allegory, allegorier, allegoriest

Just learned about history. Appalled

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Man also RIP Sir Arthur Conan Doyle you would've loved House MD

Conan Doyle drew this when he passed his medical exams

description: a simple doodle of a man in a pea-coat, jumping for joy. he's holding a piece of paper headed DIPLOMA. underneath him in cursive, it says 'Licensed to kill'

Unicorn

all these excellent books come from some random penguins house?

I’m so happy I got this shot earlier holy shit

Lets orbit around mama

Switzerland, the most egregiously superfluous European nation. Just a bunch of Frenches, Italians, and Germans having some kind of sick orgy in the mountains

i have like the most me post planned for after i finish eating my curry

ok so preface for this is that i am speaking recreationally & i do not care much about arcane. but

okay my actual nosferatu 2024 thoughts:

i was a bit apprehensive based on the trailer and the marketing that it would be the classic dracula interpretation--the main character is sexually repressed by victorian norms, her husband, her friends, etc, and then finds sexual liberation in the vampire. which, to be clear, is a perfectly fine story, but i've always felt that dracula is not the right vampire story to adapt for this, given that vampiric assaults in dracula are, imo, pretty undeniably framed as sexual violations. no shade to those who can, but when watching those adaptations i can't get over thinking like, that's her allegorical rapist :/

in the first part of the movie it seemed that that might be where the story is headed--we see that ellen's husband thomas is dismissive of her fears and her memories of her assault that come to her as dreams. and a bit neglectful of her emotional and sexual needs. there's no doubt that his dismissiveness, at the least, is out of misogyny, since we see that behavior reflected in his more misogynistic friend, who is the sort of wealthy, successful man that thomas aspires to be. his neglect comes from this desire for success.

but that changes after his experience at orlok's castle. when orlok drinks his blood, especially the first time, it's shot and acted as a rape. he has ptsd about it, too, at one point confusing ellen for orlok as she tries to hold him in bed and begging her to get off him. later, when orlok is denigrating thomas to ellen, trying to prove that he's not man enough to fuck her like orlok could, he says something like "he swooned away like a woman." thomas is emasculated by being raped, he's now, like ellen was, the woman who was too weak to resist orlok's insistent masculine sexuality.

the narrative doesn't take this "feminization" as a bad thing--on the contrary, sharing the same experience of victimization as his wife--at the hands of the same monster--drives them closer, and he refuses to think of her as "unclean." he becomes at this point the jonathan harker sort who listens to his wife about her experiences and doesn't blame her for them, or even for the part of her that felt pleasure at it--because that, too, he understands.

anyway it's cool that an adaptation of an already somewhat loose adaptation manages to be more on-theme for the actual original dracula than most direct dracula adaptions. down to the moustache

okay i have more thoughts after all. orlok represents transgressive sexuality as a whole, and, caught between him and the normal world, ellen is forced to choose between the repressive and the transgressive.

but by transgressive, i mean by the mores of the time and place, the sort of things that the og count dracula represented. a sexual, desirous woman is transgressive, homosexuality is transgressive--rape and predation are transgressive.* when dracula preys on jonathan harker in his castle, is the horror the rapey-ness of it, or the homosexuality? at the time, they would have fallen under the same umbrella. they're both sex crimes, they both put your immortal soul in danger. nowadays, we are trying to reposition the line between a sexuality that is unjustly demonized by society and one that is genuinely, "naturally" harmful along secular and rational lines--but there's no need to trot out examples in order to say that this is not an easy task.

nosferatu 2024 makes no attempt to reconcile the above question about dracula and harker, or about the larger question, which, in the movie, is centered around ellen--is orlok her abuser or liberator? instead it exploits it in order to evoke horror, disgust, attraction, fascination.

ellen is caught between the "normality" that sees her sexuality and her power as monstrosity, and the fullest expression of all monstrosity, which violated her as a child, violated her husband, and is murdering everyone she holds dear. she chooses both in the end, and neither fully--she gives orlok a heavily coerced consent and "marries" him, for the explicit purpose of sacrificing herself to restore the "normal" world and save her husband. she doesn't belong to "normality," but she refuses to accept monstrosity--and the strain is what kills her.