I Can Be Your (Undead) Father Figure

Nosferatu, Babygirl, and Dangerous Female Desire

Many spoilers for Babygirl and Nosferatu to follow~~

A little note: I have no idea why this took me so long to write.¹ Tysm for your patience! I’ll resume a normal schedule this month for sure.

The kinkiest movie of the year features psychosexual power dynamics, remote orgasm control, cucking, blood play, and, of course, bondage — both literal and figurative. I left the kinkiest movie of the year breathless, lips sore from chugging Diet Coke though a straw to satisfy the whirlpool of feelings the onscreen depiction of lust roused in me. I left the kinkiest movie of the year, and then I went to see Babygirl. Because, bar none, of the two, Nosferatu was fully and 100% my shit.

As you’ve inferred by now, Mr. Dune and I were among the capital F Freaks that went to see Nosferatu and Babygirl as a kind of mentally-disturbed Barbenheimer (and on Christmas Day no less). And part two was just a little bit of a let down. Let’s be clear — Babygirl wasn’t bad. It just left me feeling more unsure than ever that kink as I and my many sicko peers experience it could ever be represented onscreen.

As you know by now, Babygirl details GirlBoss CEO Romy (Nicole Kidman)’s accidental crash landing into the secret desires that threaten to explode every aspect of her perfect life. Our clearest window into what she wants is in the film’s opening scene when she goes from having what appears to be hot sex with her hot husband in the beautiful bed of their multimillion dollar Manhattan apartment to rushing into the next room to watch power exchange porn and masturbate on her stomach. She longs ambiently for something more than what she has, something that, to her, is aberrant from the norm and deeply dangerous to want.

I’ve said before that kink is anything that is outside of your understanding of conventional sex. But even I have to agree with those who have pointed out that the ‘kink’ that follows isn’t exceptionally kinky. As one of my faves, Chris Fleming, recently put it on Caleb Hearon’s podcast, “this 22-year-old just comes out and starts telling Kidman to sit in different parts of a room.” I mean… fair. The word ‘masochist’ is used despite no pain play ever occurring onscreen or even being implied. They did my number one most hated vanilla trope around safe words² when, about 75% percent of the way through the movie they finally pick one and, rather than choosing a neutral word like ‘yellow’ or ‘red,’ they choose her husband’s name. Moreover, they double- and triple-down on no one in the film knowing exactly what is going on other than thinking it is wrong and shameful. When Antonio Banderas finally finds out, he shames Romy and says something to the effect of “I’m a good guy, I don’t want to hurt you.” Who’s asking anyone to hurt anyone?! It’s not even happening!!

Caleb Hearon and Chris Fleming on ‘So True’

While the more advanced kinkster in me is deeply disappointed we didn’t get to see an A24 movie with actual masochism in it, I do understand Romy’s perspective. Many new subs experience the push-pull of fear and relentless drive towards the thing that scares them most. Her pursuit of her flavor of D/s looks a lot like most people’s early journeys: they find an outlet for their long-secret needs, and then the floodgates turn on, consequences be damned. And that kind of relentlessness is hot. The dog scene was hot. The milk was hot (though not literally, which may have made it more drinkable). Every ‘good girl’ hit. There was a lot to love here from two very vulnerable performances.

Still, there’s something lacking. The film is full of almosts. I personally have an ick around the Father Figure dance sequence — lots of people liked it but I would be squirming with discomfort were I in Romy’s position, just sitting and watching. Mr. Dune pointed out it would have been great if he’d been dancing this way, and the reveal at the end of the long shot was Romy in bondage, blindfolded, and waiting for the next lash of impact.³ Instead the reveal is — nothing in particular is going on. And nobody’s really a father figure here! There’s no Daddy. There’s no age play! And we’re supposed to get on board with huge fits of shame for the rest of the film due to the standing in various parts of the room, cumming on the stomach, and the two of them looking at each other forehead to forehead. The stakes of the kink are quite low, but it is problematized at an even higher volume than their power disparity at work and the fact that she’s committing adultery. The kink is the huge, unthinkable thing, and, for me, the film fails to make it huge enough. It’s like the film is side-stepping towards something, but were it to name that thing or know anything about it, it wouldn’t be cool anymore.

