The sea-gods must be crazy
Directed by: Robert Eggers
Cinematography by: Jarin Blaschke
Each time I watch
Robert Eggers’
The
Lighthouse, I get sucked further and further into the world being created,
and I wish the talented up-and-comer would create an entire cinematic universe
around the lore of this surreal psychological horror film. Blending
Lovecraft
and classical mythology, Robert and his brother
Max – who co-wrote the
screenplay – pull us down like
Charybdis into a dark, mind-bending, and
frequently comedic maelstrom of Promethean fires, querulous seagulls, devilish
sirens, ancient and wrathful gods of the abyss, enough alcohol to drown an
elephant, guilt, insanity, and farts.
Compared to the sophomore efforts of other rising genre
filmmakers like
Jordan Peele and
Ari Aster, one of the things I also love about
Eggers’ follow-up to his slow-burning debut
The Witch (2015) is that
The
Lighthouse could have been made by an entirely different filmmaker. Whereas
The Witch focuses on a supernatural, yet very grounded and dour story,
The
Lighthouse is funnier than it is scary for the vast majority of the
run-time. It’s essentially a horror-comedy, anchored by the typhoon of
Willem Dafoe (Thomas Wake) and
Robert Pattinson’s (Thomas Howard/Ephraim Winslow)
manically chaotic performances that erupt in endless, irreverent squalls. That’s
not to say that Eggers doesn’t seem to be developing some auteur-ish trademarks
that carry over into
The Lighthouse though. Like
The Witch, his
second film features animal actors, period-accurate dialogue and dialects, a
palpable atmosphere, a claustrophobic sense of dread, and the utter
psychological annihilation of the protagonists before they meet whatever their
fates may be.
The Lighthouse employs a simple setup of two men
working at the eponymous lighthouse and losing their minds together (although
one of them may have been crazy the whole time), yet the ambiguous storytelling
that Eggers favors leaves the film rife with interpretations. As the audience,
do we take the supernatural presentation that gods and mythical creatures exist
within the film’s reality, and accept that the fire inside the lighthouse
contains sanity-shattering sights? Or is what we’re presented with simply the
delusions of a man in torment – already wracked with guilt – who went mad from
the isolation and oceans of alcohol he began consuming? Are any of the film’s
events “real” from the start, or is the young assistant Ephraim Winslow (aka
Thomas Howard) suffering some sort of divine punishment in a purgatory where
he’s meant to pay for his past deeds? The film is shot relatively objectively,
but the objective narration itself seems to be unreliable. Within the context
of the story, we don’t know if what Ephraim is experiencing is real, we don’t
know if what
we’re seeing is real, and we sure as hell can’t tell
whether the sordid old lighthouse keeper Thomas Wake graduated with a doctorate
in gaslighting, or whether Ephraim truly was unstable from the start. It all
becomes a spiraling, shape-shifting web of dreams, hallucination, and
premonition.
Part of what makes
The Lighthouse distinctive as a genre
film is that the Eggers brothers use classical mythology as a core and wrap it
up in layers of Lovecraftian horror. The one-eyed seagull that Ephraim quarrels
with calls to mind the stories of the Norse god
Odin, who used birds as his
vessels to gain information and put out one of his eyes to become all-knowing.
And there’s a multitude of visual and narrative metaphors that tie these
threads together (first and foremost being the one-eyed gull). Early in the
film, the grizzled and superstitious Wake tells Ephraim not to spar with the
gulls because seabirds are the spirits-vessels of sailors who “met their maker.”
Wake also tells him that the assistant who worked for him before was driven mad
and died believing the lighthouse’s beckoning flames to be the divine fire of
the gods. Salvation sent from a higher power. Later, Ephraim discovers a severed
human head in a lobster trap: a head that’s missing an eye, the same eye as the
one-eyed gull. Did the past assistant sacrifice his eye (like Odin) to the
fires for ever-lasting life, only to be cast down and reborn as the pestilent
seagull?
The connection goes even further when we see Ephraim’s final fate
after he stares into the light himself. Perhaps deemed unfit to receive
whatever profane knowledge or visions the lighthouse contains, his growing ecstasy
quickly morphs into howls of pain and terror. With his mind corrupted, Ephraim
too is cast down, and the camera finds him dying on the rocks being
disemboweled by seagulls. We see that like the ominous one-eyed gull, like the
head in the basket, one of Ephraim’s eyes has been gouged as well. Two unworthy
sacrifices condemned to suffer half-blind. And Lovecraft 101 brings the
connections full circle, as his stories often center around men foolishly
reaching or stumbling into the void to attain the infinite, to be like the gods
(like Odin), only to have their minds shattered upon the coastal rocks of the
eternal cosmos, where they meet fates worse than death.
