The Lighthouse, A Film By Robert Eggers

Robert Eggers has a saying: nothing good happens when two men are trapped inside a giant phallus. In the director’s new film, The Lighthouse, a testosterone-fuelled duo, played by Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, are stranded on the coast of Maine, in 1890, with only a lighthouse and each other for company. It’s the ultimate “why won’t you fuck already?” movie. In these claustrophobic quarters, the pair fist-fight and bicker non-stop, but do so passionately, with homoerotic tension, hard gazes, and wrestling moves that, if slowed down, could be mistaken for foreplay. As the two sexually frustrated guys stare each other down, the very erect, penis-shaped building behind them starts to resemble a thought bubble.

Of the two men, Thomas Wake (Dafoe) is the older, dominant figure, yet also a bearded, flatulent pastiche who mutters phrases like “yer fond of me lobster, ain’t ye?” and “yer fastly a true blue wickie in the making, you is”. Ephraim Winslow (Pattinson), in contrast, is more unhinged and manic; in the script, the apprentice is described as “like a dog that’s been beaten and caged too many times”. With nowhere to go at night, these two opposing energies clash in drunken arguments that unfold like chess matches: will somebody end up dead by morning? Or is it about attempting to penetrate the other’s personal space?

Eggers first established himself as a genre extraordinaire with his 2015 debut, The Witch, a supernatural folk horror starring Anya Taylor-Joy. But whereas The Witch was feminine, deeply serious and widescreen, The Lighthouse is unbearably masculine, knowingly ridiculous and squeezed into a square-shaped frame. “The Lighthouse wasn’t intended to be a phallic companion piece to The Witch,” Eggers tells Dazed, visiting the UK for the London Film Festival. “But that’s clearly what it is.”

Shot in black and white, in grainy 16mm, with a 1.19:1 aspect ratio, The Lighthouse seems to mimic a lost film from a bygone era, but Eggers insists otherwise. “There are nods to the past that an uneducated cinema viewer will perceive as just ‘an old movie’ in its look. But the way we light it is not from the early sound period.” The 36-year-old director gives a technical explanation about exposure, kerosene lamps, and how he used practical lighting fixtures for each scene. “We’re trying to create our own thing.”

Although A24 heavily pushed Uncut Gems and The Farewell during awards season, their sole Oscar nomination was for Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography on The Lighthouse. Eggers notes, “The Witch was intended to be restrained and subtle, and to not draw too much attention to the camera. But The Lighthouse screams, ‘Look how cool this shot is!’ in a way that’s vulgar and juvenile. The whole movie is over the top.”

Pattinson, 33, dressed like his character from Good Time, tells me of a torturous shoot. Some of it was the location, the weather, and the gallons of cold water hosed onto his face. The rest came from the actor mentally preparing himself – this includes self-imposed retching – in between takes. In fact, on the first day of filming, Pattinson had a masturbation scene.

As Eggers is a stickler for details, were there comprehensive instructions for how people pleasured themselves in the 19th century? “It came with a diagram,” Pattinson jokes. “Like period-accurate wanking? There was a stage direction saying that when he has an orgasm, he lets out this guttural scream. It’s nice having something like that, because you get to set the precedent of how crazy you can go in other scenes. The first take was way more than what it was in the movie. I was throwing up on myself as I was orgasming at the same time!” He laughs. “People wouldn’t have realised what was going on.”

I offer the Portrait of a Lady on Fire comparison to Dafoe, too. “It’s not just about male toxicity,” the 64-year-old actor says. “It has a lot to do with identity and belief systems and the mysteriousness of the light, and what that signifies. Some people see a father/son relationship. Some people find it very erotic. Some people think it’s a romance. Some people think it’s a master and a slave.”

Last year, Dafoe told Dazed his main aim was to be perceived as a non-actor. But Wake is comically over the top and delivers lengthy, tongue-twister monologues; when the two men scream “what?!” at each other, it’s like a Meisner training exercise. "I still stand by that!” Dafoe says. “I’m interested in disappearing into a role, but the challenge with this is to embrace the theatricality, and to mute it, and to make the poetic prosaic. When you’re in the middle of it, you don’t feel like an actor.”

The script, written by Robert with his brother, Max Eggers, was initially about “a guy and his dog repairing and restoring a lighthouse to be a museum, and there’s a ghost in it”. But when the director plunged into the research, the story shifted and the esoteric world naturally developed. “You’re looking at photographs of old lighthouse stations, sailors, and sea captains,” Eggers explains. “They inspire you. The atmosphere becomes cumulative, from the facial hair that the actors grow themselves, to the dirt under their fingernails.”