This clicked for me when I saw an interview snippet with director Halina Reijn, wherein she admitted that “this film is about my deepest, darkest fantasies that I’m actually incredibly embarrassed about.” It is valid to process complex emotions onscreen! It is comforting to many! At the end of the day, I’m sure the film offered an escapist experience to the older ladies who packed my release-day showing, for me it fell flat because the animal part of me could sense the director’s shame at what was being depicted. And I happen to know of a nice resource Reijn might benefit from if anyone wants to pass along a certain podcast/substack.

A Toolkit For Shame

And then there’s Nosferatu.

When I reflect on what I loved about this movie aside from the costumes, the unreal cinematography, DaFoe’s rat acting, the bold and relentless narrative style, and more elements than can be enumerated here without making your email run out of storage space, what lingers with me most was its use of bondage as a recurring theme. As a woman living in Victorian society⁴, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) suffocates under the many rules and expectations set for her as a woman. She’s not supposed to desire, she’s not supposed to feel. But her desire for oblivion, as embodied in Nosferatu, gives her a release from these strictures, allows her to imagine the pleasure of life without them. Before Thomas (Nichola Holt) leaves for Transylvania, Ellen confesses her dark dream:

“It was our wedding. When we turned around, everyone was dead. The stench of their bodies was horrible. Standing before me was… Death. But I’d never been so happy.”

What happens when your desire is certain to destroy you? It’s a question Babygirl asks toothlessly, and Noferatu answers by sucking the blood straight out of the center of your chest. Ellen’s desire for evil seems dangerous, but what’s worse is the way the men around her try to contain it. Her husband, Thomas, refuses to see the wild parts of her. The shitty friend who imprisons her in his house has her literally tied up to try to contain the urges that are eating her from the inside out.

The one thing I haven’t see a lot of takes on so far is the cucking scene. Everything in Nosferatu is at 100 (I was fist pumping during that scene where Ellen takes Thomas to the ground kissing him in the shitty friend’s house. Same, girl.), and the cucking scene is no different. When she tells Thomas he “could never please [her] as [Nosferatu] could,” they’re both ripped into a flurry of passion. Desire begets desire. It’s giving my favorite part of I Love Dick, both the book and Solloway adaptation, when Chris and Sylvere use Chris’s fixation on Dick to reignite their own sex life. Sometimes the hottest thing is disruption and a competitive drive against your own feelings of inferiority, and Nosferatu nailed that.

“You could never please me as he could.”

I think the biggest difference between a sexy Gen-Z with a backpack and a centuries-old vampire, at the end of the day, is the stakes (hehe). Samuel is framed as dangerous, while Nosferatu sucks everything around him into a black hole. It’s an unfair comparison, but the core tension between these films is the question of whether a real-world depiction of kink can ever hold a candle to a metaphorical, Rorschach test of a monster-fucking horror story. Babygirl has to reassure us that everything is ok. Nosferatu is a breathless emergency, embodying that feeling of fear without having to justify it or create safe words. If we watched a real world kink film this terrifying⁵, we’d rightly trash it. When we see Nosferatu. we leave the theater steamed up and wondering how quickly we’d get arrested for trying to drag our husbands into the bathroom for a quickie at a packed AMC on Christmas Day.⁶

Cinema is in a creatively impoverished era right now. Fewer indie films are being made, and when they are it’s often clear there are far too many cooks in the kitchen. I’m starting to think you simply cannot portray kink onscreen in a literal sense. Although Babygirl provided many scenes that for me really did gesture towards subspace, its grounding in the real world sucks us out of the potential transcendence of any real representation of desire. With our feet planted on the ground, it’s hard to feel what it’s like on our knees.

Is it possible to make a film that captures true craven desire and transcendent kink? I think so. Can it be made with the state of the film industry at the moment? Seemingly, right now, only if we give Robert Eggers a blank check to rig a bleeding anus scene. No matter what happens, we’ll always have Transylvania.

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1. Lina @ Lina — dude maybe it’s because your hometown has been ON FIRE for an extended period of time???

2. Listen to this episode for a primer on safe words.

3. Just another underline on how kink is so contextual. If you (the participant, the director, whoever) just go there, buy-in can follow. And once all parties are able to come to a collective vision, you can let go enough to actually get sexy.

4. Or the German equivalent? There’s a vampire in this I think we can be a little loose with the themes.

5. I mean 50 Shades is a contender.

6. FOR EXAMPLE