Wrote a comment about Werner Herzog and vampires in response to one of John Pistelli's footnotes. It got very long so I though I'd share it on Notes.
It is so funny how reading different academic books gives you a different impression of what is canonical. I read enough film studies stuff that I have the impression that “everybody” agrees that Dracula is a trashy novel that people only care about because it inspired Murnau’s film. That is one point of convergence between the two foundational, divergent academic texts on Weimar cinema: Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (which gives the Frankfurt School view) and Lotte Eisner’s The Haunted Screen (which came to be seen as a riposte). Kracauer argues that the themes of the great expressionist German films of the Weimar era like Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet prefigure the irrationalism of Hitler and his regime. Eisner, trying to sell Weimar cinema to a French audience, instead connects it to Expressionism and to German romanticism, implicitly but forcefully claiming that there was a break between this tradition and what succeeded it.
This sounds like a rather academic issue to trouble the Invisible College comments section about, but Werner Herzog has sometimes presented his whole oeuvre as a sort of intervention in this debate on Eisner’s side. He famously walked from Munich to Paris in order to visit Eisner while she was ill and present her with The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. When he arrived, she helped persuade him to remake Nosferatu. The remake was, Herzog said, an effort to reconstitute “legitimate German culture,” reviving the legacy of the 20s in order to overcome both the trashy mediocrity of postwar German filmmaking and the long shadow Hitler cast over German traditions. The phrase “legitimate German culture” caused enormous offense on the German left, notably to the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Herzog would definitively leave Germany for America after protestors disrupted the premier of one of his best late films, Lessons of Darkness. It is a documentary fantasia about the beauty of the exploding oil rigs Saddam Hussein had set on fire by Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait during Gulf War I, set to music mostly by Wagner (one of the more questionable purveyors of legitimate German culture).
In my opinion Herzog in the 1970s was on one of the artistic hot streaks of the century: everything he touched turned to gold. This ended with Fitzcarraldo, which isn’t as good as its famous making-of documentary. His career since then has been a series of only occasionally successful attempts to re-capture the old magic: he’s sometimes still excellent, but people do him no favors by overpraising his recent work. Like David Lynch, he’s also adopted the persona of a weird uncle who tells you to pursue your dreams. I find it grating.
I also think that the new German cinema movement of which he was a part (with Wenders, Fassbinder, Syberberg and Reitz) is one of the most neglected major artistic movements of the 20th century. (Don’t take it from me! According to Susan Sontag, Syberberg’s Hitler: A Film From Germany is the greatest movie ever made. Both the New Left Review guru Perry Anderson and Stanley Kubrick agreed that Reitz’s TV show Heimat was the major European film of the end of the 20th century: those two are often wrong but would they both be wrong about the same thing? Herzog, Fassbinder and Wenders have cheerleaders in the US, but they are always considered separately and out of context.)
Why are these great artists so neglected, particularly in their home country? (There is one excellent monograph, New German Cinema, written by Thomas Elsasser, who spent a decade co-teaching German cinema courses with W. G. Sebald.) Well, their politics are, as we’ve learned to say, problematic. Alexander Kluge and the quaffably liberal Wenders are exceptions, Wenders now making documentaries about Pope Frances etc.. But even Wenders gets in trouble for collaborating with canceled Nobel laureate Peter Handke. (Fassbinder is rightly celebrated as a pioneer of gay cinema and his reflection on the Third Reich are very powerful, but he managed to get himself canceled from his avant-garde theater for an allegedly antisemitic play in the very permissive 70s. Also, any interesting gay art from the 70s is problematic today if you feel like reacting to it that way.) Habermas denounced Wenders and Handke’s Wings of Desire as a neoconservative work of art in an article the title of which one could freely translate as “The New Intimacy Between Politics and Vibes: Theses on the Enlightenment in Germany.” This sort of art, Habermas claimed, tempted Germans to abandon the unfinished project of Enlightenment for a spooky new romanticism. (Herzog’s quest for “ecstatic truth” sounds just like what Adorno would call “the jargon of authenticity.”) The neoconservative Germans had fallen under the influence of artists and thinkers who had been canceled because of their proximity to the Third Reich, but who remained alive and influential in a sulphurously tempting way up to the 1970s and after, figures like Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Arnold Gehlen and (for filmmakers) Leni Riefenstahl. Syberberg and Herzog, who were admired by Michel Foucault, were much further beyond the pale for somebody like Habermas than Wenders was. When Habermas first met Foucault in Paris, they evidently didn’t discuss philosophy at all but instead spent a whole evening arguing about Werner Herzog’s politics.
