This movie has been out of theaters for a while–I’m writing this Dec 9th, about six weeks since we saw it and honestly I haven’t given it a lot of thought since, but it felt like I needed to set it down before writing about it since Wife and I had opposite reactions. We saw it with Friend on a Tuesday with the limited knowledge gleaned from the positively charming trailer and the knowledge that it would be a “Lovecraftian” horror filled with fart jokes. I think that The Lighthouse is a lovely addition to Roger Eggers’s growing canon of arthouse horror films. It’s the ultimate bro movie in the vein of I Love You, Man, but with turn of the century dialogue, and longer drinking scenes in the dark of night. The chemistry between Dafoe and Pattinson keeps the film rolling, drives the intensity of these raucous evenings. The shape of the story is so topsy-turvy, completely out of control, because it has so much pushing for the film to end with their eventual relief on the island, when in fact, their full stint acts as only the initial action of the story. The failure to receive relief is what drives their desperation and conflict and leads to a series of choices, growth, and discovery.
The allocation of time, it’s slipperiness, is one of my favorite elements of the film. The simple division of action that occurs during the day and night. There are a few moments when Dafoe’s dialogue lets slip that Pattinson has been proposing the same course of action, taking a row boat out, for “days,” when in fact it’s the first we’ve heard of it. The film doesn’t give us a sense of whether Dafoe is gaslighting Pattinson as a power play (he is regularly derided as a tall-tale-teller, as with his inconsistent stories about his bad leg injury), which feels possible because of the way that he jealously guards the upper room of the lighthouse) the way he bullies Pattison into doing menial tasks like cleaning the floor in humiliating ways, repairing the roof, or painting the stones of the lighthouse in a dangerous manner), or whether Pattinson is genuinely losing track of time. There are other moments when the script throws some curve balls that feel rewarding with the passage of time, like when Pattinson lets slip the name Tom in a drunken night of story-telling as if it is not in fact his own name. It goes unaddressed until a confrontation between the two much later, and if you’re not listening closely you might not even notice it, because Pattinson’s character himself is so unnaturally cheerful and voluble, that you might get caught up in his uncharacteristically chatty moment. The payoff is worthwhile, especially paired with our occasional returns to the image of the logs floating off shore in his dream sequences. An aside here to talk about the excellent way the script handles accents and speech in this film, as Pattinson wends in and out of 19th century Melvillian dialogue based on his sobriety, his mood, and his level of lucidity. Pattinson toward the end of the film when relations have soured in their final confrontation after the storm harks on his frustration with Dafoe’s phony affect, his reaching for the patois of old seadogs in the modern world, the stuffy, silly decorum that Dafoe has devised for their time together. Pattinson’s breaking of accent and speech suddenly feel less like imprecision and more like a clever nod to anachronism, the chimera of Melville’s impenetrable dialogue and the cruelty of modern expressions. These moments of deception depend on the spectacular fluidity of time.
The elements of magical realism are a mixture of gross and titillating: the mermaid on the beach, the slithering tentacle in the (suspected) dream sequence at the lighthouse, the violent murder of the seagull, and Neptune’s curse. These artistic moments are the connective tissue of Eggers’s work, the parts that make his movies fun to watch, approachable, unexpected, and exciting. I can sit down and watch a two hour period film about an abusive colonial family as long as I can rest confidently in the knowledge that at some point, somewhere, a teenage girl is going to do some dark fucking magic. I can power through a weird aspect ratio, black and white film with 19th century dialogue, provided that at some point there’s the possibility that someone is going to get shanked by a tentacle monster.
Wife essentially says that this movie lacked a core, had nothing to say, and constituted a two hour long wank session for toxic males to commiserate over male problems. I think, channeling her disappointment from October, she would say that the attention paid to the mermaid token and the mermaid itself reduced the film to not so much a slow-burn as a overly serious collection of navel-gazing that never quite launches.
I’ve been trying to level a response to that general criticism and I think my two observations are 1) how much I love the seemingly anti-millennial speeches (the young man’s story is “so common, so boring”) and 2) how well suited the film is to popular anxiety over the political conversation with relatives at the dinner table. “Was it about… Trump?” I hazarded to Wife while brushing my teeth a few hours after we’d seen it. “It wasn’t about anything,” she responded. Lighthouse’s proximity to Thanksgiving and the holidays, the proximity of scenes and dialogue to those of our own kitchen table discussions with the removal of a century’s worth of vocabulary, feels like a way of taking the partisan heat out of their discussions, or at least reorganizing (?) that heat in such a way to make it more evident. Knives Out, which I’ll write about soon is another film that I think did a great job this year of channeling that anxiety about the escape room feel of sitting down to eat with relatives in this period of American life.
So, against the recommendation of Wife, I think this is a go from me. Maybe see The VVitch first and if you can sit through two hours of colonial drama, you will definitely enjoy this second installment.
