(Eerie Music)
- (Jared) Avast ye mateys. Marooned sea dog Jared here to (coughs) talk about a 2019 film
so unpredictable that the phrase “jaw-dropping” feels like an absurd understatement: The Lighthouse
Whenever a movie leaves me feeling that weird cocktail of impressed awe and confusion, I
have to wonder: Is this film TOO smart, or is it just pretending to be? Let’s investigate
in this Wisecrack Edition on The Lighthouse: Deep or Dumb? And of course, Spoilers ahead.
Alright guys let’s do a quick recap. Lighthouse spotlights, no pun intended, the relationship
between seasoned lighthouse keeper “Old” played by Willem Dafoe, and his reluctant
mentee “Young,” played by that vampire guy whose arguably the best young actor of
the moment. Anyway, Old is gassy (farting) AND gas-lighty, potentially screwing with
Young for his own amusement, putting him through punishing physical labor and constantly trying
to get him wasted.
- (Old) Bad luck to leave a toast unfinished lad.
- (Jared) All this, while also refusing to let Young look at his precious lantern. The
day before they’re supposed to FINALLY leave, everything goes buckwild: Young kills the
shit out of a seagull, causing a gnarly storm to brew, and then is like, man do I need a
drink. The men bond, open up about their pasts, and even sing fun sailor songs.
- (Chanting) Oh we’re homeward bound! Oh we’re homeward bound!
- (Jared) When the ferry fails to pick them up, things degenerate fast. Young, who we’ve
learned killed his former boss and assumed his identity -
- (Young) I just stood there as all… I just stood, watched him get swallowed by them logs.
- (Jared) Loses all the sh*ts and beats up Old, eventually killing him, but not before
pausing to hallucinate him as his dead boss, a mermaid, and a squid creature. Then, Young
finally gets to see the light which is a beautiful, serene experience.
- (Young) [SCREAMS]
- (Jared) Kidding, it just about kills him and we end on an UN-Youtube friendly shot
of him lying naked on a rock while birds peck at his innards, which we have thoughtfully
concealed with Nic Cage gifs.
Okay so … what in the name of Poseidon just went down?! The way we see it, there are countless
possible ways to glean meaning from this film - so we’re going to focus on three: aesthetics,
psycho-sexual dynamics, and mythology. Let’s start with: Aesthetics. According to the film’s
cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, Eggers said that “atmosphere comes first and then the
rest comes out of that.” And boy, this film’s got atmosphere FOR DAYS. It feels out of a
different yet nonspecific time - with an old-fashioned boxy 1.19:1 aspect ratio that visually smushes
the two men together and makes us increasingly claustrophobic.
They also mimicked the look of “orthochromatic film” which dates back to the early days
of photography, and was particularly used for portraits. Fittingly, the first frontal
view of Young and Old is presented almost as if they’re posing for an old-fashioned
portrait, as they gaze at the camera, unnaturally still. Orthochromatic film filters out red
light, giving the sky a washed out look and people’s faces a darker, more textured complexion.
It’s evocative and surreal and makes the actors look weathered as hell. Because they
were using old lenses, and an old style of film, everything about the production process
had to be super meticulous. The orthochromatic look requires a TON of light, and the film
set was SO bright`w that apparently, some film crew members wore sunglasses EVEN during
nighttime scenes, which is honestly just called style.
There’s some intimation throughout that “light” is “dangerous”, the interior
shots grow steadily brighter as Old learns more about Young’s shady past, and of course,
the lighthouse’s extreme brightness seems to basically kill Young at the end. But it’s
not totally clear. Now, this film probably has the coolest aesthetics of 2019. Full stop.
But try as we might, we couldn’t unearth any overarching MEANING behind them. So for
this one, we’re going to say - atmospheric as hell, but not quite DEEP, though definitely
let us know if we’re missing something.
Let’s move on to part 2: sexuality. AKA your high school gym teacher’s second expertise.
- (Mean Girls Gym Teacher) Don’t have sex. Because you will get pregnant and die!
- (Jared) From phallic lighthouses to vaginal keyholes, sex is FRONT AND CENTER, which is
fitting for a movie that features dudes jerking their lighthouses about every five minutes.
It’s most obvious in the tensions between Young and Old, who, like your Boomer parents,
vacillate between yelling at each other and embarrassingly slow dancing. The queer-ish
subtexts are pretty clear, and Eggers along with actors Robert Pattinson and Willem DaFoe
told the Huffington Post that this was intentional. “The whole thing is about power dynamics,
so it is about Willem pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing. And there’s pent-up anger
and pent-up erotic energy and pent-up smells. Where is that breaking point?”
Indeed, the struggle for power is central to the plot. Old claims absolute control,
telling Young to throw the rule book away because he’s the king of this shitty castle.
- (Young) The manual says - - (Old) My log is the only book on this rock.
- (Jared) He alternates between telling Young to do the hardest possible chores and YELLING
at him for having supposedly done them wrong. He even dangles him from a rope just to be
a jerk. These dynamics come to fruition in a bizarre mirror image when Young takes Old
for a walk like he’s a dog, in an image that feels straight out of a kink handbook.