Eggers sighs when I ask about Pattinson’s on-set rituals (“I was not encouraging Rob to piss himself and vomit…”) but perks up when it comes to production design. For instance, Eggers excitedly sets up what he promises will be an exclusive nugget of info, and it’s about the period-accurate floorboards, and how they were deliberately uneven and constructed so that certain areas would puddle with water when the house was flooded. “But they weren’t distressed right. We had to act fast and change our schedule to do more work on the floorboards. That might seem insignificant, but these details accumulate into a credible world where you can believe in mermaids.”

When Pattinson jerks off to a miniature mermaid figurine, was that also inspired by historical materials? “I didn’t read about lighthouse keepers masturbating, but I have a hunch they probably did,” Eggers says, chuckling. “I found ivory scrimshaw mermaids and naked women in the research that seemed like, you know, primitive pornography. Without the internet, what else are you going to do?”

At one point, Pattinson tells me, there was a match cut between the lighthouse and an erect penis. “That was in the movie for ages,” Pattinson says. “When I saw it, I didn’t even know it was a penis. I thought it was the lighthouse. But it was a penis getting hard, and then the lighthouse kind of tilting. It was so subtle. I don’t know why they couldn’t have left it in.”

However, the film is still full of ambiguities, especially when Winslow is driven mad through loneliness, horniness, and paranoia that he’s being gaslit by Wake. “I relate to any story implying that there’s something hidden behind a door,” Pattinson explains. “If someone says, ‘I can’t tell you that’ – I cannot progress past that point in the conversation until they tell me what they were going to say. It’s a universal emotion. My character’s a little crazy anyway, but it’s that fixation. I’m thinking: I need, I need, I need – it heightens everything.”

When Pattinson asked Eggers what was real and imaginary, the director told him it could be anything he wanted. “You can’t really play that,” says Pattinson. “But if you’re having passionate emotions about something, the ambiguity comes quite naturally. My character wants to be recognised and validated. I always thought that he’s looking for a daddy in Willem’s character. He doesn’t realise it, but he gets pleasure out of being a submissive – which you wouldn’t necessarily get when you watch it, but I thought that was there.”

The Lighthouse was partially inspired by a real incident known as the Smalls Lighthouse Tragedy. In 1801, Thomas Griffith and Thomas Howell, the latter decades older than the other, manned a lighthouse together in Wales. When Howell died in an accident, Griffith continued living with the corpse and slowly lost his mind. Following the incident, it became mandatory for British lighthouses to be helmed by a minimum of three people.

Fittingly, Dafoe considers the lighthouse to be a symbol of isolation. “It’s reaching out and serving other people,” he says. “But the lives of these people are solitary and turned inward. There’s a world out there that they’re reaching out to but aren’t quite contacting.” The lighthouse’s Fresnel lens – period-accurate, if you were wondering – is almost sci-fi in its blinding brightness. “The light is mysterious because it leads the way. It’s filled with all kinds of fraught meaning, and will mean different things to different people.”

To top it off is an incessant foghorn – imagine the beeping door of Uncut Gems, but it never stops – and an immersive, hypnotic sound design. During the writing, Eggers would play MP3s of the sea, the winds, and, yes, the foghorn. “It’s a delicate line,” the director explains. “That foghorn needs to be something that you can understand would drive the characters crazy, without having the audience leave.”

Has anyone told Eggers that The Witch, particularly the whispery “wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” climax, is prime ASMR material? He shakes his head. Well, is he conscious of the pleasurable side of soundscapes? “I generally try to make it unpleasurable! But even if you’re telling a ‘terrible, horrible, no good, very bad’ story, you’re trying to find harmony in the chaos that is life, and the beauty in the ugliness.”

Moreover, the rhythm of the dialogue is metronomic, and the cadence certainly goes against Dafoe’s non-actor claim. Still, many of the quotes could be incorporated into your daily life. Feeling hungry? “If I had a steak, I could fuck it.” Need a holiday? “The sea, she’s the only situation wantin’ fer me.” Somebody won’t respond to your Facebook message? “O what Protean forms swim up from men’s minds and melt in hot Promethean plunder scorching eyes with divine shames and horrors.”

