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Say, why's it bad luck to kill a gull?
Robert Eggers' The Lighthouse (2019) remains one of my odder experiences of cinema, like seeing so many of my own touchstones set out in a stranger's configuration—a densely allusive, richly imagistic maritime pas de deux in which dreams, secrets, and dooms fold into one another like the tide booming on the gull-mewed black ledges which afford scarce room for the peeling buildings of a station, let alone the fractious demons of the men supposed to tend its light, yet more absurdist and aggro than its maledictions of Neptune and talk of seabirds as lost sailors' souls would traditionally suggest. It has the numinous, shape-changing sea; it also has plenty of slime. I like to think it would have given Lovecraft the screaming mimis.
Originally sparked by Edgar Allan Poe with an infusion of Smalls Lighthouse, The Lighthouse draws on the tragedy in the loosest sense of a weird and grisly fate befalling two lightkeepers—wickies, in the late nineteenth century Downeast vernacular of the profane and literate screenplay by Robert and Max Eggers—named Thomas, although by the time the film discloses this information it feels less historically indebted than sympathetically inevitable. Its sea-haunting doesn't miss a trick, beginning well past realism with the blare of a foghorn like a sounding leviathan even before it shows us the tender steaming across a silver shagreen of sea, ferrying the latest pair of keepers to their four-week stint on this stark, remote light. They are sinewy, scour-boned, an old salt and his green assistant who look sometimes like kin, sometimes like incomprehensible strangers, sometimes like scratched tin reflections of the same man and are played by Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson as though either of them might turn out to be his shadow. Badger-bearded and ship-tattooed, Tom Wake declaims the laws of the station like a preacher under sail, his grizzled authority self-contradicted by his meandering malice and his habit of ripping farts for emphasis. With something more than the territorialism of seniority, he warns, "I tend the light . . . The light is mine." Tom Howard who was hired as Ephraim Winslow stews tight-lipped over his back-aching menial duties of stoking and swabbing and whitewashing the tower, his mustache bristling as pugnaciously as his eyes flicker away. Late of the Hudson's Bay Company, he explains his turn to seaward, "I ain't the kind to look back at what's behind him, see?" But then he might not have to, when the ghosts of his time in the Canadian woods make such natural bedfellows with the kind of sea-soaked fancies said to have driven the assistant keeper before him to a madman's grave. No sooner has the younger Tom settled to his mattress than he finds secreted among its horsehair the well-thumbed scrimshaw of a mermaid, a harbinger or perhaps a portrait of the apparition he will stumble across on his resentful rounds of slops and coal—pale as pearl-shell, rockweed-veiled, she looks like a shipwreck's inconnue; then his hand uncovering her cold breasts discovers the roughening slits of scales and ventral fins, she is the mermaid who swam through his dream of a white-headed body floating among logs like coffins and as he blunders back from her in horror, she jackknifes up from the wet black rocks to jeer him in the voice of a gull. The foghorn swallows his scream. Is it gaslighting when the elder Tom claims that weeks have passed since their relief failed to show in the nor'easter that the barometer is still falling from, or has time merely slipped like the spaces of the lantern room where he can be seen paying homage to its Fresnel splendor in his naked skin? When the younger Tom spied on him, he saw something like a tentacle slithering through the shifting blaze that the older man saluted as "me beauty . . . a finer, truer, quieter wife than any a live-blooded woman." The longer their shift wears on, the more these jags and intimations of the supernatural accrete like nacre, but what's their grit? The guilt of one man, the longing of another? Some radiation of the light itself? Perhaps it is only that classic combination, what you bring to what you find, in which case it's best not to think what it means to be the catalyst: that anyone else might have gotten away.
