The Lighthouse

 I heard this joke in New Hampshire.  It's about Maine.  People in New Hampshire think of folks in their neighboring state as primitive bumpkins with funny-sounding accents.  To get the full effect of this joke, it must be imagined as spoken with drawl of an old-time Maine lobster-man.  Up in Maine, a newcomer to the State is surprised by a visit from his neighbor.  The neighbor says:  "I'm here to invite you to a party."  "What kind of party?" the newcomer asks.  "Well," the Maine old-timer says:  "They'll be drinkin' and, then, dancin'.  Then, there'll be fightin' and, finally, fuckin'."  "Wow," the newcomer says.  "Sounds wild.  Who's invited?"  "Just you," the old Maine fisherman says.  This joke pretty much summarizes the action in Robert Eggers' The Light House, a grumpy and tedious horror film starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe.  Pattinson plays a young man, a refugee from the Canadian lumber camps, who signs up for a four-week gig tending a remote light house somewhere off the north Atlantic coast -- the film was shot, in part, in Nova Scotia.  Pattinson's boss is named Tom Wick, a much older man (a bit like Coleridge's "ancient mariner").  The film is, to all intents and purposes, a two-hander:  the light house master and his assistant are ill-matched and, at first, Wick mercilessly bullies and torments Pattinson's character who is called either Winslow or Thomas Howard (it turns out that this kid has killed a man in the lumber camps and taken his name, Ephraim Winslow).  For the first two-thirds of the movie, Wick persecutes his assistant, demanding that he do pointless and agonizingly hard jobs involving the maintenance of the light house.  Wick may be some kind of sea-god; in one shot, he's naked, holding down the young man and his eyes blaze with light -- he seems to be an embodiment of the light house itself in this image.  Winslow/Thomas, however, is mentally unstable and the constant bullying harassment by Wick doesn't help things.  He's prone to seeing visions, including a dead sailor's head in a lobster pot and sexually voracious mermaids.  The tables turn in the film's last third -- now, Winslow/Thomas savagely beats the old Tom Wick, drags him around on a leash like a dog, and, at last, buries him alive.  By this time, the light house's spartan housing has been drowned by a perpetual storm that lashes the rocky islet and the two men savage each other in knee-deep water into which they also piss and vomit.  The tempest has kept the men from being relieved of their light house duties and they are running low on food -- fortunately, Wick has cached about fifty bottles of booze in the dirt next to the light house and so the two men spend the second half of the movie getting drunk and, then, staying drunk.  While inebriated they dance together and embrace and, even, come close to kissing. Meanwhile outside, enormous waves hammer the light house rocks and a mermaid sprawls on the vicious-looking stone ledges next to the sea.  When Winslow/Thomas has sex with the mermaid, she opens her mouth and screams like a sea-gull.  

The film is grim to the point of being unintentionally funny.  Shot in black and white, everything looks sodden, rain-swept, and cold.  It's a handsome movie, made in the style of David Lynch's early pictures, particularly Eraserhead, dense with different shades of black  The light house throbs and pumps and makes guttural intestinal noises like the apartment building in Blue Velvet -- the sea and the tower sound like they are engaged in some kind of nightmare industry.  Eggers choreographs the action with many slow and lugubrious crane shots -- the camera slowly rises up around the spiral steps in the light house passing through different gradations of pitch-black, grey, and misty whitish gloom.  Strange geared machines chug away in an outbuilding.  There are several cisterns full of dark water that may be sewage.  At one point, Winslow/Thomas has to thrown lye or something into one of these black wells.  The light house master won't let his helper ascend into the brilliant blaze of the mirrored tower-top cell where the fresnel lens of the oil-fired light rotates to cast its beam into the watery chaos around the islet.  This isn't only one area to which the assistant is denied access -- he's also not allowed to open a locked armoire in which the light house keeper stores a journal in which he writes incessantly.  At one point, the master tells the kid that he is recommending that he be docked all of his pay due to "incessant self-abuse" that has kept him from performing his duties.  At the bloody climax of the film, Thomas/Winslow takes the keys from the corpse of Wick (he has to half disinter the man that he earlier buried alive) and breaks into the armoire.  It's not clear what he reads in the journal but his eyes grow wide with horror -- the scene is a variant on the episode in The Shining in which poor Shelley Duval reads her husband's novel which consists of one sentence repeated a million times:  "all work and no play make Jack a dull boy."  This is another comical aspect to the movie -- it recapitulates other more famous horror films but doesn't bother to surpass them.  (For instance, we see Wick chasing Thomas/Winslow with an axe, limping along like the villain in The Shining because one of his legs is -- I kid you not -- a pirate's peg leg.)  at the very end, Winslow/Thomas also climbs up into the top of the beacon, a place to which he has been denied access:  the chamber is filled with light and mirrors and this supernatural radiance blazes on the young man as he howls at the sky.  But nothing is revealed.  