“You can’t improvise,” Dafoe says. “It’s too constructed. Improvisation is held up as this wonderful, creative thing, but it isn’t necessarily. No matter how clever some people are, you can subconsciously feel them standing outside of themselves.” Given the amount of preparation, including the dialect training, would Dafoe consider a prequel or sequel? “You’d have to bring in Netflix to scrub us up – we’d have to be 30 years younger.”

A big two years for Pattinson awaits as he will star in Matt Reeves’ The Batman and Christopher Nolan’s $205 million-budgeted Tenet. Among Dafoe’s upcoming projects is Eggers’ third film, The Northman. (“It’s a nice role,” Dafoe teases.) The Northman, a Viking revenge-thriller set in the 10th century, will also feature Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy, Bill Skarsgård and Alexander Skarsgård. According to rumours, it will also mark Björk’s first acting gig since Dancer in the Dark.

“I would be very bored making a contemporary movie,” Eggers says. “I love researching as a means to an end, and as a means to be able to build a complete 19th century lighthouse station with a 70ft tower.” Does that affect the scripts he gets offered? “I get sent everything. I don’t read most of them, because I’m interested in my own stuff. Certainly, I get a lot of horror stuff. It’s rare that larger franchises are sending me scripts, but they will call me for a meeting to see if I’d be interested.”

What about a 19th century Batman? “I think Batman belongs to no earlier than the 1930s,” Eggers says. “Imagine Fritz Lang doing Batman as an actual detective noir. That’d be cool.”

For now, though, there’s The Lighthouse, a psychosexual comedy-horror that’s arguably a celebration of the cinema experience – the characters themselves are mesmerised by the spectacle of a bright, projected light. “The effect of having the compressed aspect ratio on a huge screen really does something,” Pattinson says. “I would love to watch it on IMAX. It’s such an alien, experiential movie. If you’re sitting in a dark room, you feel completely overwhelmed and disoriented.”

And, at the very least, you get to witness Dafoe being buried alive. In the actor’s impeccable filmography, it’s one of his finest scenes, and it typifies the cruel, absurd humour of The Lighthouse. “It’s the purest kind of performing,” Dafoe says. “It’s a horrible feeling. I used to say after I did The Last Temptation of Christ that everybody should go up on the cross, because regardless of your background, you’re going to feel something.

“It’s similar. It’s very close to what would happen if I was buried alive in real life.” He laughs. “It’s about breathing. It’s about tasting that sand. It’s about keeping that speech going. It’s about having that last word. It’s about feeling miserable and feeling so elementally dejected.”

Robert Pattinson on masturbation and the lonely eroticism of The Lighthouse. By Nick Chen. Dazed ,  January  27, 2020.

Robert Eggers and Jarin Blaschke are one of those director-cinematographer teams that can make it hard to sense exactly where to draw the line between each filmmaker’s contribution. Eggers is a former production designer with a pinpoint graphic sense of what’s in frame, and for the period feel that fuels his scripts. However, he relies on his cinematographer’s intimate knowledge of his vision to storyboard and help find the unique look, feel, and visual language of his films.

Like “The Witch,” the process of creating the visual language of “The Lighthouse” was a long, evolving dialogue between the two friends. IndieWire talked to both — Eggers on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, Blaschke at the cinematography film festival Camerimage in Poland — to learn more about the ideas, decisions, and execution that resulted in one of the year’s most cinematically inventive films.

The Square-ish (1.2) Aspect Ratio

Blaschke: It seemed like a great shape to depict the story and then it has another secondary benefit of transporting you: It’s claustrophobic, there’s a giant phallus in it, and there’s only two men. And even if you put them in a two-shot, you’re scrunching them to put them in that frame; they barely can fit. The frame is right at their backs in the two-shot. In a real space, if feels kind of ridiculous because the room does have space, but we’re not showing it, so the room feels smaller. Even in a wider shot, the ceiling starts coming down because of the shape of it.

We also have a lot of up-and-down vertical shots, booming and cable shots going up and down the stairs. “The Lighthouse” is more close-up oriented than “The Witch,” too. It’s just a better format for close ups — not just faces, but details.

Black-and-White Film Stock

Eggers: And from the beginning, how do we create a black-and-white look that’s special and will give the most texture and will be the most interesting to this story? So we shot on black-and-white negative because there’s a way in which the blacks just bottom out in a way you can’t quite get by shooting color and doing it in the DI.