The Greek figures of Prometheus, Poseidon, and Proteus are
also either very strongly alluded to or explicitly mentioned in the film’s
story. In Greek mythology
Prometheus stole fire from
Zeus and gave it to
humanity, resulting in the development of the arts and sciences, and consequently,
civilization. The myth could also be interpreted more generally as Prometheus
giving humans knowledge and intelligence. In Lovecraft however, when humans
have the knowledge of the gods bestowed upon them, the information is infinitely
unfathomable, like trying to stuff a planet inside a thimble, and their mortal
minds are driven mad even trying to comprehend a fraction of it –– which is
exactly Ephraim’s reaction when he stares into the lighthouse’s source. And
whatever conjures that otherworldly light also gets left ambiguous. Is there
some abominable creature inside? Is it a tear in space where a dimension of
ungodly horrors bleeds through into ours? Is it a divine light that communicates
secrets from the edges of our universe and beyond? Whatever it is, we know that
Ephraim’s punishment for digging where he wasn’t meant to dig is similar to the
punishment Prometheus received from Zeus. For stealing the fires of knowledge
Prometheus was bound in chains and forced to have an eagle eat his regenerating
liver every day for the rest of time, and in the final shot of
The
Lighthouse, as mentioned before, seagulls are feasting on Ephraim's exposed
bowels.
Eggers and Eggers also take some of the aspects of the
sea-god
Poseidon and give him a very direct Lovecraftian repurposing by mutating
the godhead into an ancient cosmic horror like the slumbering “
Great Old One,”
Cthulhu, and the monstrous deep-sea deity,
Dagon. In the Lovecraft mythos,
these creatures register humans on the same scale that we register microbes,
yet their simple existence, when they wake or show themselves to us, is enough to
shred our sanity to ribbons. Thomas Wake on the other hand takes on the
characteristics of Poseidon’s son
Proteus, complete with tentacles and trident,
which explains why he’s so protective of the seabirds and seems to do the
bidding of the lighthouse and the sea. Wake’s thundering, movie-stealing
monologue is also the perfect coalescence of classical myth and Lovecraft. Like
a death knell, his character curses Ephraim for insulting his culinary skills,
and he calls upon the wrath of the abyssal terror he serves, referring to it as
“…the dread emperor himself, forgotten to any man, to any time, forgotten to
any God or devil, forgotten even to the sea…”.
I’d also have to be mad myself to not mention the film’s
cinematographer
Jarin Blaschke. I rarely include close-ups or faces in my
photosets – I typically prefer to emphasize wide shots with notable compositions
– but there’s a reason why this photoset is chock-full of both: the way Jarin
Blaschke lights faces in
The Lighthouse is singularly stunning. His
close-ups are some of the most nuanced I’ve ever seen, and his mesmerizing shots
throughout the film are undoubtedly some of the best cinematography the genre
has to offer. Similar to his strategy of not using artificial light in
The
Witch (his previous collaboration with Robert Eggers), Blaschke deftly
utilizes lamps, candles, and natural light sources in
The Lighthouse to
create striking, expressionistic images that look like chiaroscuro paintings,
where the shadows are blacker than pitch, and the bright whites nearly wash the
screen out, giving the film a juxtaposing sense of gauzy dreams and menacing nightmares
consuming each other in a never-ending cycle. It’s particularly effective when
used on Dafoe. His acting is incredible enough as is, but I find his face to be
uniquely beautiful, and Blaschke lights him in a way that brings out the detail
of all the lines and ridges of his face that read like a topographical map of
some arid desert. Simply putting his face on screen fills even the most austere
images with texture and a heightened feeling of physicality, and in
The Lighthouse
his face becomes a commanding source of power, telling a story in itself.
I’ve been watching
The Lighthouse nigh-religiously since
it came out on streaming platforms and it has rapidly ascended the ranks to
become a top-five horror film for me, and one of my favorites of all time. It’s
one of those deliriously good flicks that are more and more rewarding with each viewing.
While Ari Aster’s
Hereditary (2018) is my
favorite horror debut of the 2010s, of the sophomore releases of those directors,
The Lighthouse
blows them all out of the water, and Robert Eggers has become my favorite
director of that talented crop overall through two films.
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