Exorcizing the Beasts Within
A Chaser on Beauty and the Beast and Nosferatu
In true American fashion, we spent Christmas at the movies. Nosferatu, director Robert Eggers’s retelling of the horror classic, opened at the Savoy, Montpelier’s art house cinema. We joined about 100 others in the darkened room last night. The line snaked out the door as folks queued to purchase tickets and concessions. We chatted up with friends as we waited for the film to begin. Small town life requires such pleasantries.
Throughout the screening, I kept noticing parallels to the other gothic tale we took in last week: Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, the musical production at Northern Stage in White River Junction. Both stories feature a humanoid monster in a far-off castle who is obsessed with a fair maiden, and who are interacting with a rare enchantment. The transformation that each story must manifest is personally redemptive within a society that trudges along seemingly unawares.
The stories explore the dichotomy of dark and light, personhood, and the limiting worldviews that are accepted as normal, despite what personal experience tells us.
“What I kept asking myself is why do we need this story again,” I mused as we drove home last night. We often puzzle through our first impressions after a show. “I mean, if you’re going to retell a story, what’s new about it?” I realized a beat later, “Maybe there doesn’t have to be anything new. Maybe we just need the story retold.” Maybe it is we, the audience, who are new.
I had wanted to write a review of Beauty and the Beast–-it’s been sitting in drafts. Then this movie came along, and now I'm finding they merge into a bigger story. So now I’m introducing something I want to be an annual year-end tradition: finishing up a few solid but stalled drafts and sending them off. I’m calling these “Chasers,” as in, a finishing touch. Not a full think, but definitely a flavorful part of the whole. Sometimes I get caught up in being uncommonly excellent that good enough just won’t do. In the spirit of clearing the deck for what lies ahead, I’m posting them anyway, typos and all. Thanks for indulging me.
All the world’s a circus
Northern Stage’s production kept all the hallmarks of the Disney retelling including the characters, songs, and conceit. The set design is simple in its elements and rich with versatility. The light design especially, in which sunlight frolics through the leaves at the edge of a forest, the magic rose is cast in shadow, and unknown dangers lurk in the purple gloaming.
Eggers likewise wrangles the light—while the movie is in full color, it employs dramatic shadows, sharp silhouettes ornately framed like daguerreotypes, and strategic lighting such that the film feels as black and white as words on a page.
The villagers in Beauty and Beast, fully embodied by the antagonist Gaston, are madding comfortably in their medieval ways, unabashedly accepting the limitations of their lives. It makes our heroine Belle yearn for an agency that is not afforded to women. The only places where she can wander freely are in her imagination and in her singing. Riley Noland’s singing voice as Belle is graceful and nubile, uncorrupted by failure.
Disney is not known for subtlety, and stage director Carol Dunne uses it to her advantage, pulling from the cultural zeitgeist to brush the crowd with armchair conservatism, represented by red ball caps and billowy trad life costumes. To further blunt the knife, as Gaston whips the mob into a bloodthirsty, flag-waving frenzy, the color red is swung about, splashing hot-headed, rage-fueled, blood-curdling fear into our faces. It leaves no doubt: this is who our MAGA influencers are.
As much of a circus as village life is, Belle trades one overbearing theater for another in the Beast’s enchanted castle, only she doesn’t know it until it’s too late.
It’s giving fragile manhood
Where Disney’s Belle is so desirable, all creatures take interest in her, Nosferatu’s heroine Ellen is possessed so fiercely with visions and seizures that only a lonely few will have anything to do with her.
The town of Wisborg, where Ellen and her new husband live, is sparsely populated in the way a once-abandoned place has yet to reawaken. It harkens back to the desolate city streets during the early days of COVID lockdown. Cities are meant to be lived in. Drained of gaiety, the landscape is as bony and raw as Count Orlok himself.
And the bodies—they keep piling up. They are bagged and tossed overboard and into collection wagons. They are casketed and carried away. The threat of plague lingers and the drudgery of the professional, learned class continues on.
