls accumulate to an unholy matrimony with a “lieutenant to the Devil.” Our wedded protagonist then begins to moan, taking pleasure in her suppression. The sensuality of the scene is cut by Ellen convulsing on the soil bed. The scene plays like a warped wedding night. Ellen speaks with Nosferatu through her dreams, but as she ages, her unconscious self (where desire lies) begins to leak into the real world. The beginning of Nosferatu showcases an inversion of a female mystic’s origin. Whether plagued by the calls of an angel or a demon, the subject is dominated by a superior force.

Babygirl (dir. Halina Reijn, 2024)

The Girlboss and The Masochist

Halina Reijn’s Babygirl also showcases a woman seeking something more from her regimented life. Romy is married to Jacob and is a successful CEO of a large tech company. She finds excitement in a dangerous and socially taboo pursuit of dominant submissive sexual relationships with a young intern named Samuel. Despite being in a position of professional power, Romy meets up with Samuel in a hotel and assumes the role of a submissive (the “babygirl”) to Samuel’s dominance. The relationship confronts ideas of power, sex, gender, and domestic boredom.

Similar to the start of Nosferatu, Babygirl begins with erotic exhalation. We hear Romy moaning before we see her. She is having sex with her husband, a theater director. Her performance of ecstasy itself is theatrical: dramatic and fake. Afterwards, Romy leaves the bedroom and finds a space on the dark living room floor to watch porn on her phone. Like Ellen, she seeks an external answer to her appetite. Instead of stepping into the night towards a spiritual savior, Romy finds catharsis through a digital landscape. This is fitting for the industry she works in. Later in the film, her disdain for her domestic sex life finds her literally crawling to a man as if she is subhuman.

In both films’ opening scenes, dissatisfaction within convention prompts the protagonists to seek more radical completion. Both Ellen and Romy are venturing into erotic relationships devoid of equal human connection, substituted instead by an intangible master. In the first act of each film, the characters are marked by their longing for something beyond the self; this is the catalyst of each plot.

Nosferatu calls to Ellen through the window of her bedroom, and Romy first looks longingly at Samuel through the glass door to her office. In both perspectives, the women are tempted outside their physical confinements, whether domestic or professional. In that initial moment of desire, the glimpse of temptation is just beyond their enclosures.

Who Is the Beast?

An audience member may ask the silver screen:

“But why do they seek submission?”

Like the basis of all elementary Freudian topics, we can turn to their spiritually intense childhood experiences: Romy is a woman who grew up in an undisclosed cult, while Ellen has sought religious authority since childhood. Both women's appetites are activated by constraints. Ellen's convulsive bouts in adulthood are often in social spaces, and she is depicted ripping off her outdoor clothes. The men around her seek some form of control over her unconventional behavior: the rational and civilized Friedrich Harding uses bondage to ensure she doesn’t move at night, her doctor attempts to treat her with sexist pseudoscience, and, oh yes, an immeasurable force in the shape of a male vampire preys on her spiritual sensitivities to mentally possess her. What's a girl to do?

Nosferatu

Romy is a powerful and wealthy businesswoman, but she is still controlled by patriarchal standards of beauty and domesticity. We see that she fears depletion of the social capital attributed to youth and beauty when we see her getting botox and popular cosmetic treatments. While her company creates robots instructed to perform scripted tasks, she is still trapped within similar expectations to a Stepford Wife (another Nicole Kidman film) to make school lunches for her kids and be physically attractive. Even through the neoliberal white feminism that birthed “girlbosses,” invasive gendered norms are still there—despite momentary progress, capitalism and feminism will never be compatible.

To have desire is to have a sense of self, and when a sense of self is denied (by suppressing a woman's agency), desire becomes an insurmountable quest to find solace outside oneself.  These women pursuing authoritative figures each represent a woman seeking herself and a sense of agency. Whether they are in positions of power, narratives of what we should want are already prescribed, and the expectations of gendered performance are defined. In both films, this suppression leads to implosion or explosion. It can also leave space for animalistic desire, a display of sexual otherness.

