For Love and Lucre: If KStew is Straight, Maybe Check Your 401K
Is the Market Crashing Out, or Are We Just Horny for the Apocalypse?
The February 2025 Dough! Newsletter questions user Bald Ann Dowd’s Twitter (or X) theory that heterosexual roles performed specifically by a queer Kristen Stewart—notably, Twilight (2008) and Love Me (2025)—might be a recession indicator. The author, Emma Slack-Jørgensen, has her doubts but perhaps overlooks compulsive heterosexuality as an essential feature of both capitalism and the films made under it.
Nosferatu’s (2024) tagline is “succumb to the darkness,” while Babygirl’s (2024) is “get what you want this Christmas.” Heterosexual desire—and its consuming power, at once both thrilling and self-annihilating—is the driving force of films like Twilight, Nosferatu, and Babygirl alike.
Sexuality imbues the narrative of many films of 2024. Both Nosferatu and Babygirl are led by protagonists whose lives are threatened by sexual desire and shame. While in Babygirl, the exposure of sexual desire leads to better sex, better office culture, better marital satisfaction, and female empowerment all around, in Nosferatu, Ellen’s sexual desires, and their exposure, ultimately kills her. Both films, like Twilight’s 2008 release, came out at a time when the threat of economic recession looms imminently.
Twilight, too, is a narrative driven by the lust of the heteronormative adolescent sex drive. Edward’s vampiric desire for Bella is always threatening to consume her, evident by his constant reminders that she is “breakable” by virtue of her humanness, which was dimly evoked when Nicole Kidman’s character in Babygirl unconvincingly tells Harris Dickinson’s character that he is vulnerable by virtue of his age. In Nosferatu, the protagonist Ellen abhors Count Orlok as much as the “base” aspects of her nature compel him near.
Emma reminds us that gothic literature, and particularly, the vampire motif, represent unequal power dynamics at times of economic and social change. Nosferatu is set at a particularly shifty economic time. Germany in the 1830s was a nation in transition. Though it was at the brink of industrialization—Karl Marx would publish The Communist Manifesto just 10 years after the setting of this film—Ellen would have grown up in the era of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and German Romanticism. Industrialization’s modernizing impulses are set against the persistently “backwards” traditional forest principalities haunting the emerging consciousness in German city centers. In this rapidly developing setting, the vampire emerges as a specter of the past that threatens to destabilize the present.
Fast forward to 2025, and again we find ourselves in a time of rapid social change—to put it mildly. In the United States, Donald Trump is dismantling the structures of democracy, and ushering in a technocracy that is founded upon the powers of capital aided and abetted by a gaggle of tech-bro billionaire henchmen. The aristocratic vampire of Bram Stoker’s Dracula is now an undead technocrat, and our fears surrounding the powers of technology and environmental catastrophe wreaking havoc on the world are made sensible through religion, apocalypse narratives seeing a particular revival. The New Yorker laments the ‘apocalyptic’ decline in birth rates, and the Independent prepares for the end of civilization. As technology and climate warming accelerate at alarming rates, we are haunted by the specter of a religious worldview that tells us the end times are near.
In this setting—where vectors of political power are changing, and the worst fears of our age are materializing—films inevitably express social moods. In a world of such uncertainty, some psychologists and political theorists, like Freud and Lyotard, argue that there is a secret desire that emerges: to be consumed by our desires and watch the world go up in flames. No wonder at least one apocalyptic film has been a blockbuster hit every year since 2020.
We fear the changing (and perhaps, ending) world and yet our desires under capitalism are compelled towards it. Psychology-inflected political economy tells us that all matters of desire are libidinal, and the economy, too, is a “matter of desire.” To say that the economy is a matter of desire is to say that it is more than a system of inorganic production. It is to say that economic life is propelled forward by a range of psychic drives. In Foucault’s opening to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, he remarks on how an analysis of the economy as libidinal brings “the flows of desire, the fears and anxieties, and the loves and despairs that traverse the social field” to light. Lyotard, in his book, Libidinal Economy, simply claims: “every political economy is libidinal.” Not only are all modes of production (from feudalism, industrialization, and techno-capitalism) libidinal, but so are any attempts to understand them—in political economic theory, or film, for that matter. Both the institutions and concepts of contemporary capitalism must be read as vital aspects of its psychic life.
And it is precisely this economic terrrain which puts desire to work—specifically, heterosexual desire. Heterosexual desire embodies the kind of self-annihilating impulses of desire under late-stage capitalism in a way which queer desire cannot. Studies of “compulsive heterosexuality” track how heterosexuality was made mandatory, and homosexuality outlawed, at the same time as industrial capitalism spread throughout Europe. Theorists hold that homosexuality was outlawed because it was a threat to the regeneration of labor necessary for the continuation of industrial production. Yet heterosexuality, which enables the continuation of capitalism while threatening us with overpopulation, is deeply entwined with its own self-destruction.
Despite, or Freud may say because of, capitalism’s self-annihilating potential, we continue to desire more under it. When consumption and extractive blood-lust threaten to destroy us, the only kind of sex which reflects (and completes) this destructive process is self-annihilating straight sex, best represented in the ending of Nosferatu, where Ellen, a quintessentially modern self fraught with conflicting desires, dies—quite literally under a naked vampire—as a new day dawns over a rapidly modernizing Germany.
Compulsive heterosexuality as one of the underpinnings of capitalism explains why straight sex in films—and the libidinal desire that underpins it—is a reflection of the acceleration of capitalism towards destruction. Capitalism is always about heterosexual, self-destructive libidinal desire. In a time of industrial advancement, Count Orlok is the specter of the past at the same time as he is Ellen’s desire for affection and pleasure—the hallmark of capitalistic urges to consume. Today, compulsory heterosexuality is being enforced again through increased marginalization of trans and gay communities, and politicians adopting extreme religious values, all while the world is burning and the climate clock marking disaster draws ever nearer. It is no surprise, then, that we see a proliferation of specifically heterosexual desires and their thrilling and destructive potential play out on the big screen.
In this era of late-stage capitalism, our secret desire is that we will all be destroyed. That the world will burn. That we will be annihilated. It is a kind of desire produced by capitalism’s compulsion towards accelerationism: that in a world we can’t control, we desire the drastic intensification of capitalist growth and technological change to destabilize existing systems and create radical social transformations, even if that means destroying everything, and ourselves along with it—a kind of erotic nihilism. In Nosferatu, Ellen’s fulfilled desire brings destruction. In Babygirl, this heterosexual death drive completed actually ushers in a future where a woman can be the boss of an Amazon-like company, openly sleep with her teenage intern, and still be able to tell men who try to shame her to fuck off. Both films are driven by self-annihilating heterosexual desire—but, fulfilled, one brings destruction and the other a kind of utopian feminist future.
Films like Nosferatu and the consuming desire it embodies is a kind of manic call to usher in impending destruction for the sake of an unknown and radically open future. And this kind of self-annihilating desire under late-stage capitalism is always heterosexual, doomed to destruction, or at least to bust. In fact, I would hedge my bets with Bald Ann Dowd: straight Kristen Stewart may indeed be a recession indicator.
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