The Lighthouse (dir. Robert Eggers, 2019)
In the last three or four movies, I’ve got a masturbation scene. I did it in High Life. I did it in Damsel. And The Devil All the Time. I only realized when I did it the fourth time. But when I saw the clay figure of the mermaid, if you’re getting turned on by that, you’re in a very strange place in your life.
—Robert Pattinson in an interview with Variety, October 2019
After the critical and financial success of his directorial debut The Witch in 2015, filmmaker Robert Eggers had the opportunity to do just about anything he could want. What he chose to do was to make a movie about Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe as nineteenth century lighthouse keepers going insane together on a barren rock in the North Atlantic, with period accurate dialogue, black and white cinematography, and an aspect ratio that’s barely been used since the 1930s.
It is an absolutely stunning piece of cinema in all its disgusting, funny, terrifying, manic, drunken, windswept, piss and shitsoaked glory. I cannot believe something like this managed to receive as wide of a release it got, and I hope it’s a box office smash against all the odds because I want Eggers to make even more alienating and bizarre films. It is so good that I am willing to overlook the fact that Pattinson’s Ephraim Winslow would be unlikely to reference Moby-Dick because it had fallen into obscurity by the 1890s and it would not be until the 1920s when the so-called Melville Revival began that anyone would be comparing Dafoe’s limping, soliloquizing ex-seaman Thomas Wake to Captain Ahab.
As to what greater meaning there is to The Lighthouse, who’s to say? An exercise in style, resurrecting techniques from the early years of cinema and the lost language of a previous century? A study in isolation, boredom, and madness? A weird sea tale? The inherent dehumanization of work? Youth versus age? Labor versus capital? A queer love story gone bad? Evidence that maybe all those nineteenth century temperance societies kind of had a point about alcohol? A buddy comedy for the ages?
The answer is, of course, all those things and more. Plus, Pattinson gets another notch in the old movie masturbation belt.
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