Revisiting THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019)
Revisiting THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019)
Robert Eggers' sophmore feature deserves its cult reputation. Why did it speak to us?
Revisiting THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019) for its third anniversary confirms it a richly rewarding and entertaining film that, while appreciated on release, should only grow in legend with the passage of time.
Written by brothers Robert and Max Eggers and directed by the former, the film takes shape as a deceptively simple story of two men – one young, one old – who gradually drive each other mad in the damp confines of a lighthouse located in the middle of nowhere. The younger novice lighthouse keeper (referred to as a “wickie”), Thomas Howard, is played by Robert Pattinson, with Willem Dafoe playing his curmudgeonly elder and direct manager, Thomas Wake.
Before the era-defining performances of the two leads impress themselves, the film’s mesmeric cinematography, conjured like a spell by Jarin Blaschke (who received an Academy nomination), surely does. In interviews about the film, Blaschke emphasises the lengthy, yearslong pre-production period that provided him and Eggers with the clarity to realise the film’s striking visual language.
While the particular film stock and vintage lenses used make their impact, the film’s sharp contrast black-and-white lighting and constricted 1.2 aspect ratio are transportive. Knowing the thematic importance of “the light” to THE LIGHTHOUSE, the crew dedicated themselves to communicating this visually to their audience. The pitch black sidebars created by the squarish aspect ratio work to make a scene feel claustrophobic and threateningly nocturnal.
Three distinct dangers present themselves in that void: employer surveillance, unresolved internal turmoil, and the ever disruptive stormy ocean weather. It quickly becomes clear that Wake will apply a most pernicious managerial style to Howard, instilling fear that prying eyes are upon him at all times—lest he not be working himself to the bone.
In nighttime scenes where the lighting is layered most lavishly, Howard is consumed by troubles stemming from unresolved moral guilt and a tortured refusal to accept his sexuality. Over the course of the film, the weather which begins as a latent threat outside of the frame takes on a manifest role in the climactic chapter. The film’s sound design is a brilliant supplement to its experiential cinematography. In each scene, crashing waves, quaking sirens and screeching seagulls aurally reinforce the desperate circumstances of the characters.
The script is a now trademark painstakingly period-accurate Eggers masterclass in language and rhythm. The production design, including the construction of every single building in the film, costuming and even the cutlery forcibly entraps you in this inhospitable space and time at the cross-section of machinery and nature. Pay no mind to voices who assert these technical aspects of THE LIGHTHOUSE amount to merely an accomplished but vain genre pastiche. Indeed, pay attention to the filmmaking instead — it explicates the struggle at the core of the film’s narrative.
Dafoe’s Wake is an irritating neurotic of a manager who constantly dictates and surveils his underling Howard, played with barely subdued fury by Pattinson. Wake flagellates Howard, abusively wielding his seniority in their shared workplace. A pedestal entitles Dafoe to deny Pattinson access to the tower’s light itself, rumoured to hold an enchantment. Aggressive disciplinary tirades at the disputable signs of an imperfectly swabbed floorboard, threats of deducted pay, and constant secretive scrawling of logbook entries (later uncovered to recommend ‘severance without pay’) are all employed to subordinate Pattinson.
An implacable tension – the division between employee and manager – precludes the men from properly relating to and therefore sharing with each other the physical and psychological burden of the brutal conditions of their post. Wake’s monopoly on the “light” work and cooking duties (their tenuous food source) guarantee Howard is alone in absorbing the toll of the job’s hardships.
When Howard’s mental state understandably falters, Wake emasculates him, labelling him a ‘bitch’ and launching into a coruscating denunciation of his alleged expectations of the ‘silver spoon what should have been [his].’ Dafoe delivers multiple such brilliant monologues in the film, during which you cannot unstick your eyes from the screen. In feminising Howard and divorcing him from the nourishment and intimacy of Wake’s “marriage” to the light, Wake unknowingly inflames the younger man’s distorted sexuality.
At times the two come close to enacting mutual homosexual urges, always pulling back out of masculine shame and unwillingness to reckon with these feelings. In a displacement of these feelings, Howard furiously masturbates—a doomed attempt to experience the highs he spies Wake basking in with the light. Initially, these masturbations are performed with a totem of a mermaid with exposed breasts, which becomes the fixation of Howard’s repressed sexual fantasies. This recurring mermaid fantasy evokes a mythical ascendence from the life of an immiserated worker and escalates into a danger to Howard’s identity, fracturing it beyond repair.
After Howard lashes out violently (an incident that at once recalls a guilty episode in his past and implies a coming explosion of conflict), things take a turn for the worse. Resources are dwindling, and the pair resort to formulating an alcoholic beverage with kerosene, which they formerly used to power the mechanical lighthouse. This marks the final time we see the men in a remotely survivable state. It is the apex of a fevered mania induced by divisions of labour and internalised homophobia.
While drinking the kerosene liquor grants the wickies a brief drunken respite from their immediate circumstances, it also symbolises the final stage in the transformation of their human bodies into machinery. The faceless lighthouse establishment employing the two men to staff the remote location is conspicuosly absent throughout — only ever seen via lettering on a jumpsuit worn by Winslow and various instruments.
The keepers' unquestioning compliance with this uncaring institution has led to the forsaking of personhood in favour of false identities as indentured workers. At the beginning of the film, we see Wake and Howard relieve two lighthouse keepers of their duties, and they often discuss their own supposedly impending relief. During his meltdown, Howard discovers the corpse of a previous tender, informing him of his disposable status—the loss of his life won’t harm the ‘United States Lighthouse Service.’ As the sea storm intensifies, the pair’s grip on reality is washed away, along with the hope of ever receiving the relief they require. In both mind and body, the raging ocean is sweeping them away.
The film’s final scene accentuates the isolating modernity of industry, recalling the myth of Prometheus, punished for bringing fire to humanity. The natural world exacts its revenge on the wickies for erecting the mechanical, phallic lighthouse that pollutes a certain prehistoric and organic balance. Winslow is posed, clearly alive, on salt-washed rocks, while seagulls defecate on him, feasting on his insides for eternity. Perhaps Eggers is just really into mythology. Regardless, inherent in this image is that instead of liberating humanity from an existence defined by scarcity and division, the technology and social structure powering capitalist advancement form a new collective punishment. This new suffering is enforced by the rulers of capitalist society and their lackeys like Winslow, in place of the Gods of old.
The hallucination of THE LIGHTHOUSE suggests that to survive the dire climatic and labouring conditions we find ourselves in, we must abandon pre-existing resentments and cooperatively produce shared abundance – in contrast to the competitive expropriation that defines society today.
Note: This piece is based on a shorter, less developed review that I initially posted on my Letterboxd account when the film first released. It has been revised and expanded for posting here and does not appear in any for-profit publications as of 06/11/2022. I hope reading this makes you want to watch THE LIGHTHOUSE.