Romy and Ellen's natural inclinations turn them into something other than human. Romy takes the position of a thirsty dog on all fours over a bowl of milk, awaiting the dominant’s direction for her every move. Ellen's lifelong convulsions transform her into a monstrous non-human. There is a scene where she is overcome by possession and her eyes roll back and her mouth opens wide, creating a face of insatiability. In heightened passion, she turns to her husband for sex, only to laugh at him. She can’t be satisfied by human attempts.

Death in the Marital Bed

The husbands of Ellen and Romy are tormented by the subjects of their wives’ extramarital relationships too. Both films have moments of intensity in which the husbands confront the other men. When Thomas travels to Count Orlok's home, he is preyed upon by him over the course of a feverish night that ends with him being bitten by Orlok in front of a fireplace. When Jacob confronts Samuel, a climatic battle is expected. They physically fight for a moment before Jacob collapses into a panic attack to which Samuel actually comforts him, also in front of the fireplace.

The setting and close framing of characters in each scene is… interesting. The tension between the husband and the other man is intimate, almost erotic itself. During both displays of masculine hubris (Thomas is there because he must provide economically for his wife, and Jacob is there because he wants to reclaim his wife or at least control the situation), I asked myself: “Are they going to kiss?” The interrogation of conventional marriage also opens the husbands to queer intimacies.

Further, the final scenes of each film mirror each other. Ellen is in her marital bed, dead with Nosferatu. Having surrendered to his agreement of devotion, she bedded him as a distraction from the impending dawn that would kill them both. Whether or not Ellen actually desired the count at this point is debatable. But like the flowers she holds at the beginning and end of the film, Ellen is attached to the ephemeral. As a gothic heroine, her emotional sensitivities and attraction to the natural and supernatural make her unfit for conventional domesticity.

Alternatively, the marital bed is transformed by the end of Babygirl. The main thoroughline in the film is Romy's sexual dissatisfaction with her husband. But instead of judgment or separation, her husband joins in Romy's fantasies, finding a space for mutual pleasure outside the domestic sphere. Together, the married couple adopts elements of Romy’s transgressions; they go to a hotel themselves where Romy embodies a submissive character, like she did with Samuel. What differs is the mutual enjoyment between partners—one is not entirely in service of the other. I have not been married but am aware of the expected waning of erotic desire within a long-term relationship, and Babygirl asks us why this is the expectation of marriage (it doesn’t have to include infidelity!). Desire is always evolving as a person is always discovering themselves. Many people don't have the luxury to ponder these existential ideas or take such a large detour in their personal lives like the one that is afforded to Romy. What we can take away is that when you are in a romantic or sexual relationship, there is room for recalibration. Centering mutual pleasure is radical in patriarchal institutions like heteronormative marriage. Unlike Ellen, Romy doesn’t have to die when she expresses interest in new erotic frontiers.

Babygirl

The call of the darkness, the void, is coming from inside the house—when Ellen seeks spiritual authority, she seeks an answer to herself, and when Romy seeks domination, it is used as creature comfort. For Ellen and Romy, the characters that tower over them are no match for the abysses they themselves carry, the wild terrains of their inner workings. Ellen is both captive and captor, while Romy is dog and master. In both stories, protagonists banish the characters that, for the majority of the movies, are controlling them. Babygirl has a happier ending of course, with Romy appropriating the relationship she had with Samuel and applying it to her marriage, finally feeling satisfaction. But both women find a cathartic end to their torment, a purification through release. 

The tagline of Babygirl is:

“Get exactly what you want.”

This is not to say we should all seek this kind of erotic play in our lives; specific threats to Romy and Ellen’s livelihoods create personal inclinations to such alternative attractions. Their individual rites of transformation are informed by relatable ideas of power. At the same time, hunger can’t be so rationalized—perhaps it's just what Romy wants, and that's the point.

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The people next to me in the theater during Babygirl are my writing collaborators here. I sat beside a group of women who displayed so much joy during the sex scenes, specifically when Romy licked milk out of a dog bowl. In a shared moment of catharsis within the shared darkness of a theater, I smiled with them.