Robert Eggers | How toilet humour unblocked an unlikely blockbuster director

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As Nosferatu heads to video-on-demand in the US, we look at how fart jokes and fake penises offer a surprising way into Robert Eggersā€™ filmography.


If you want an indication of how unlikely Nosferatu’s recent box office success was, look no further than Amleth’s fart in The Northman. In the many thousands of words spent dissecting Robert Eggers’ recent pair of blockbuster classics, few have looked at the director’s fondness for playground humour. Through some strange alchemy of the incredibly mundane and the supernaturally absurd, the two or three shots of passed gas or genitalia in the director’s post-Lighthouse filmography have become oddly central to his more mainstream success. Stop sniggering, this is serious stuff.

The flatulent episode in question comes as the “young pup” (then played by Oscar Novak; later transforming through movie magic into Alexander Skarsgård) is undergoing a memorable coming-of-age ceremony led by his father (Ethan Hawke) and local fool (Willem Dafoe). Clothes have been abandoned; hallucinogens have been supped; and into spooky tunnels the trio delve for the last time they’ll be found under the same roof.

In any other film – particularly any other blockbuster revenge epic – this sequence of father-son bonding would be an entirely un-scatological affair. Instead, In Eggers’ hands the hero we’ll soon see tearing a man’s throat out with his teeth spends his father’s last moments pretending to be a dog and farting when the court jester asks him to burp.

Read more: Nosferatu review | Hell never looked so good

It’s one of few moments of levity in a film otherwise wholeheartedly committed to retelling a burly Norse saga.

Another precedes it by a matter of minutes, when Dafoe’s character is introduced wearing a comically large leather penis and making jokes about King Aurvandill (Hawke)’s wife (Nicole Kidman).

A third should have come much later, when Amleth delves into an Icelandic barrow in search of a magical sword. In the film’s Blu-ray commentary, Eggers’ laments forgetting to ask Skarsgård to react to the crypt’s appalling smell. Typically for the director, this wouldn’t just have been a bit of fun; the stench of enchanted gravesites is bizarrely well-documented in the Viking sagas which inspired the script.

As a way into a style of filmmaking some could find alienating, a bit of botty or genital humour is a strangely well-judged compromise (the director has acknowledged that his personal taste would be much more consistently po-faced than the demands of a studio picture allow). Rather than lightening the mood with historically anachronistic quips or bits of witty wordplay, Eggers’ films are much more likely to break from their bleak tones with Willem Dafoe’s flatulence (The Lighthouse) or a shot of an undead nobleman’s penis (Nosferatu).

Online commentators have certainly gotten a lot of mileage from a combination of Count Orlock’s disintegrating member and his distinctly twirlable moustache – less deliberately funny, admittedly, but perhaps even more absurd in a big studio horror movie.

But in films where characters are deliberately acting in ways that seem entirely alien to us today, constrained either by the supernatural strangeness of Viking morality or the buttoned-up restraint of 1830s Germany, a quick nod below the belt provides an anchoring, of sorts. Whether they’re riding into Valhalla on the back of a winged horse or fleeing from a demonic manifestation of sexual desire, these people are still human; what could be more relatable than being caught publicly urinating outside a vampire’s crypt?

Itā€™s ironic, then, that Eggers’ most mainstream sensibilities (everything is relative) have emerged from what is undoubtedly his least-marketable film.

In 2019’s The Lighthouse, where even the haunting wail of a New England foghorn on the soundtrack sounds like a bowel movement waiting to erupt, the story’s obsession with its characters’ physicality provides a charming contrast with their slow decent into bonkers delirium. As Dafoe and co-star Robert Pattinson drink, fart and masturbate their way into madness, they become more recognisably human as societal facades fall away – a pair of braying, flatulent animals howling against the constraints of their one-walled prison.

the lighthouse robert eggers
The Lighthouse (2019) (Credit: Universal)

You’d probably struggle to sum up The Lighthouse in a sentence without using the word “weird” or its synonyms. But when we think about that for a moment, it’s not immediately obvious why. Most of the film’s non-supernatural elements (one particularly unfortunate seagull aside) couldn’t be more ordinary. They seem odd only because we’re not used to seeing them in our stories; beautiful people with perfect teeth, in our minds, scarcely have need of an indigestion tablet.

Back to Nosferatu and The Northman – both filled with things that are more objectively unusual (rat plagues, Björk, etc) – these snippets of crude humour serve a dual purpose. In the context of the film, they make the story feel much stranger while bringing its characters down to earth with a bang. They maintain Eggers’ unusual cinematic stylings while offering a tiny glimmer of light into otherwise bleak narratives – and they let us chuckle at a comedy burp at the same time.

He may not thank me for this; but Robert Eggers is the smartest fart-connoisseur working today. I might get that on a T-shirt.

Nosferatu is in UK cinemas now, and available to download in the US.

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