Who is Hegzog’s Nosferatu? He isn’t Hitler—Nosferatu resembles Hitler even less than Aguirre does—but he isn’t exactly not Hitler either. Hitler looms over all the interesting German movies of this epoch. This is particularly true of Nosferatu, which remakes a film that Kracauer and many others had interpreted as a sort of premonition of the catastrophe to come. (Only Syberberg, to Sontag’s delight, dared to make a New German Cinema film where the Herzogian hero is actually Hitler.) Most of the leading characters in Herzog’s films of the 70s are either almost-inhuman supermen who stand above and outside of society because of their grandiose and unreasonable desires, basically their will-to-power. Or else they are cripples or misfits who can seem almost subhuman, but effectively find themselves in the same position as Herzog’s supermen (Nosferatu is both at once). Either way, they attempt to realize desires that are not quite human and, of course, they fail. Yet this failure produces the images of ecstatic truth that give life its meaning. Now, as Settembrini says of music in The Magic Mountain, this sounds politically suspect! (None of this is to suggest, even if you buy the perspective of his critics, that Herzog is some kind of crypto-Nazi. Herzog is far too much an admirer of the outcast and too much of an individualist. It is Syberberg’s Wagnerian interest in the shared irrational myths of a people that is really politisch verdächtig.) Herzog’s implicit response is that you ignore the irrational vibes that ground our rationality at your peril. If there is a critique of both Nazis and of Germany’s left-wing extremists of the 70s implicit in his work (cf. the hilarious short “Precautions Against Fanatics”), it is that revolutionary efforts to remake society are doomed to fail. Yet if even the failure of an irrational project, when sufficiently grandiose, can give rise to great images, this seems like cold comfort. But perhaps it is a mistake to look to art for political edification.
I see why you think that the vastly inferior Eggers movie is misogynistic, and I agree. (Its real limit, as you say, is visual.) Ross Douthat amusingly tweeted that it’s about a notionally Christian society that has lost faith in the power of the Church to combat evil. Naturally, when inexplicable evil overtakes them, they resort to human sacrifice! But Eggers’ Nosferatu thinks it is a feminist film, and the reasons for this are interesting. I guess the movie’s premise is that taboos around female sexuality are connected to the mysterious forces that the rationality available to the people of Wismar cannot control. The film indulges in Victorian (or I guess Biedermeier) stereotypes about women being treated for hysteria when their real illness is sexual repression. Our heroine needs to be sacrificed, but the sacrifice is necessary because her society represses the feminine instead of worshipping it. Most importantly, the sacrifice works: she has great sex with Dracula (we shouldn’t kink shame I guess) and then all the demonic energy that the repression of her sexuality has summoned is dispersed. In the Herzog film, the sacrifice fails (although it has deep nobility). Sensitive Klaus Kinski gets to rest, but Jonathan becomes a vampire and rides off into the storm. There isn’t even the horizon of a happy reconciliation of the dark desires which the vampire represents.
Thank you for all of that context, of which I was but dimly aware. I know of Habermas's critical habits, and have, as you say, considered some of those filmmakers' works, but separately and somewhat out of place. Wings of Desire is one of my favorite films. I read Sontag's essay somewhere along the way, but it did not convince me to see Hitler. While I understand the conditions of post-WWII Germany, making art in a milieu in which one is ethically forbidden from ecstatic irrationality seems unpropitious to me, and as for Hitler the persona, anyone or anything so tabooed will necessarily be in a way also sacralized. Herzog's position as you describe it ("you ignore the irrational vibes that ground our rationality at your peril") seems (ironically!) the most reasonable one, whereas Habermas strikes me as rational to the point of irrationality.
