Psycho. #35

Is Willem Dafoe the last of a dying breed?

Your recent writings about character actors had gotten me pondering, is Willem Dafoe the last of a dying breed? It’s hard to explain because it’s kind of a ‘vibes’ thing.

For added context, I was thinking about my soft spot actors like Donald Pleasence, Peter Lorre, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee & Vincent Price. I realised that only Dafoe gives me that vibe, especially in the films by Bob Eggers.

So you’ve seen Nosferatu? Quite mid, wasn’t it! I spent a long time after seeing the film trying to work out why, in the parlance of our times, it “didn’t hit”: the biggest reason, which is splashed with an almost embarrassing obviousness across the screen at all times, is Eggers’ reverence for the source material; his sense that he is taking up a mantle. The ghost of Murnau and the presence of Herzog haunt him: he is in thrall to the mythos, and just as Ellen is ultimately undone by the deathly desire of Orlok, so too is Eggers finally defeated by the beast that was this project. To carry on the analogy: Ellen senses Orlok calling from afar — she feels a madness within her; Eggers too had heard a voice, felt an urge within him to take on Nosferatu, and just as Ellen’s sacrifice rids the world of the count, Eggers sacrificed everything within him, his last energies, to finally purge himself of this need. What we see before us is an unburdening: it is heartbreakingly free of anything resembling a voice, or any dialectical engagement with the legend or the preceding texts, but it does at least have a sense of finality, of having got the job done. One hopes that, finally released from his curse, he can now proceed to reclaim his own authorial intent.