Here, Young is expressing the dehumanization he felt when Old regularly called him a “dog,”
- (Old) Swamp dog! Swamp!
- (Jared) and reclaiming his power.
Taken on its own, Old’s behavior is just dickish. Put in the context of his physical
and emotional relationship with Young, though, and it becomes pretty clearly erotic. As if
to bring the point home, Eggers evokes the work of Sascha Schneider, a late 19th century
queer painter who had to flee Germany because of his sexuality. In one of the film’s most
striking moments, Eggers recreates this Schneider painting called “Hypnosis,” which depicts
one man’s face shining light onto the face of a younger man, as if revealing some frightening
and seductive truth. Is Eggers perhaps suggesting that interacting with Old reveals some frightening
but seductive truth about Young - maybe a new gradation of his sexuality?
Now, we’re not saying that they’re gay - and neither is Eggers. It’s hardly that
simple. Regardless of which way they typically swing, they enter into a tacitly-erotic relationship,
out of loneliness or genuine sexual attraction. They’re each fulfilling a need of the other
- Old gets to feel in control despite living in a world dictated by the uncontrollable
forces of the sea. As for Young? Robert Pattinson explains of his character: “In a lot of
ways, he sort of wants a daddy.” And boy does he get one.
The pure erotic fascination is given plenty of time to brew onscreen - There’s lots
of secretly watching one another from a distance and Old even calls Young:
- (Old) Pretty as a picture.
- (Jared) There are also moments of reprieve -- softer images of their relationship -- like
when they sit peacefully by the fire as Old engages in your traditionally domestic hobby
of knitting. However, they still manage to make even peaceful, feminized tasks impetus
for more hyper-masculine aggression. Not incidentally, their most tumultuous fight erupts over whether
or not Young likes Old’s cooking.
- (Old) I seen it! You’re fond of me lobster! Saw ya…
- (Jared) Rather than expressing his pain and vulnerability, something he might see
as overtly “feminine”, Old immediately turns to his most wildly violent impulses,
literally calling on Triton to, uh ...
- (Old) Choke ye, engorging yer organs till ye turn blue and bloated with bilge and brine
and can scream no more!
- (Jared) Yeah. That.
Old’s sick-ass seadog monologue brings us to another point: The film’s treatment of
the nebulous line between sex and death. Take this climactic moment when Young finally sees
the light.
- (Young) (SCREAMING)
- (Jared) What is he experiencing? Just pain? Or a weird pleasure in pain? That strange
duality has fascinated many thinkers, including Georges Bataille, whose book Erotism: Death
and Sensuality outlines the odd relationship between these two aspects of human experience.
According to Bataille, we are, from the very beginning, individuals existing in a state
of discontinuity from those around us, that is, a state of isolation and loneliness. Death
“jerks us out of a tenacious obsession with the lastingness of our discontinuous being.”
That is, it literally destroys our sense of a singular, separate self. In doing so, it
actually AFFIRMS our “continuity of being.” Or, as literary scholar Nidesh Lawtoo; puts
it, in death, we go from “separate “beings” to a common ontological ground [of ‘Being.]’”
Because we both desire that continuity AND fear our inevitable death, we search for continuity
elsewhere, specifically, in eroticism. As Bataille put it,“the whole business of eroticism
is to destroy the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their
normal lives,” ie to destroy our discontinuity by uniting intimately with another. In this
way, eroticism is a "a psychological quest... not alien to death” because both are about
recovering our lost continuity, overcoming our profound sense of separation.
This idea feels VERY present in The Lighthouse, most apparently when Young finally sees the
alluring lantern, which has already been thoroughly sexualized. This moment feels in line with
Bataille’s definition of “the sacred” in that it seems to cause Young both “divine
ecstasy and extreme horror,” a phenomenon we also see in Young’s earlier mastuabautory
adventure in the shed, which ends with him on his knees in pain.
Now according to Bataille, the experience of the erotic, that is, the tearing down of
your usual self containment, is rupturous - eroticism is often violent. The link between
violence and erotics manifests in the many brawls between Young and Old, when they could
just as easily be about to make love as they are about to kill one another.
But the dichotomy is most glaringly obvious in the moments right after the two almost
kiss - when instead of locking lips, they lock fists. Right here, we have a textbook
example of two dudes not being able to distinguish between love and violence. Fittingly for this
moment, Bataille opined that “Extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror,” which we
certainly see in Young’s frightened reaction to Old’s embrace. In The Lighthouse, there’s
a porous relationship between sex and death, love and violence, some literal and some symbolic.
More subtly, there’s the ongoing motif of a post-coital cigarette first seen when Young
lights up after jerkin’ it to his favorite half woman half fish. Of course, the post-bang
cig is coyly being repurposed for both sexual AND violent encounters - Young describes wanting
a cigarette after watching, letting, and/or causing his boss to die
- (Young) All I could think when he was done… was I… I could use me a smoke.
- (Jared) And he also lights up after killing Old. What’s more, the original script even
has him do the same thing after killing the seagull, underscoring Egger’s intentions.