In today’s green-screen age, it is refreshing to get a monster movie that doesn’t rely on digital flourishes or horror genre gimmicks to set itself apart. This rendition of Nosferatu is pretty straightforward, as any artist copying the work of a great master. We get nods of the familiar: long spiky fingernails in shadow creeping up a wall, gypsy merry-makers and their spirited warnings, a bedroom balcony with fluttering curtains through which the demon materializes.
What Eggers adds is a story of female agency for our modern times. Ellen, a seer from a very young age, was diagnosed with a “melancholy,” so dark and lonely that she summoned a vampire from his grave in order to find solace. He possessed and preyed upon her. She found no relief until she married her loving husband Thomas.
In classic abusive jealous ex-boyfriend moves, Count Orlok (the vampire, the Nosferatu for those who don’t know the story), goes balls to the wall in subterfuge to reclaim his Ellen. He is mind-fucking her, contorting her body, sucking her lifeblood. He manipulates or kills anyone he needs to in order to keep her his. He even buys and moves into a house in the same neighborhood!
I’d be pretty freaked out, too.
Female self-sacrifice
The villains of these tales—Gaston, the scheming narcissist, and Orlok, the possessive psycho killer—are offset by their saving grace counterparts: the Beast, a self-involved recluse, and Thomas, an earnest naif. These pairs battle each other to claim the lady for themselves. Whereas Thomas is honor-bound to protect his wife, Beast’s ulterior motive is to ultimately reclaim himself.
But what Gaston, Orlok, Beast, and Thomas cannot forcefully compel is the freely offered and willing love of the woman they seek. So as the occultist portrayed by Willem Defoe admits to Ellen, the men will go with their torches to destroy the vampire, though he knows it is a “false hunt.” The men must do what they must. It is Ellen who has the power to commit the deed.
In this scene, she steals a private moment with the professor by walking him from the carriage to his door. He sees her as no human has before—through anthropological time—and reaffirms and reframes her nature: in a different century, she may have been accorded the office of high priestess. But in this age of polite society, she’s a breath away from the sanatorium. She wears mourning clothes and her face is framed by the wide brim of her bonnet such that it haloes her, a black crown. She knows the key to releasing Orlok’s torment is to give in to his seduction just long enough to lure him into daylight. She and the professor part ways with this unsaid between them.
And so goes Belle, galloping back to the castle of her imprisonment, certain in her own belief that she can do something to save the Beast. Because no one deserves to be victim of Gaston's violent tendencies. As she rushes to Beast’s side, he crumples, huffing his dying breaths. She wasn’t able to save him from the spear. As life falls away, she whispers to him between sobs, “I love you.”
It was meant to have fallen on dying ears. It was supposed to have been a farewell. Belle, had she known the words would release the magic spell, may have acted differently. The story doesn’t give us room to wonder. But since she uttered the words freely, the spell is broken and she must make good on her words into happily ever after. A different kind of imprisonment.
Ellen at least knows she will not survive her sacrifice. She invites and re-pledges herself to Orlok after which he ravages her as only a feral sex-starved undead vampire can. Lost in whatever euphoria that brings, he is stuck mid-suck as the rooster announces the dawn and sunlight vaporizes him. Thomas finds her laying underneath the husk of his body. She manages to gaze into her husband’s eyes one last time before she, too, dies.
What our comfort stories say about us
I never would have considered these two stories to be so similar had I not viewed them so closely together. In a way, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897 (upon which Nosferatu is based), is a darker retelling of Beauty and the Beast, which was published in French in 1740.
Like home cooked comfort foods, the loop of stories we turn to have a way of making life more bearable, allowing us reprieve from the chaos and struggles of living.
What I like about tales of enchantment is that it gives the cipher a way to beat the magic, and claim some manner of control in the world. It also reinforces the fact that there are forces working with and against us all the time. Most of us choose not to harness our own powers. We get and remain comfortable as magical moments swirl by.