(Intriguing contrast between America and Germany on irrationality vis-a-vis the national sin/crime. In America the abolitionists were the ecstatic irrationalists associated with Romanticism, while the Southerners were busy inventing sociology and relying on other "science" in their apologetics for slavery. Even the "almost superhuman" great leader here was on the historically and politically correct side.)
Re: Eggers, I don't necessarily equate anti-feminist with misogynist, since feminism is so at war with the feminine. But I agree with your reading of the film overall. I think Eggers in most or all of his films seems concerned to pay some tribute to the archetypal feminine.
Re: Dracula the novel, Stoker is one of the dead white men ironically helped by cultural studies, postmodernism, et al. to become more canonical than he was before. I remember rashly remarking to my doctoral adviser, a scholar of Marxist-feminist disposition who taught it almost every semester, that it was a bit trashy, and she replied that it took on every major issue of its period. That's not exactly an aesthetic criterion, but, combined with Stoker's hyper-consciousness of media that almost looks forward to another Irishman's big book about an outsider in the modern city, the novel does come to seem more formidable than it appeared at first.
I don’t mean to be too hard on Habermas, who is a great thinker in spite of certain inquisitorial tendencies. He’s aware of the limits to reason (or to what he calls the linguistification of the sacred) and in response to them he seems in his old age to have found Jesus, an underreported development.
The New German Cinema directors become both more intelligible and more clearly major figures when they are seen together, or at least they did for me. I used to wonder why more wasn’t written about them as a group and then I realized that the ones I liked best were seen as exemplary (not just by Habermas) of the so-called “Tendenzwende.” The Tendenzwende was felt to be exemplified by a shift to the political right: first the Social Democrats picked a more conservative Chancellor, then they lost to the Christians; Regan won in the US; everybody was exhausted by a student radicalism that had occasionally degenerated into what Habermas called “left fascism.” But Habermas also saw the Tendenzwende at work in a renewed academic interest in philosophical romanticism, in a general vogue for spirituality among intellectuals, and in politically suspect art that lacked pedagogical content. DeepL translates Tendenzwende as “change of trend.” So it seemed a bit topical…
I’ve seen people on this website denounce the Dimes Square set and vibes-adjacent art as phenomenon similar to German Romanticism or the French Decadent movement, as if that’s an insult. I think they have a ways to go to merit the comparison, but if the vibe shift produces art to match the films that came out of the Tendenzwende we’ll be very fortunate. (Syberberg’s Hitler may or may not be good, but it is the Finnegans Wake of this movement. If you were making fun of Sontag and wanted to come up with a fictional pretentious movie she would love, you’d probably have trouble matching Hitler. OTOH Syberberg’s insane film of Parsifal is perhaps good place to start with Richard Wagner, the main anxiety-of-influence figure for this crew. These excerpts give an idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PZErcCuEgA; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PZErcCuEgA. There’s also Herzog’s Wagnerian film about the exploding oil wells.)
Another brilliant weekly essay, John! You simply cannot miss.
Though Coppola’s use of Wagner is understandably the most famous, my favourite, oddly from the same year, is Herzog’s use of the prelude to “Das Rheingold.” It embodies what you describe as giving “equal voice and stature to each side in the now perennial confrontation between bourgeois modernity and the primal and primordial history it represses.”
As the lush, triumphant landscape of Wagner's arpeggios rises, Herzog's visions of mountains and mist descend ever deeper into sinister night—a brilliant disjunction that confronts, unsettles, and compels. And that’s to say nothing of Kinski’s eyes throughout the film: somehow drowning in a human sadness never to be his own, slipping beneath the surface toward the oblivion he craves, never fully submerging, caught in the endless, choking tedium of existence.
Eggers recently said he refuses to make contemporary movies because the idea of having to “photograph” a cell phone is “just death.” But when his audience rightly wonders whether he’s run every second of his droning, metronomic bore through a VSCO filter, and when his final, pale tableau of intertwined lovers seems designed for Tumblr or a One Perfect Shot account on X, it’s clear he’s already succumbed to the same flattening tendencies he claims to resist—the lifeless, glassy logic of the screen.