Similarly, Old pulls his suspenders up after his rendezvous with a lamp, a moment the script
describes “as if getting dressed after a night with a woman.” Echoing this moment,
Young pulls up his suspenders after beating Old to a pulp, also as if getting dressed
after sex. Sex, death, what’s the difference? All in all, the unique take on sexuality,
and the interesting treatment of the line between sex and death, love and violence feels
pretty deep to us.
Let’s conclude by looking at mythology. The Lighthouse evokes parallels to numerous
myths, fables, and folklores, drawn from a myriad of seafaring cultures. For example,
the idea that seagulls contain the souls of dead sailors is a real maritime myth, which
may have brought about the historical superstition that killing a seabird is bad luck. This effect
was most famously described in the 1798 poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which
shows a sailor doom his ship by killing an albatross. As punishment, he is forced to
wear the dead bird around his neck like an especially unattractive scarf. Young is regularly
tormented by a hostile one-eyed seagull. Upon learning that the bird is Team Jacob, he beats
it to death in a violent rage. This appears to seal his fate, as the winds suddenly change
direction, and a storm ensues.
But there’s more one-eyed imagery to haunt your dreams. When Young inquires about the
previous junior wickie, Old replies that he went mad and died.
- (Old) The second? - (Young) Mm-hmm.
- (Old) Died. Went mad he did.
Later on, Young seems to hallucinate the severed head of a man with one eye. The resemblance
between the one-eyed former keeper and the one-eyed seagull is undeniable. So what does
it mean? Was the previous keeper attempting to warn Young about the malevolence of the
lighthouse? Possibly.
Then there’s the mermaid, who appears both as a figurine and an actual part lady part
fish with, and this is according to Eggers, a vagina modeled after that of a shark’s.
Equal parts beautiful and terrifying, the mermaid has symbolized erotic danger everywhere
from medieval churches to Greek mythology, where Sirens lured many a horny sailor to
his doom. Frequently in such tales, mermaids pull their sailor lovers underwater, leading
to some pretty awkward one night stands. Such a moment happens during Young’s masturbatory
fantasy and/or nervous breakdown. In this way, the mermaid helps solidify this aforementioned
link between sex and death.
Then there’s the other assorted oceanic imagery, which tends to revolve around Old.
This is most notable during the men’s deadly fight, in which Old seems to spontaneously
sprout squid tentacles, before also fading into a barnacle-covered version of himself
that, sorry, honestly just recalls this guy. Oh and he also fades into the mermaid. What’s
going on here? Is Old simply emblematic of all sea lore, representing the way some men
subsume their lives and identities to the ocean waves, and thus get swallowed up in
all its mysteries? Maybe? We honestly don’t know.
And then, of course, there’s the allusion to the Greek myth of Prometheus, the Titan
who was punished by Zeus for stealing the secret of fire and bestowing it unto humanity.
In this myth, fire symbolizes humanity’s curiosity for knowledge and triumph over nature.
The titular Lighthouse exists in the film as a font of forbidden knowledge and the object
of Young’s obsession. And, you know, it’s also literally a flame.
Now, the gods punished Prometheus for being a bad boy by chaining him to a rock for all
eternity, to have his liver eaten by an eagle every day, only to regenerate at night. In
the final scene of the film, we see Young’s liver being pecked upon by the one-eyed seagull,
a la Prometheus. The gods also punish humanity by giving it its first woman, Pandora, described
in Greek poetry as a “beautiful evil”. Through Pandora and her dang box, all the
evils in the world are released. The theme of femininity and beauty as beguiling and
dangerous is telegraphed throughout via the mermaid, as well as the assorted attribution
of feminine traits and duties to both Old and Young. Is Young being punished for “stealing
the fire” of the lighthouse? Is it the result of his fear of femininity and his latent desires?
We’re not totally sure, and we’re not totally sure if it’s deep.
Ok so, this has honestly been one of the harder films we’ve ever analyzed. And we think
we know why. Eggers himself has said that he wanted the movie to be inconclusive. He
wanted to raise more questions than answers.
- (Young and Old shout, “What?” Back and forth at each other)
- (Jared) He WANTED us to spend hours on Reddit trying to understand the significance of the
lobster trap. This is a pretty cool approach that not many directors are brave enough to
take, lest they be labeled pretentious. We truly applaud it. The only downside is that
such an approach CAN result in the film not articulating any clear meaning.
The Lighthouse is many things at once: a love story, a hate story, a story of madness and
obsession. But despite all of these gradations, no interpretation FULLY makes a clear statement
- the movie lacks a thesis and it does so intentionally. As a result, we’re a little
dumbfounded. It’s clearly not superficial, but can you be deep if you’re not fully
articulating a message? We’re genuinely not sure, so we’re going to split the difference
and say “quite possibly deep, and quite certainly not dumb.”” But what do you
think, Wisecrack? Has Robert Eggers broken Deep or Dumb? Or is there another interpretation
we, like a one-eyed seagull, simply cannot see? Let us know what you think in the comments.
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