Blaschke: Film is our palette of choice. When they were doing the budget for both “The Lighthouse” and “Witch,” we didn’t know which would go first. Rob asked me, “Can we get close [to what we want] through digital means?” I said, “No.” Then “The Witch” happened. That was ideally going to be shot on film — it wasn’t — and it was a relative success, to put it mildly, and he got the courage to push for shooting on film. Even in the script, before he introduces the characters there’s a single line: “Must be photographed in black-and-white 35mm film, aspect ratio 1.2: 1.” Just to calibrate your mind as you read it.

Kodak makes Double-X and Tri-X. Tri X is actually a better film stock; the latitude is probably similar, it just has a smoother, sharper image, but they only make it 16mm. They’d cut it for us in 35mm, but they would charge a dollar a foot. For our film, the kind of broken-down look, the Double-X was actually more suitable, so we let the Tri-X go, but man, I would love to shoot Tri-X on a movie.

Sunglasses-at-Night Bright

Blaschke: Kodak rates Double-X at 250 [ASA measures how fast, or light sensitive, a film stock is — the lower the number, the more light required to achieve proper exposure], but I tend to consider that a bit optimistic. They’re trying to market their film, so they put the highest speed they can get away with. I pulled a half stop and called it 160 in doing my calculations. We had a custom filter that cut about a stop out, so you’re dealing with ASA 80. 35mm color film is 500, and Alexa is 800, so it’s just a whole different discipline.

I also prefer bounce light, which is very, very inefficient. On top of that, the lenses we used have a lot of character, but they are different depending on where you set the aperture. If you shoot it wide open [letting in the maximum amount of light], it just goes too far. It’s smeary.

So you can’t have a very wide aperture, the film stock isn’t very sensitive, we put a filter on top of that, and bounce light is inefficient. By the time it gets in a window, it’s greatly reduced so lighting the interiors required a tremendous amount of light. We had every big HMI in Nova Scotia going and we stole a lot from Toronto.

Eggers: It was also a challenge, because black-and-white takes so much more light. Even if it’s a scene with a single kerosene lamp, the light bulb that is pretending to be the flame of that lamp was blindingly bright and often time people were wearing sunglasses on set when we were shooting night interiors.

Weathered Texture and a Special Filter

Blaschke: Rob loves texture. He wants the sets to have water stains and filth. In both movies, he’s had the floor redone, and you don’t see the floor that often.

Eggers: We had a custom filter made by Schneider that created more of an orthochromatic look so you could get all the texture on Dafoe and Pattinson’s faces.

Blaschke: It’s a cyan filter, photographically pure. No red light gets through; it just discards any red light.

Initially, a lot of our references were early photography, and early photography has a kind of emulsion that doesn’t see red light. In fact, the earliest emulsions didn’t see green light even, just blue light, so that renders the color world in a very specific way. With 19th-century photographs, you can have a sunny day and the sky still looks blank white, no clouds, because it’s blue and blue becomes white.

Things that have a lot of red, like caucasian skin tones, become much darker and it just amplifies variations within a red tone. Like this brick wall [pointing to a wall in the restaurant where the interview took place], you’d have very dark bricks, different shades of brick would be emphasized. And if you have ruddy skin, or little blood vessels, or a blemish, it just amplifies it, which just takes you to a palette from another time. It’s a little peculiar, and hopefully it’s transportive.

Eggers: It proved complicated for costume and production design because it renders colors differently. These are all things that, in the middle of the last century, people knew how to do this. We were having to research.

Blaschke: The way we are shooting — getting this hard, very severe, unfriendly, blank white sky — it’s almost a conflict sometimes because it tends to brighten skies. If you have storms, which were a big part of this film, you need it to be dark. That became tricky where you actually had to put in a grad [filter] to make a dark sky, because in general we wanted it to be as austere as possible.

But it was worth the headache, because Rob and the art department would get the texture right on set, and then I’m amplifying it with the filter while achieving this distinctive old-photography look.

Shot Listing and Finding the Visual Language

Eggers: Look, if anybody likes the cinematic language of this movie, or “The Witch,” it’s definitely a collaboration between me and Jarin. I’m totally not Scorsese saying, “This is what we’re shooting, light it, and shut up.” It’s very collaborative and there’s many specific shots that I write into the screenplay, but we’re working on the language together.

