Fool Me Twice
The shamed retreat into themselves, but the guilty can take responsibility for their actions. A Review of Frédéric Gros’s A Philosophy of Shame.
In what is perhaps the first period drama about the dangers of pornography addiction for women, Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu warns us of what happens when fantasy contaminates reality. The film revolves around Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), an angelic young wife who harbors a terrible shame. Although she loves her husband, she cannot bear to tell him that ever since she was an adolescent girl, in her dreams she receives otherworldly sexual satisfaction from the malicious vampire Orlok—a dark and seductive fantasy which still haunts her many years later. The motivating paranoia, expressed through Ellen’s sincere but self-serving husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), is that a wife may be faithful in reality, yet may still be fantasizing about other men while her husband is asleep. As it turns out, Ellen is, and this bodes disaster for everyone around her. Nevertheless, when Orlok arrives in her hometown of Wisburg, bringing the plague in his wake, Ellen’s shame becomes the town’s salvation. By enticing the vampire to her bed, she distracts Orlok long enough for the sun to rise and thereby rid Wisburg of his malign influence. Of course, Ellen herself must also die shortly thereafter. By consummating her fantasy in a final shameful act, she assuages her guilt at the horror she has brought to her town and her family because of her perverse imagination—or perhaps an imagination that is pure yet too porous.