The two characters speak in a strange lingo that is a mixture of pirate gibberish with Shakespearian nonsense.  The actors affect such heavy nor'east accents that most of what they say is impenetrable.  (Sometimes, Pattinson drops the accent and sounds like Teddy Kennedy or the corrupt politician with the Kennedy accent in The Simpsons.) At one point, Wick taunting his assistant says:  "Every scantling of your soul is Winslow no more but is barren sea alone."  Thomas/Winslow gets a similar aria in which denounces Wick.  After his soliloquy, which sounds a bit like something from the blacker parts of Macbeth or King Lear, Wick is impressed -- "ah, you have a quite a way with words, laddy," he grunts.  This elaborate diction is probably very impressive -- Eggers is known for his ability to write grim, poetic sounding effusions (he successfully simulated Puritan diction in his first film The Witch) but it's all for naught if you can't understand what the actors are saying.  In The Light House, there's so much pirate "argh!" in the speech that it's impossible to figure out the dialogue.  As far as I can tell, it probably doesn't make any sense at anyway.  The movie is all mood and no plot -- everything gets increasingly disgusting as the movie proceeds; in the end, the two men, who have become irredeemable drunks, pour some kind of viscous glop into their booze -- is it some sort of oil, even, perhaps the stuff that fuels the light house beacon? In the last scene, hungry sea gulls eviscerate poor Thomas/Winslow who lies paralyzed on the frigid rocks. This is avian revenge for the young man slaughtering a sea gull that has been harassing him.  He's been warned:  Wick has told him that sea fowl are inhabited by the souls of dead mariners.  

I wasn't able to figure out what this movie is supposed to be about.  It has some of the nihilistic and comical features of Beckett's Waiting for Godot with two men alternating between master and slave.  There's an aspect of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner in the motif about the vengeful sea fowls.  The movie looks like David Lynch and seems derived pictorially from that director's work and the plot involving the delirium-inducing aspects of isolation (cabin fever) alludes to The Shining.  Other aspects of The Shining are on display -- it's not clear what is real and what is hallucination and, as at the Overlook Hotel, there are forbidden rooms in which evil secrets lurk.  It's not clear when the story is supposed to be taking place.  Thomas/Winslow denounces Wick as "not even a good Captain Ahab imitation" -- so he seems to have read Moby Dick and, in fact, talks in that book's garbled Elizabethan diction.  Eggers is a serious film maker and the picture probably is carefully designed and rife with symbolic significance -- but it's too obtuse and morbidly grim to be worth investing any interpretative energy in the thing.  The movie is shot in the old German Expressionist ratio -- it's pillar-boxed which gives the black and white images a strong impression of confinement and claustrophobia and, dare I says, madness. The film's pacing is all messed-up.  There's no slow burn toward the insanity at the end.  In the movie's first ten minutes, Winslow/Ephraim finds a little effigy of a mermaid in the sea-weed stuffed mattress on which he has to sleep -- and from that point to the end, we're off to the races.