Blaschke: For me, a lot of it is instinctual the way we come together with our shots. I’ll just read the script, first time for story, but I just keep reading it over and over and over. I have more time with Rob; I have the scripts earlier than I would if I didn’t know him. A more complex idea comes to my head, and if I don’t have all the shots yet, I’ll just read through the script again. I tend to read it in order as the audience would watch the film, as opposed to jumping around, or do the most difficult stuff first.

I can’t speak for Rob, but our stuff tends to just mesh together. I’ve never asked about the mystery of that, but for me, I don’t only think about shots, but cuts. “What is likely the shot before? What’s the shot likely after?” Scenes do get mixed up and scenes get taken out, but I do my best to play it in my mind like an animation.

I think about each cut as valuable as each shot. If this shot ends at this point, what is the most effective image after that, and don’t move onto a new shot unless you actually have something new to say. So if you’re kind of playing within a certain idea in a scene, stay there. Stay in shot-reverse-shot, or stay in the two-shot. If the scene has a new beat, then you can do something else, but I don’t give myself permission to do something else until that thing is finished.

The Lighthouse

Blaschke: I think I’m pretty imaginative with the camera, but lighting-wise much less so. I need a reference in real life. In the script it says, “He’s enchanted by this marvelous enchanting, bewitching, swirling patterns” of the lighthouse light, and you go to a real lighthouse and that’s actually what it does – the machine room underneath has these swirling patterns, almost like you are underwater – so it’s like, “Oh, thank God.”

You have the rotating lens, that was built. And while I might not have been able to invent these lighting patterns, I know that a light at a certain angle, through a certain part of the lens, is going to make a pattern. You have to play with it a little bit, what part of the lens to project the light.

A real lighthouse at the time would have been an oil flame in the middle and the lens just amplifies it. At these museum lighthouses that are still working, it’s just a 60-watt bulb in there, but for our slow film stock it needs to be bright light. We had a 6,000 watt HMI bulb, which was exceptionally bright. It would throw light across the bay to the town and it was going into people’s windows at two in the morning, which I felt bad about, but when they first turned that on it was enchanting, especially when it was that bright. Any little mist in the air puts out these beams. It’s grainy, but there is detail in that highlight. If we shot digitally, that wouldn’t be there.

The Visual Language of ‘The Lighthouse’ Is So Much More Than Black-and-White. By Chris O’Falt.  Indiewire. January 31 , 2020

In the same year that the Twilight saga ended, Robert Pattinson starred in David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis (2012), and it felt like a statement of intent from a young actor determined to take control of his career. Pattinson is a risk-taker who is drawn to directors with unique visions and roles that push him to extremes, and The Lighthouse is the latest chapter in an increasingly impressive body of work.

When you first read this screenplay, what was it that connected with you and convinced you that you had to do it?

Screenplay writing is quite a strange artform. It’s just designed to make you turn the page and it’s a sort of bastardised version of writing a lot of the time.

When you see something from page one that’s like, “This is something that’s not going to change, there’s not going to be any script revisions, you’ve written it as a piece of writing” – when you feel that level of respect for something and that disciplined approach, it’s powerful. I remember reading Paul Thomas Anderson’s scripts and that’s a similar thing, where it doesn’t feel like a script, it’s something more.

If you’re making in any way a narrative movie and the script is bad and the dialogue is bad, it doesn’t matter what you do with it, the movie will be bad. So when someone is writing something in a very special way, you trust it.

 When I spoke to Robert Eggers he said, “Rob and Willem have different combinations of inside-out and outside-in, method and not-method.” How would you describe your approach to acting?

 I saw Willem do an interview where he said, “The only way for Robert to approach a scene is to jump in the water and drown,” and I was like, “That’s kinda true.” I’ll prep stuff but sometimes when I say what I’ve been thinking about a part, I always feel so silly talking about it, and you’re much better off just keeping it to yourself.

I know I can access a kind of recklessness, which doesn’t always work, but I know how to really hype myself up now. It’s fun, but it can only work when you’re in a particular type of scene or working with a particular actor. Willem is a really exciting actor to do stuff with because it’s never phoned in, ever, and we both really enjoy going to that manic level.

It’s unusual for a film to be a pure two-hander and The Lighthouse does have a very theatrical quality. Did you approach it any differently because of that?

Not really, but when we were rehearsing Robert had taped out the whole room exactly to the dimensions of the set, and Willem and Robert have both done a lot of theatre, but maybe I just don’t have the imagination for it.

In some ways the blocking was like a play, but there was also weird stuff like the aspect ratio meant we had to be closer together. There are so many scenes when we’re close together just to get in the shot, but then it kind of adds this weird thing because they’re supposed to have so much animosity, but we look like we’re about to kiss all the time.

