Nosferatu: eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922)

Ass-Headed Bottom: Look, is he supposed to be Jewish? Germany in 1922, after all... Or is he, presciently, supposed to be Farengi (and hey... weren't those broad-browed, gibbering, thieving, financiers-to-the-universe supposed to be Jewish?)? Or is the actor playing Nosferatu, Max Schreck, clairvoyantly pre-channeling the insufferable green troll who will someday seem a distant and unintended parody of Nosferatu (though granted, Shrek pulls its zany characters from a different sack of stereotypes: the passionate Spaniard [oy], the black jackass [vey!], but ogres, too, have been known to stand in for Jews, at least in German political cartoons)? Most urgently, are those chili peppers where fingers should be?


Sorry for all the late-night paranoia. But what can be expected, anyway, of a paranoid Jewish fellow such as myself, on plenty of ambien, remembering what I thought of Nosferatu, when I watched it three weeks back, on ambien? I'm pretty sure I thought Nosferatu was a hideous bloodsucking Jewish stereotype, but hey, I was zonked up, and I'd already seen M, which would hopefully make any Jew paranoid (made Peter Lorre, who played that film's Nosferatu, emigrate right quick, for example).


Beyond these foolish but vivid sensations--that I was watching an ugly image of myself--I thought it was the creepiest movie I'd ever seen (what with the shadows and chili-fingers and the sniveling, rodentine face), that it was by far the best treatment of the Dracula story I've encountered, and that "talkies" were always needless. Sure, talkies brought some new angles, new shit, but I kinda preferred the silent kind. And anyway, don't the best talkies include as much possible silence as can be swung. 2001, for instance, which begins with exasperating efforts at human communication--like when the scientist's daugher asks him via 70s-Skype to bring home "a bush baby" (apparently all the rage on the moon), or when Dave holds up his end of the conversation while HAL beats the humanity out of his ass at chess, or when Frank's parents try to send him an e-card from earth, when he's in outer fucking space!--anyway, happily, revenge involves the brutal silence of asphyxiation in a vacuum, the heavy-breathing of a vengeful astronaut, the pleadings of a broken machine, who croons language to death with a devolving rendition of "Daisy," and which ends with the music of an acid-trip and the inexplicable sounds in the inexplicable house where he inexplicably ages and dies and is reborn into the least explicable thing in movie history--the Star-Child, who doesn't speak either. Or think of that little movie with the two guys walking around, camping out, eventually babbling about how "We Conquered Thebes." Heard that somewheres... Anyway, talkies will peter out, thank God, and we will be left with the "all-you-need-to-know" beauty-truth of Nosferatu.


And Nosferatu himself--mon semblable, mon frere!--is the man for our time. You are looking at 2010:


What I wouldn't give to see this guy wrap his chilifingers around any number of throats--A-Rod's, perhaps, or BP Clown Tony Heyward, or all those other, lightweight vampires presently pussifying our cinema. Because Nosferatu, at least on ambien, strikes me as just what the world needs a good spankin' of: a purely evil, bloodthirsty, acquisitive, lecherous, blue-tinged scourge. None of that wussified rooting for Jonathan Harker or whomever; he's a sap, his lady's a sap, they're all saps; we have more respect for the utterly gratuitous but delightfully creepy spiders and rats seen in the film's crazy color-scheme.


I've been thinking about the end of the world a lot, lately, and it seems to me, Nosferatu's worldwide triumph would be a relatively painless, quite exciting way to end it all. And if he's Jewish--my man Nos--that's okay too. A-


Slothrop: Good News readers! Ass-head has watched one too many vampire movies and has resurrected himself from his coffin. And even better news: the Nosferatu Ass-Head speaks about is part of the mammalian kingdom and, even even better, also resembles our fair Ass-Head after he's had an ambien and a few beers.


Blondie: The goal of German Expressionism, when un-neutered, as it is here and in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari up to the final minutes of cowardly framing device, is to make the impoverished viewer understand that the world under capitalism, as is, is indeed fucked, filled with chili-fingers and dopplegangers and painted on shadows and claustrophobic spaces. In other words, that we should realize that we live each and every day in an Ambien haze, and to wake the fuck up lest the chili-fingers squeeze the life out of our skinny, weakened turkeynecks.


Then again, most of the aesthetics of German Expressionism, at least in his filmic form, were motivated by the fact that the post-Weimer Germans didn't have any money to pay for the lights or rigging or sets to shoot outdoors. So they created their own worlds, lights, shadows, spaces; poverty enforced a new way of witnessing the world. Which I suppose I might say of grad school, but I'd probably get attacked by the nosferatus posing as Ph.Ds whose offices are just down the hall.

Koko: Bottom, I hope you appreciate how lonely this place is without you. Who else is going to compare anorexic vampires to Farengis?