Thank you, David, and thank you for your very kind reply a week ago, which I fear I neglected to respond to! Yes, I was interested in Kevin Kautzman's description of the Wagner film. (Wagner is so inescapable, yet I keep escaping him somehow...) Completely agree with your description of Eggers's predicament. Those who think they can just "log off" are the most "logged on" of all, because they don't even know what memes are flowing through them. I liked this piece in that vein from last week:
I’ll say that Trollope, at his best, follows Austen and prefigures James in the “barely smothered scream[s]” that hide inside the smooth, plainspoken prose. Skip “The Way We Live Now,” the Big, Important Social Novel that lazily fails to realize its nominal ambitions. Read “Can You Forgive Her?”, whose heroine realizes in the first chapters that she’s come to the end of a standard novel plot, and who spends the next eight-hundred pages battling against getting buried in her happy ending.
Thank you! I was hoping that would be the case for when I do get around to his work. I watched the BBC adaptation of The Way We Live Now, so I do feel free to start elsewhere.
Trollope is great. Life is a hard, pitiless struggle in his novels. I read the six political novels straight through, and it was like reading, one gigantic super-novel. I enjoyed The Way We Live Now, as well. He is often funny.
If the outer life, taken as implying the inner life, is to be the way forward, should we not think about using Ballard as a reference point? That’s my idea anyway.
Yes, Ballard seems relevant. His work often seems to be about externalizing both the Freudian and Darwinian impulses that modernist writers got at through evocations of the inner life. I remember when I was reading High Rise I thought it was like a description of the internet.
I need to see the Coppola Dracula. The gravitational pull of a young Winona Ryder was already strong, this has probably put me into reentry mode.
I also need to read Dracula. I have a copy of The Annotated Dracula. I have looked at the pictures, and they are great, especially the illustrations by Sätty.
The movie has its detractors, but if you take it in the right spirit—there's a certain camp element—I think you'll enjoy it. I didn't read the novel until I was in my 30s, and I had to read it twice to grasp its importance. (Ideally one should probably read it first around age 14.) The first time I dismissed it as schlock, but it has real breadth and depth, real cultural centrality.
Wrote a comment about Werner Herzog and vampires in response to one of John Pistelli's footnotes. It got very long so I though I'd share it on Notes.
It is so funny how reading different academic books gives you a different impression of what is canonical. I read enough film studies stuff that I have the impression that “everybody” agrees that Dracula is a trashy novel that people only care about because it inspired Murnau’s film. That is one point of convergence between the two foundational, divergent academic texts on Weimar cinema: Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (which gives the Frankfurt School view) and Lotte Eisner’s The Haunted Screen (which came to be seen as a riposte). Kracauer argues that the themes of the great expressionist German films of the Weimar era like Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet prefigure the irrationalism of Hitler and his regime. Eisner, trying to sell Weimar cinema to a French audience, instead connects it to Expressionism and to German romanticism, implicitly but forcefully claiming that there was a break between this tradition and what succeeded it.
This sounds like a rather academic issue to trouble the Invisible College comments section about, but Werner Herzog has sometimes presented his whole oeuvre as a sort of intervention in this debate on Eisner’s side. He famously walked from Munich to Paris in order to visit Eisner while she was ill and present her with The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. When he arrived, she helped persuade him to remake Nosferatu. The remake was, Herzog said, an effort to reconstitute “legitimate German culture,” reviving the legacy of the 20s in order to overcome both the trashy mediocrity of postwar German filmmaking and the long shadow Hitler cast over German traditions. The phrase “legitimate German culture” caused enormous offense on the German left, notably to the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Herzog would definitively leave Germany for America after protestors disrupted the premier of one of his best late films, Lessons of Darkness. It is a documentary fantasia about the beauty of the exploding oil rigs Saddam Hussein had set on fire by Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait during Gulf War I, set to music mostly by Wagner (one of the more questionable purveyors of legitimate German culture).
In my opinion Herzog in the 1970s was on one of the artistic hot streaks of the century: everything he touched turned to gold. This ended with Fitzcarraldo, which isn’t as good as its famous making-of documentary. His career since then has been a series of only occasionally successful attempts to re-capture the old magic: he’s sometimes still excellent, but people do him no favors by overpraising his recent work. Like David Lynch, he’s also adopted the persona of a weird uncle who tells you to pursue your dreams. I find it grating.