Everything about Robert’s filmmaking is very precise, from the dialogue to the blocking to the lighting. How do you respond to that kind of exacting direction?

I kind of like it. I think you always balk at it initially. You think, “I want to have total freedom to do this thing,” but really even if someone says this is the track you’re on, the direction is still always different and particular.

It’s also not designed for any perceived audience satisfaction, it’s just for Robert’s taste and that’s the movie I wanted to make, so it’s actually weirdly satisfying. And it’s exciting; if someone says the only way they’ll accept the scene is if you get a hole-in-one, when you do get that hole-in-one it’s like [screams excitedly].

Willem often talks about his choices being dictated by filmmakers and how dedicated he is to fulfilling a director’s vision, and it seems you have a similar outlook. Do you look at his career as a model to follow?

His career is impossible! Willem is a one-off, but I do love the fact that he’s just so excited about finding new directors. I mean, he is on the hunt for directors constantly.

I think supporting people who are making exciting stuff, especially when it’s so difficult to get anyone to come and see anything, it does make a difference. There are so many auteur directors whose movies don’t make any money, but there’s always a believer somewhere, some kind of patron, and they always seem to have long careers. I mean, Claire [Denis] is still making loads of movies. I think there are believers everywhere if you are a believer.

“I know how to hype myself up now”: Robert Pattinson on making The Lighthouse. By Philip Concannon. Sight & Sound ,  January 31, 2020. 

If The Lighthouse director Robert Eggers suffers from anxiety of influence, it doesn’t show. His gothic maritime horror film depicting a psychosexual power struggle between bullying ‘wickie’ Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) and his guilt-ridden assistant Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) off the coast of 1890s Maine draws on many literary works, paintings and films. It’s less a text than a trove.

 Literary influences

The film originated with the attempt of Eggers’s co-writer brother, Max, to develop a screenplay from a late Edgar Allan Poe fragment about a Norwegian noble who exults in his solitude as a lighthouse keeper but experiences forebodings. The brothers merged the idea with the story of Thomas Griffith and Thomas Howell, quarrelsome real-life wickies who in 1801 served at the Smalls Lighthouse west of Pembrokeshire in Wales. When Griffith died, Howell placed the decomposing corpse in a makeshift coffin and lashed it to railings outside. The sight of one of Griffith’s arms flapping in the wind is said to have driven Howell mad. He anticipates the paranoid murderer-narrator of Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) and Winslow.

Winslow’s bloody feud with seagulls harks back to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). Its narrator, a wedding guest, learns from the mariner, of “grey beard and glittering eye”, how he brought death to his ship by killing an albatross:

    The very deep did rot: O Christ!

That ever this should be!

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs

Upon the slimy sea.

About, about, in reel and rout

The death-fires danced at night;

The water, like a witch’s oils,

Burnt green, and blue and white.

The tapping of one of the gulls at Winslow’s bedside window owes a debt to Poe’s The Raven (1845) and The Tale of Tod Lapraik in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped sequel Catriona (aka David Balfour, 1893), which tells of two men’s struggle for control of the isolated Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth – one of whom assumes the guise of a solan goose to attack the other when he’s suspended by a rope on a cliff face. Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), based on Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 story, is also an obvious touchstone.

Wake represents the Homeric sea god Proteus – as he sometimes appears to Winslow – and Winslow is Prometheus, the stealer of fire whom Zeus chains to a rock so his liver will be eaten repeatedly by an eagle. Wake and Winslow echo, too, The Tempest’s Prospero (king) and Caliban (resentful slave). Characterised by what Eggers calls “faux-Shakespearian, faux-Miltonian” rhetoric, the threats and sea-myth curse Wake lays on Winslow conjures the monologues in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), as when Stubb tells Flask he dreamed Captain Ahab had turned into a pyramid:

   “While I was battering away at the pyramid, a sort of badger-haired old merman, with a hump on his back, takes me by the shoulders, and slews me round. ‘What are you ’bout?’ says he. Slid! man, but I was frightened. Such a phiz! But, somehow, next moment I was over the fright. ‘What am I about?’ says I at last. ‘And what business is that of yours, I should like to know, Mr Humpback? Do you want a kick?’ By the lord, Flask, I had no sooner said that, than he turned round his stern to me, bent over, and dragging up a lot of seaweed he had for a clout – what do you think, I saw? – why thunder alive, man, his stern was stuck full of marlinspikes, with the points out. Says I, on second thoughts, ‘I guess I won’t kick you, old fellow.’”

