A Lighthouse Is Never Just A Lighthouse
By Arden Fitzroy
Do you remember the last film you watched in cinemas before lockdown hit, back in those carefree days? I do. Mine was The Lighthouse (2019), and really, does a better cinematic send-off into 18 months of lockdown even exist? Two lighthouse keepers, Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) and Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) are stranded on assignment on a remote island off the coast of Maine when a storm hits. Hark, there be spoilers: things go a bit wrong.
The two men eventually go mad in each other’s company, and supernatural elements may or may not be involved. Everything each of our stoic characters says may be an earnest unburdening (a “spilling of the beans”, if you will) or it may be total bullshit. Who knows? We are presented with several versions of what might be the truth: just as we are satisfied that we have caught someone out in a lie, something happens to cast doubt on the entire thing once more. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure in that regard. While there are so many ways to interpret all that happens, one thing that can be agreed on is that it’s a wild ride.
The Lighthouse rewards a rewatch with the captions on. The language used is some of the most luxurious, heightened, and image-heavy this side of Shakespeare, and Dafoe in particular has an uproarious time with the script. That said, despite the strange unreality baked into the film, something it does very well is to ground the characters in their 1890s setting, as real people you can relate to, in a situation that has actually happened. The film’s square aspect ratio on 35mm black-and-white film launches you right into their world, and makes it feel like a lost gem from the German Expressionist era. It’s striking, and it brings you close enough that truths and lies bleed together until they no longer matter as they would in another narrative. To the point that even focusing on what is red herring for the underlying emotions.
The queer subtext is really just text, most prominently in the scene where Wake and Winslow get smashed, raucous dancing turns into slow dancing, and, as the script says: “it seems like they might kiss… No, that’s madness!” So they start fighting instead, but in a weirdly intimate way, presumably because that’s more ‘allowed’, at least. This pull between the characters is something that can definitely be read in the performances, and was intentional. In an inimitably Pattinsonian turn of phrase from an interview: “He sort of wants a daddy.”
Now, this is interesting. Especially in a major, mostly mainstream, cinematic release. As a queer person who loves horror, I’ve had to find representation in subtext, no matter how problematic, meagre, or queerbait-y. And in horror more than any other genre, any aspect of queerness was used as something to layer in to unsettle the mostly white, cis, and heterosexual Americans who were presumed to comprise the major chunk of box office. Queerness of any form would be framed as the underlying, repressed motive causing the serial killers’ killing urge (how much has been said about Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs (1991) already?) or falsely equated with other pathological behaviour that has nothing to do with queerness. (e.g. in the subtext of Freddy Krueger’s preying on teenage girls and boys in their sleep.)
So: queerness has historically been used as something to amp up the horror and revulsion, for certain people. Now, the way The Lighthouse approaches it is different because among everything else that’s going on in the background, the attraction between the characters is the only thing in the entire film that doesn’t feel unsettling. It pulls focus back to the humanity of the situation.
It’s there that we can infer another reading of that eternal question, what the fuck is going on in The Lighthouse: that perhaps the real antagonist here is societal toxic masculinity, and what arises from it. What is meant here by toxic masculinity is the destructive behaviours that have been normalised under patriarchy. “Boys will be boys will be eldritch sea creatures etc.” We can also infer some notes of compulsory heterosexuality—where monogamous heterosexuality is assumed and enforced as the big thing to aspire to—in Wake’s (possibly fictional) stories of wives and girlfriends past, who all paled before the pull of the sea. Amusingly, Winslow does call him out on his “Captain Ahab bullshit.” But there’s a lot to unpack in what each character expresses, even if it’s untrue in a specific story, in the kind of stories and goals a typical working-class man of the 1890s would be expected to tell. Winslow just wants to be able to settle somewhere with “no one to tell [him] what for.” A lot of this hasn’t changed.
Everything about the film expresses claustrophobia, and that could include the roles our leading men are compelled (or in Winslow’s case, forced) to take. They fear everything that threatens their control. Wake becomes increasingly paranoid at any implication that he may lose control of tending to the great big Light, which of course only makes Winslow more curious about what the deal is. There is a cycle of increasingly destructive dominance which develops between them, starting off as benignly as the hierarchy of their context would allow—their opening interaction being Wake farting in Winslow’s face—and ending up with Winslow forcing Wake to walk across the island on all fours on a leash. It is a film that doesn’t struggle with escalation.
Proximity to the feminine is seen as degrading. Most of the epithets they sling at each other are gendered feminine, and in the context placed as something weak, less than: the whining ‘painted actress’ Wake accuses Winslow of being when he demands to know the truth, the ‘old bitch’ Winslow throws at Wake when the latter wants to know if he’s fond of his lobster. There’s a constant push-and-pull of gender roles that they force onto each other: in one scene, Winslow decries being Wake’s ‘housewife’—making apparent how they devalue that invaluable manner of work. Even though Winslow’s job is meant to be that of upkeep, maintenance, and assisting the lighthouse keeper, in Wake’s enforcement of the role and Winslow’s response we can see how this job turned into another component of this cycle of control, that Winslow feels personally belittled. The siren, the closest thing to a feminine figure in the story, mostly exists as a symbol of Winslow’s increasingly tortured expressions of desire, usually intercut with shots of the guy from his past life whose death he feels guilty over in one of several masturbation scenes.
The Lighthouse shows in a nuanced way I haven’t really seen in anything else the way that structural violence affects everyone. The violence of social hierarchy, and how it punishes anyone who so much toes the line of their assigned role—and the violence of the capitalist superstructure which thrives on this. Perhaps that is the true punishment visited on Winslow in that final shot, half-dead and eaten alive by seagulls. The real Promethean hubris of our times: non-conformity to our assigned roles.
The funny thing is that all the physical and emotional abuse they fall into, all the weird visions and symbols, the fighting and the swigging of honeyed turpentine—all these things make more sense to the characters in their context than the human alternative. And if that’s not a scathing commentary on the world beyond the island, I don’t know what is.
Arden Fitzroy (they/them) is an actor, writer-poet and producer, who believes in experimentation and blurring the boundaries of genre, gender and art forms. Their writing has appeared or is forthcoming with the Royal Society of Literature, Untitled Writing, Stone of Madness Press, UCL Culture, Rejection Letters, and more. They have sat on judging panels for the British Fantasy Awards and are a frequent guest on pop culture podcasts. They were shortlisted for the London Writers Award in Poetry 2018, the Creative Future Writers’ Awards 2020, the VAULT FIVE 2021, and the Streetcake Experimental Writing Prize 2021, and have opened for Saul Williams on the Roundhouse Main Stage. They have also written for short film, theatre, and audio. You can find Arden on Twitter and Instagram.
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