I also think that the new German cinema movement of which he was a part (with Wenders, Fassbinder, Syberberg and Reitz) is one of the most neglected major artistic movements of the 20th century. (Don’t take it from me! According to Susan Sontag, Syberberg’s Hitler: A Film From Germany is the greatest movie ever made. Both the New Left Review guru Perry Anderson and Stanley Kubrick agreed that Reitz’s TV show Heimat was the major European film of the end of the 20th century: those two are often wrong but would they both be wrong about the same thing? Herzog, Fassbinder and Wenders have cheerleaders in the US, but they are always considered separately and out of context.)
Why are these great artists so neglected, particularly in their home country? (There is one excellent monograph, New German Cinema, written by Thomas Elsasser, who spent a decade co-teaching German cinema courses with W. G. Sebald.) Well, their politics are, as we’ve learned to say, problematic. Alexander Kluge and the quaffably liberal Wenders are exceptions, Wenders now making documentaries about Pope Frances etc.. But even Wenders gets in trouble for collaborating with canceled Nobel laureate Peter Handke. (Fassbinder is rightly celebrated as a pioneer of gay cinema and his reflection on the Third Reich are very powerful, but he managed to get himself canceled from his avant-garde theater for an allegedly antisemitic play in the very permissive 70s. Also, any interesting gay art from the 70s is problematic today if you feel like reacting to it that way.) Habermas denounced Wenders and Handke’s Wings of Desire as a neoconservative work of art in an article the title of which one could freely translate as “The New Intimacy Between Politics and Vibes: Theses on the Enlightenment in Germany.” This sort of art, Habermas claimed, tempted Germans to abandon the unfinished project of Enlightenment for a spooky new romanticism. (Herzog’s quest for “ecstatic truth” sounds just like what Adorno would call “the jargon of authenticity.”) The neoconservative Germans had fallen under the influence of artists and thinkers who had been canceled because of their proximity to the Third Reich, but who remained alive and influential in a sulphurously tempting way up to the 1970s and after, figures like Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Arnold Gehlen and (for filmmakers) Leni Riefenstahl. Syberberg and Herzog, who were admired by Michel Foucault, were much further beyond the pale for somebody like Habermas than Wenders was. When Habermas first met Foucault in Paris, they evidently didn’t discuss philosophy at all but instead spent a whole evening arguing about Werner Herzog’s politics.
Who is Hegzog’s Nosferatu? He isn’t Hitler—Nosferatu resembles Hitler even less than Aguirre does—but he isn’t exactly not Hitler either. Hitler looms over all the interesting German movies of this epoch. This is particularly true of Nosferatu, which remakes a film that Kracauer and many others had interpreted as a sort of premonition of the catastrophe to come. (Only Syberberg, to Sontag’s delight, dared to make a New German Cinema film where the Herzogian hero is actually Hitler.) Most of the leading characters in Herzog’s films of the 70s are either almost-inhuman supermen who stand above and outside of society because of their grandiose and unreasonable desires, basically their will-to-power. Or else they are cripples or misfits who can seem almost subhuman, but effectively find themselves in the same position as Herzog’s supermen (Nosferatu is both at once). Either way, they attempt to realize desires that are not quite human and, of course, they fail. Yet this failure produces the images of ecstatic truth that give life its meaning. Now, as Settembrini says of music in The Magic Mountain, this sounds politically suspect! (None of this is to suggest, even if you buy the perspective of his critics, that Herzog is some kind of crypto-Nazi. Herzog is far too much an admirer of the outcast and too much of an individualist. It is Syberberg’s Wagnerian interest in the shared irrational myths of a people that is really politisch verdächtig.) Herzog’s implicit response is that you ignore the irrational vibes that ground our rationality at your peril. If there is a critique of both Nazis and of Germany’s left-wing extremists of the 70s implicit in his work (cf. the hilarious short “Precautions Against Fanatics”), it is that revolutionary efforts to remake society are doomed to fail. Yet if even the failure of an irrational project, when sufficiently grandiose, can give rise to great images, this seems like cold comfort. But perhaps it is a mistake to look to art for political edification.