Like its predecessor in New England old weirdness, The Lighthouse handles its ambiguities honestly: it isn't interested in mystification so much as the point where explanations cease to help. Knowing our Coleridge and Homer, we have no difficulty believing that the killing of the one-eyed seagull changed the wind, raised the storm, called the strangeness out of the wave-wrapped rock, but it makes no difference what will expiate it if the two Toms come to grief on their own recognizance before then. Never as straightforward as mere enmity, their relationship swirls between the adversarial, the familial, and the erotic, especially after the exchange of storm-ruined rations for a crate of grog uncorks confidences and vulnerabilities previously insinuated only through the safely masculine expressions of boasts or goads. The younger Tom bridles that he wasn't meant to work like a housewife, the elder Tom calls down a sea-god's curse over his unappreciated cooking. A moment of slow-dancing tenderness almost closes to a kiss which a bout of sodden fisticuffs averts, in whose aftermath the men rest in one another's arms as if it had been sex after all. Someone has chopped a hole in the lifeboat. Either someone has been doing some hard lying or reality has split like light through a catadioptric lens. "Where are we? Help me to recollect. Who're you again, Tommy?" Even as relations between the two men deteriorate like a Pinter play out of Whale Weekly, the film holds its weirdness in time with its psychodrama, reserving some of its most striking touches for its storm-bound, unraveling second half. Desperately clutching his scrimshaw fetish, the younger Tom masturbates in a welter of intrusive fantasies, the shark-flowered genitals of the stranded mermaid, a blond man's shoulders in a mackinaw jacket, a dripping tangle of tentacles and the jabbing point of a peavey, the siren's embrace pulling him into another man's death. Polyphemos does not figure by name among the script's copious classical allusions, but the lighthouse's single eye glares and blinks on the water, the one-eyed gull horribly recurs when a lobster pot hauled up from the foaming sea disgorges a human, one-eyed head. In a shot as unreal and arresting as our portrait-like introduction to the wickies proper, the younger Tom kneels in the grip of the elder, transfixed by a cyclopean beam of light straight out of Sascha Schneider's Hypnose (1904). It's scarier for being so tactile and imperfect, not some evanescence of spindrift and dread. So much of the film rests on this commingling of the workaday and the unearthly, the black comedy of bad roommates one second and the rip current of myth the next. Even its most violent scenes can vouchsafe shocks of strange beauty like a vision of the elder Tom as a coral-crowned, barnacle-breasted Old Man of the Sea, kraken-twining for the younger Tom's throat as brutally and sensuously as the mermaid slid her fingers into his mouth or the Canadian timberman punched him square on the nose. The dialogue ranges as deliberately between registers, its ornate language—credited in the closing titles to the influence of historical diaries, Herman Melville, and especially Sarah Orne Jewett—deployed in service of spellbinding invocation and surreal vulgarity. "You smell," the younger Tom pants in a veritable coloratura of turpentine-drunken invective, "like hot onions fucked a farmyard shithouse." Half-choked in the alien element of earth, his elder prophesies the judgment of the awful transcendence at the heart of the light:
"Ye wish to see what's in the lantern? So did me last assistant . . . Oh, what protean forms swim up from men's minds and melt in hot Promethean plunder, scorching eyes with divine shames and horror and casting them down to Davy Jones. The others, still blind, yet in it see all the divine graces and to Fiddler's Green sent where no man is suffered to want or toil, but is ancient, mutable, and unchanging as the she who girdles 'round the globe. Them's truth. You'll be punished."
In a coup of nerdiness and aesthetics, The Lighthouse was shot by Jarin Blaschke on black-and-white 35 mm film with lenses from the '30's, a custom-built orthochromatic filter, and Klieg levels of light poured onto the set, combining to a dark-grained, metallic effect of haze and austerity comparable to daguerreotypes and early film; the silent-to-sound transitional aspect ratio of 1.19:1 makes it look even more frame by frame like some lost curiosity of an alternate film industry. It is remarkably beautiful, which I do not say only because it is used to represent one of the best mermaids I have seen rendered on film, laughing like nothing human in her clinging wrack of hair. (Valeriia Karaman plays her as if the price of the scene was a drowned cameraman.) It is the kind of movie whose visible allusions leave the viewer wondering what echoes form the rest of the iceberg, like a trace of the Smuttynose murders in the late use of an axe or Peter Grimes in the accusation that the elder Tom murdered his previous wickie—watching the patterns coiling and breaking of chalk in black water, I thought the spell of Mana and the spell of Reck and the spell of Lir. Val Lewton would have approved of the visual as well as literary inspirations, although I'm not sure the dick jokes would have made it past RKO. The blasted, churning, discordant score by Mark Korven is intensely modern. I saw this movie originally at the Somerville Theatre with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks, but it has since made itself available on Kanopy. Its salt-encrusted rhyme of chanteys and nightmares may not suit all comers, but even when I am perhaps more oriented toward its nautical uncanny than its toxically masculine maelstrom, I am in fact the target audience for credits music of A. L. Lloyd's "Doodle Let Me Go (Yaller Girls)." The location shooting in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia deserves its own playlist. This plunder brought to you by my live-blooded backers at Patreon.