Captain Ahab’s obsessive hunt for the whale is mirrored in Wake’s jealous possession of the lighthouse and its lantern, which triggers Winslow’s need to see it, effectively opening Pandora’s Box in a climax traceable to Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955).

Wake’s rhythmic dialogue was modelled on the speech of the captains, sailors and fishermen – and in Winslow’s case, farm people – interviewed by Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1901) to authenticate her regionalist fiction, which eloquently captured the decline of their trades in coastal southeast Maine. Her stories are suffused with nostalgia. In her 1877 novel Deephaven, the narrator and her friend visit Captain Sands, who opens for them a chest he has kept of an admired long-gone sailor:

    “He was brought up a Catholic, I s’pose; anyway, he had some beads, and sometimes they would joke him about ’em on board ship, but he would blaze up in a minute, ugly as a tiger. I never saw him mad about anything else, though he wouldn’t stand it if anybody tried to crowd him. He fell from the main-to’-gallant yard to the deck, and was dead when they picked him up. They were off the Bermudas. I suppose he lost his balance, but I never could see how; he was sure-footed, and as quick as a cat.”

Sands’s daughter is married to a Winslow (though the marine painter Winslow Homer probably bequeathed Ephraim his surname). As one tall captain bumps his head against a low doorway in Jewett’s short story All My Sad Captains (1895), Winslow bumps his on entering the lighthouse’s sleeping quarters; his task of laying cedar tiles may come from the same story. The Eggerses took a few lines from Jewett. “All of the nuns were Catholics,” a quip by Wake, is spoken by Deephaven’s lame fisherman Danny.

The forbidden knowledge Winslow seeks in the lantern room seemingly issues from the radiance, which, emitted through a Fresnel lens, causes Wake to ejaculate. The room is apparently the lair of a slithery cephalopod or kraken, suggesting the influence of the Cthulhu Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft’s dread-laden allegorical fiction.

Visual influences

Eggers’s admiration for symbolist art is manifested in figurative arrangements taken from Sascha Schneider’s 1924 painting Perseus and Andromeda and an untitled 1888 Jean Delville drawing of a flock of birds preying on a man. With its kohl-eyed mermaid, black-headed gulls, phallic sea serpent and male corpse, Arnold Böcklin’s 1887 Silence of the Sea is a partial blueprint for The Lighthouse as a mythic movie.

Jarin Blaschke’s sombre black-and-white cinematography and the film’s square-ish frame facilitate Eggers’s harnessing of the chiaroscuro of mid- to late-Weimar cinema, notably that of G.W. Pabst (The Joyless Street, 1925) and Fritz Lang as he jettisoned the Böcklin-inspired imagery of Die Nibelungen (1922-24) for the documentary style of M. (1931). Other referents include Ingmar Bergman’s Fårö island dramas, notably Through a Glass Darkly (1961), and Béla Tarr’s The Man from London (2007), with its observation tower and lighthouse.

Key to The Lighthouse is Jean Grémillon’s poetic realist drama The Lighthouse Keepers (1929), which documents the labours of a Breton veteran and his son, who is driven mad by rabies; Georges Périnal’s cinematography renders strange the lantern’s light as it is impressionistically filtered through the steel lattice in the keepers’ cylindrical prison. Brittany’s coast and the sea beyond is also the world – fraught with poverty and the expectation of loss – of such sublimely lyrical Jean Epstein documentary shorts as Finis terrae (1928), Mor’vran (1930) and Les Feux de la mer (1948), and the brief drama Le Tempestaire (1947).

Lighthouses and keepers appear in these films, and in Le Tempestaire there’s a mysterious ageing salt with Thomas Wake’s beard and physiognomy. Despite their philosophical tone and import, Epstein’s Brittany films are part of The Lighthouse’s DNA. Less likely an influence, though a testament to the universality of gothic lighthouse lore, is a 1970 episode of Dad’s Army that has four members of the platoon guarding a lighthouse, and Private Frazer telling his companions about a “slithery thing” that once terrified his wickie friend at a Scottish lighthouse. The tale and the gag it sets up come directly from Michael Powell’s atmospheric Welsh lighthouse thriller The Phantom Light (1935), which, happily, Private Pike remembers seeing.