I see why you think that the vastly inferior Eggers movie is misogynistic, and I agree. (Its real limit, as you say, is visual.) Ross Douthat amusingly tweeted that it’s about a notionally Christian society that has lost faith in the power of the Church to combat evil. Naturally, when inexplicable evil overtakes them, they resort to human sacrifice! But Eggers’ Nosferatu thinks it is a feminist film, and the reasons for this are interesting. I guess the movie’s premise is that taboos around female sexuality are connected to the mysterious forces that the rationality available to the people of Wismar cannot control. The film indulges in Victorian (or I guess Biedermeier) stereotypes about women being treated for hysteria when their real illness is sexual repression. Our heroine needs to be sacrificed, but the sacrifice is necessary because her society represses the feminine instead of worshipping it. Most importantly, the sacrifice works: she has great sex with Dracula (we shouldn’t kink shame I guess) and then all the demonic energy that the repression of her sexuality has summoned is dispersed. In the Herzog film, the sacrifice fails (although it has deep nobility). Sensitive Klaus Kinski gets to rest, but Jonathan becomes a vampire and rides off into the storm. There isn’t even the horizon of a happy reconciliation of the dark desires which the vampire represents.
Thank you for all of that context, of which I was but dimly aware. I know of Habermas's critical habits, and have, as you say, considered some of those filmmakers' works, but separately and somewhat out of place. Wings of Desire is one of my favorite films. I read Sontag's essay somewhere along the way, but it did not convince me to see Hitler. While I understand the conditions of post-WWII Germany, making art in a milieu in which one is ethically forbidden from ecstatic irrationality seems unpropitious to me, and as for Hitler the persona, anyone or anything so tabooed will necessarily be in a way also sacralized. Herzog's position as you describe it ("you ignore the irrational vibes that ground our rationality at your peril") seems (ironically!) the most reasonable one, whereas Habermas strikes me as rational to the point of irrationality.
(Intriguing contrast between America and Germany on irrationality vis-a-vis the national sin/crime. In America the abolitionists were the ecstatic irrationalists associated with Romanticism, while the Southerners were busy inventing sociology and relying on other "science" in their apologetics for slavery. Even the "almost superhuman" great leader here was on the historically and politically correct side.)
Re: Eggers, I don't necessarily equate anti-feminist with misogynist, since feminism is so at war with the feminine. But I agree with your reading of the film overall. I think Eggers in most or all of his films seems concerned to pay some tribute to the archetypal feminine.
Re: Dracula the novel, Stoker is one of the dead white men ironically helped by cultural studies, postmodernism, et al. to become more canonical than he was before. I remember rashly remarking to my doctoral adviser, a scholar of Marxist-feminist disposition who taught it almost every semester, that it was a bit trashy, and she replied that it took on every major issue of its period. That's not exactly an aesthetic criterion, but, combined with Stoker's hyper-consciousness of media that almost looks forward to another Irishman's big book about an outsider in the modern city, the novel does come to seem more formidable than it appeared at first.
I don’t mean to be too hard on Habermas, who is a great thinker in spite of certain inquisitorial tendencies. He’s aware of the limits to reason (or to what he calls the linguistification of the sacred) and in response to them he seems in his old age to have found Jesus, an underreported development.
The New German Cinema directors become both more intelligible and more clearly major figures when they are seen together, or at least they did for me. I used to wonder why more wasn’t written about them as a group and then I realized that the ones I liked best were seen as exemplary (not just by Habermas) of the so-called “Tendenzwende.” The Tendenzwende was felt to be exemplified by a shift to the political right: first the Social Democrats picked a more conservative Chancellor, then they lost to the Christians; Regan won in the US; everybody was exhausted by a student radicalism that had occasionally degenerated into what Habermas called “left fascism.” But Habermas also saw the Tendenzwende at work in a renewed academic interest in philosophical romanticism, in a general vogue for spirituality among intellectuals, and in politically suspect art that lacked pedagogical content. DeepL translates Tendenzwende as “change of trend.” So it seemed a bit topical…
I’ve seen people on this website denounce the Dimes Square set and vibes-adjacent art as phenomenon similar to German Romanticism or the French Decadent movement, as if that’s an insult. I think they have a ways to go to merit the comparison, but if the vibe shift produces art to match the films that came out of the Tendenzwende we’ll be very fortunate. (Syberberg’s Hitler may or may not be good, but it is the Finnegans Wake of this movement. If you were making fun of Sontag and wanted to come up with a fictional pretentious movie she would love, you’d probably have trouble matching Hitler. OTOH Syberberg’s insane film of Parsifal is perhaps good place to start with Richard Wagner, the main anxiety-of-influence figure for this crew. These excerpts give an idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PZErcCuEgA; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PZErcCuEgA. There’s also Herzog’s Wagnerian film about the exploding oil wells.)