Originally sparked by Edgar Allan Poe with an infusion of Smalls Lighthouse, The Lighthouse draws on the tragedy in the loosest sense of a weird and grisly fate befalling two lightkeepers—wickies, in the late nineteenth century Downeast vernacular of the profane and literate screenplay by Robert and Max Eggers—named Thomas, although by the time the film discloses this information it feels less historically indebted than sympathetically inevitable. Its sea-haunting doesn't miss a trick, beginning well past realism with the blare of a foghorn like a sounding leviathan even before it shows us the tender steaming across a silver shagreen of sea, ferrying the latest pair of keepers to their four-week stint on this stark, remote light. They are sinewy, scour-boned, an old salt and his green assistant who look sometimes like kin, sometimes like incomprehensible strangers, sometimes like scratched tin reflections of the same man and are played by Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson as though either of them might turn out to be his shadow. Badger-bearded and ship-tattooed, Tom Wake declaims the laws of the station like a preacher under sail, his grizzled authority self-contradicted by his meandering malice and his habit of ripping farts for emphasis. With something more than the territorialism of seniority, he warns, "I tend the light . . . The light is mine." Tom Howard who was hired as Ephraim Winslow stews tight-lipped over his back-aching menial duties of stoking and swabbing and whitewashing the tower, his mustache bristling as pugnaciously as his eyes flicker away. Late of the Hudson's Bay Company, he explains his turn to seaward, "I ain't the kind to look back at what's behind him, see?" But then he might not have to, when the ghosts of his time in the Canadian woods make such natural bedfellows with the kind of sea-soaked fancies said to have driven the assistant keeper before him to a madman's grave. No sooner has the younger Tom settled to his mattress than he finds secreted among its horsehair the well-thumbed scrimshaw of a mermaid, a harbinger or perhaps a portrait of the apparition he will stumble across on his resentful rounds of slops and coal—pale as pearl-shell, rockweed-veiled, she looks like a shipwreck's inconnue; then his hand uncovering her cold breasts discovers the roughening slits of scales and ventral fins, she is the mermaid who swam through his dream of a white-headed body floating among logs like coffins and as he blunders back from her in horror, she jackknifes up from the wet black rocks to jeer him in the voice of a gull. The foghorn swallows his scream. Is it gaslighting when the elder Tom claims that weeks have passed since their relief failed to show in the nor'easter that the barometer is still falling from, or has time merely slipped like the spaces of the lantern room where he can be seen paying homage to its Fresnel splendor in his naked skin? When the younger Tom spied on him, he saw something like a tentacle slithering through the shifting blaze that the older man saluted as "me beauty . . . a finer, truer, quieter wife than any a live-blooded woman." The longer their shift wears on, the more these jags and intimations of the supernatural accrete like nacre, but what's their grit? The guilt of one man, the longing of another? Some radiation of the light itself? Perhaps it is only that classic combination, what you bring to what you find, in which case it's best not to think what it means to be the catalyst: that anyone else might have gotten away.