Divine inspirations: the art of The Lighthouse. By  Graham Fuller. Sight & Sound , January 28 , 2020

In 1855, a youthful Wilkie Collins (author The Woman in White and The Moonstone) wrote his first drama, The Lighthouse, setting it on the Eddystone Rock. In the preface he wrote

‘Two men were in charge of maintaining the light at the top of the Lighthouse…These keepers lived on an utterly bleak rock, at the mercy of the elements, for all regular communication with the main land, that is to say, for all contact with the rest of the world and for the renewal of provisions essential to their survival. This singular situation struck me as full of potential for a dramatic situation never before exploited.’ Collins goes on to describe the terrifying perils facing the keepers, including the risk  of starvation. He describes how, in order to give the drama more depth, he established a strong relationship between the men, ‘as distinct from those between other men’, by linking it to a crime committed long ago, ‘It is thanks to these circumstances that I hoped to be able to show the most violent emotions between men’.

The drama opens with the keepers cut off by a storm, wondering how many weeks they have been there for. Hunger and alcohol induced hallucinations take hold and the older keeper confesses to a murder that guiltily haunts him. Confessing in a moment of confusion, he then ‘gaslights’ the younger into believing it is he who is going mad.

Sounding familiar?

In Robert Eggers’ latest film, The Lighthouse, on general release this week, the plot eerily mirrors Collins’ narrative in its claustrophobic depiction of isolation, madness and violent masculinity: two lighthouse keepers, one old and one young, are sent to mind a lighthouse on an isolated rock in the middle of the sea. Cut off from civilisation, tensions rise as the manipulative old keeper forces the younger into a relationship of servitude and submission. Both have secrets to hide and as the storm blows and the seas rage, preventing any escape, hidden truths and forbidden fantasies are soon revealed. As provisions are exhausted, the keepers’ sense of reality, time and identity is lost, merging in hallucinatory confusion with mermaids, sea-gods and the ghosts of dead sailors.

Robert and Max Eggers wrote the role of the old lighthouse keeper, Thomas Wake, for one of the USA’s greatest actors, Willem Dafoe, an actor with experience in both cutting edge theatre and film. Wake’s protégé keeper is played by Oscar-nominated Robert Pattinson. Dafoe and Pattinson give outstanding performances that the nineteenth century stage would have been proud of. Dafoe’s handling of the archaic sailor’s dialect and heightened text, declaimed in a terrifying monologue in which he summons the sea gods’ curse, leave one with a sense of the great psychological acting that Collins had envisaged in his own lead actor, the novelist, Charles Dickens, who ‘literally stunned’ the audience as the old keeper, Aaron Gurnock, by becoming a ‘living, palpitating reality, a completed picture in which the greatest tragic effects were obtained without betraying the most exact and scrupulous truth.’ Dickens was by all accounts an incredible actor.

When Collins presented Dickens with The Lighthouse, the novelist immediately knocked down his drawing room in order to build a theatre for its performance. Surrounded by a circle of visual artists second to none, Dickens commissioned the marine artist and scene painter, Clarkson Stanfield, to paint a front cloth for the production. Stanfield was familiar with Turner’s paintings of Eddystone and produced a painting reflecting his unsettling seascapes. Eggers’ has a background in visual production, demonstrated in the stunning compositional artistry of the film. Turner, Stanfield and Eggers each give a sense of the elemental forces that cannot be survived. Eggers is a director who exploits sensation – Collins, arguably, the founder of sensation fiction. Both Eggers and Collins’ Lighthouse plays upon the audiences’ senses, visually, aurally and viscerally reflecting the intermedial nature of the Victorian theatre. Aaron Gurnock’s confessional monologue is punctuated with the ominous sounding of the lighthouse gong, Damian Volpe’s uncanny sound design for Eggers’ score builds tension by intermittently sounding the foghorn. Where Dickens’ sons stood in the wings of their father’s theatre rolling pebbles across wooden boxes, throwing handfuls of salt across the stage and operating the wind and thunder machines with all their might, the constant lashing of wind and waves relentlessly permeates each of Eggers’ scenes.

The unapologetic theatricality and period detail of Eggers’ film may not be for everyone but although Dickens and Collins were harsh critics of imitation (even the unlucky seagull features in each) I suspect they might have relished Eggers’ re-telling of a universal story that keeps returning to haunt us.

Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens beat director, Robert Eggers, to The Lighthouse. By  Caroline Radcliffe.  University of Birmingham,  February 7, 2020