Another brilliant weekly essay, John! You simply cannot miss.
Though Coppola’s use of Wagner is understandably the most famous, my favourite, oddly from the same year, is Herzog’s use of the prelude to “Das Rheingold.” It embodies what you describe as giving “equal voice and stature to each side in the now perennial confrontation between bourgeois modernity and the primal and primordial history it represses.”
As the lush, triumphant landscape of Wagner's arpeggios rises, Herzog's visions of mountains and mist descend ever deeper into sinister night—a brilliant disjunction that confronts, unsettles, and compels. And that’s to say nothing of Kinski’s eyes throughout the film: somehow drowning in a human sadness never to be his own, slipping beneath the surface toward the oblivion he craves, never fully submerging, caught in the endless, choking tedium of existence.
Eggers recently said he refuses to make contemporary movies because the idea of having to “photograph” a cell phone is “just death.” But when his audience rightly wonders whether he’s run every second of his droning, metronomic bore through a VSCO filter, and when his final, pale tableau of intertwined lovers seems designed for Tumblr or a One Perfect Shot account on X, it’s clear he’s already succumbed to the same flattening tendencies he claims to resist—the lifeless, glassy logic of the screen.
Thank you, David, and thank you for your very kind reply a week ago, which I fear I neglected to respond to! Yes, I was interested in Kevin Kautzman's description of the Wagner film. (Wagner is so inescapable, yet I keep escaping him somehow...) Completely agree with your description of Eggers's predicament. Those who think they can just "log off" are the most "logged on" of all, because they don't even know what memes are flowing through them. I liked this piece in that vein from last week:
https://luxarbo.substack.com/p/your-dumbphone-wont-save-you
I’ll say that Trollope, at his best, follows Austen and prefigures James in the “barely smothered scream[s]” that hide inside the smooth, plainspoken prose. Skip “The Way We Live Now,” the Big, Important Social Novel that lazily fails to realize its nominal ambitions. Read “Can You Forgive Her?”, whose heroine realizes in the first chapters that she’s come to the end of a standard novel plot, and who spends the next eight-hundred pages battling against getting buried in her happy ending.
Thank you! I was hoping that would be the case for when I do get around to his work. I watched the BBC adaptation of The Way We Live Now, so I do feel free to start elsewhere.
Trollope is great. Life is a hard, pitiless struggle in his novels. I read the six political novels straight through, and it was like reading, one gigantic super-novel. I enjoyed The Way We Live Now, as well. He is often funny.
The absinthe scene with the wolf in the cinémathèque is pure fin-de-siècle squee (and meta without being annoying).
If the outer life, taken as implying the inner life, is to be the way forward, should we not think about using Ballard as a reference point? That’s my idea anyway.
Yes, Ballard seems relevant. His work often seems to be about externalizing both the Freudian and Darwinian impulses that modernist writers got at through evocations of the inner life. I remember when I was reading High Rise I thought it was like a description of the internet.
I need to see the Coppola Dracula. The gravitational pull of a young Winona Ryder was already strong, this has probably put me into reentry mode.
I also need to read Dracula. I have a copy of The Annotated Dracula. I have looked at the pictures, and they are great, especially the illustrations by Sätty.
The movie has its detractors, but if you take it in the right spirit—there's a certain camp element—I think you'll enjoy it. I didn't read the novel until I was in my 30s, and I had to read it twice to grasp its importance. (Ideally one should probably read it first around age 14.) The first time I dismissed it as schlock, but it has real breadth and depth, real cultural centrality.
So many good books, so many classics, so little time.