Like its predecessor in New England old weirdness, The Lighthouse handles its ambiguities honestly: it isn't interested in mystification so much as the point where explanations cease to help. Knowing our Coleridge and Homer, we have no difficulty believing that the killing of the one-eyed seagull changed the wind, raised the storm, called the strangeness out of the wave-wrapped rock, but it makes no difference what will expiate it if the two Toms come to grief on their own recognizance before then. Never as straightforward as mere enmity, their relationship swirls between the adversarial, the familial, and the erotic, especially after the exchange of storm-ruined rations for a crate of grog uncorks confidences and vulnerabilities previously insinuated only through the safely masculine expressions of boasts or goads. The younger Tom bridles that he wasn't meant to work like a housewife, the elder Tom calls down a sea-god's curse over his unappreciated cooking. A moment of slow-dancing tenderness almost closes to a kiss which a bout of sodden fisticuffs averts, in whose aftermath the men rest in one another's arms as if it had been sex after all. Someone has chopped a hole in the lifeboat. Either someone has been doing some hard lying or reality has split like light through a catadioptric lens. "Where are we? Help me to recollect. Who're you again, Tommy?" Even as relations between the two men deteriorate like a Pinter play out of Whale Weekly, the film holds its weirdness in time with its psychodrama, reserving some of its most striking touches for its storm-bound, unraveling second half. Desperately clutching his scrimshaw fetish, the younger Tom masturbates in a welter of intrusive fantasies, the shark-flowered genitals of the stranded mermaid, a blond man's shoulders in a mackinaw jacket, a dripping tangle of tentacles and the jabbing point of a peavey, the siren's embrace pulling him into another man's death. Polyphemos does not figure by name among the script's copious classical allusions, but the lighthouse's single eye glares and blinks on the water, the one-eyed gull horribly recurs when a lobster pot hauled up from the foaming sea disgorges a human, one-eyed head. In a shot as unreal and arresting as our portrait-like introduction to the wickies proper, the younger Tom kneels in the grip of the elder, transfixed by a cyclopean beam of light straight out of Sascha Schneider's Hypnose (1904). It's scarier for being so tactile and imperfect, not some evanescence of spindrift and dread. So much of the film rests on this commingling of the workaday and the unearthly, the black comedy of bad roommates one second and the rip current of myth the next. Even its most violent scenes can vouchsafe shocks of strange beauty like a vision of the elder Tom as a coral-crowned, barnacle-breasted Old Man of the Sea, kraken-twining for the younger Tom's throat as brutally and sensuously as the mermaid slid her fingers into his mouth or the Canadian timberman punched him square on the nose. The dialogue ranges as deliberately between registers, its ornate language—credited in the closing titles to the influence of historical diaries, Herman Melville, and especially Sarah Orne Jewett—deployed in service of spellbinding invocation and surreal vulgarity. "You smell," the younger Tom pants in a veritable coloratura of turpentine-drunken invective, "like hot onions fucked a farmyard shithouse." Half-choked in the alien element of earth, his elder prophesies the judgment of the awful transcendence at the heart of the light:
"Ye wish to see what's in the lantern? So did me last assistant . . . Oh, what protean forms swim up from men's minds and melt in hot Promethean plunder, scorching eyes with divine shames and horror and casting them down to Davy Jones. The others, still blind, yet in it see all the divine graces and to Fiddler's Green sent where no man is suffered to want or toil, but is ancient, mutable, and unchanging as the she who girdles 'round the globe. Them's truth. You'll be punished."
In a coup of nerdiness and aesthetics, The Lighthouse was shot by Jarin Blaschke on black-and-white 35 mm film with lenses from the '30's, a custom-built orthochromatic filter, and Klieg levels of light poured onto the set, combining to a dark-grained, metallic effect of haze and austerity comparable to daguerreotypes and early film; the silent-to-sound transitional aspect ratio of 1.19:1 makes it look even more frame by frame like some lost curiosity of an alternate film industry. It is remarkably beautiful, which I do not say only because it is used to represent one of the best mermaids I have seen rendered on film, laughing like nothing human in her clinging wrack of hair. (Valeriia Karaman plays her as if the price of the scene was a drowned cameraman.) It is the kind of movie whose visible allusions leave the viewer wondering what echoes form the rest of the iceberg, like a trace of the Smuttynose murders in the late use of an axe or Peter Grimes in the accusation that the elder Tom murdered his previous wickie—watching the patterns coiling and breaking of chalk in black water, I thought the spell of Mana and the spell of Reck and the spell of Lir. Val Lewton would have approved of the visual as well as literary inspirations, although I'm not sure the dick jokes would have made it past RKO. The blasted, churning, discordant score by Mark Korven is intensely modern. I saw this movie originally at the Somerville Theatre with
rushthatspeaks, but it has since made itself available on Kanopy. Its salt-encrusted rhyme of chanteys and nightmares may not suit all comers, but even when I am perhaps more oriented toward its nautical uncanny than its toxically masculine maelstrom, I am in fact the target audience for credits music of A. L. Lloyd's "Doodle Let Me Go (Yaller Girls)." The location shooting in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia deserves its own playlist. This plunder brought to you by my live-blooded backers at Patreon.
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I didn't, either! I love especially that it wasn't a matter of retro cred, it was the requirements of swinging for the fences of its very particular look and it's just nice that we don't have to give the actors Klieg eye because of it anymore. (They used a lot of halogen lamps, apparently.)