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

Heart and Soul : Joy Division

Bernard Sumner: I felt that even though we were expecting this music to come out of thin air, we never, any of us, were interested in the money it might make us. We just wanted to make something that was beautiful to listen to and stirred our emotions. We weren’t interested in a career, or any of that. We never planned one single day.

Peter Hook: [Ian Curtis, the late lead singer of Joy Division] was the instigator. We used to call him the Spotter. Ian would be sat there, and he’d say, “That sounds good, let’s get some guitar to go with that.” You couldn’t tell what sounded good, but he could, because he was just listening. That made it much quicker, writing songs. Someone was always listening. I can’t explain it, it was pure luck. There’s no rhyme or reason for it. We never honestly considered it, it just came out.

Stephen Morris: He was pretty private about what he wrote. I think he talked to Bernard a bit about some of the songs. He was totally different to how he appeared onstage. He was timid, until he’d had two or three Breakers, malt liquor. He’d liven up a bit. The first time I saw Ian being Ian onstage, I couldn’t believe it. The transformation to this frantic windmill.

Deborah Curtis: He was so ambitious. He wanted to write a novel, he wanted to write songs. It all seemed to come very easily to him. With Joy Division it all just came together for him.

Tony Wilson: I still don’t know where Joy Division came from.

Mark Reeder: I met Ian when he was working at Rare Records. They were very elitist in that shop: all beards and long hair, tweed jackets, and they all thought they were something else. I always thought if I ever worked in a record shop, I’d never want to be like them. Totally unhelpful, ignorant of the people coming into the shop. If you made a mistake in the pronunciation of a track, you’d be ridiculed to death.

Ian wasn’t like that. He was always trying to sell me reggae records. This was about 1974. Ian was totally into reggae music. Dub. He wasn’t there very long—about a year—and he was the youngest one in the shop, and he was the only one you could talk to. We talked about all kinds of stuff, and usually the topics would cross over from music to history and the war. He was fascinated by the war.

I started working at Virgin Records when I was about 14. Just part-time initially, and I got paid in records. They needed someone to stock up the records on weekends, while they were all in the shop. Just helping out, and then I ended up working there. It was back in the 70s. Real hippie days: lots of long hair and ’staches and stuff.

There was this seating arrangement, because people kept stealing headphones. They’d either break or they’d be nicked. So somebody came up with this idea where they’d have this seating arrangement at the back, covered in this vomit-green bri-nylon carpet covering, and the loudspeakers were put in the headrests. And people would sit, obviously, next to each other, and it was impossible to hear anything. You could move these speakers, put them next to your ears in the hope that you could not hear the person next to you.

But Virgin was a place where people just liked to hang out really. That’s why it stank of incense in there as well, to disguise the smell of marijuana. It was more rock music than disco then. In 1973, they’d just had this massive success with Tubular Bells, and then came Tangerine Dream, and they were the kind of records that put Virgin on the map and made the Virgin shop in Manchester special. All the other record shops were a bit elitist.

I was captivated by the idea of electronic music. I remember in 1968 when you had to have a stereo. We’d seen some bloke offering them in the paper, so one Saturday afternoon we went round to this bloke’s house to look at this stereo. It was this massive thing stuck in the middle of the room, like a cabinet, a sideboard with loud-speakers at each end and a drinks bit in the middle, and to demonstrate this stereo he put on Switched on Bach by Walter Carlos, and I was like, “What is that?”

Before that, my only exposure to electronic music had been Doctor Who. And “Telstar.” Then, for years and years, I didn’t hear anything synthetic at all, until I came to this bloke’s house and he put on Switched on Bach. Which was like the Brandenburg Concerto played on a synthesizer. I’d been exposed to classical music cos I played violin at school, but this was something completely different, and it was in stereo. From that moment I was captivated by the idea of electronic music.

In the Court of the Crimson King came out when I was about ten, and I was just overawed. It was avant-garde, ambient, and I’d sit in total silence, listening to this record. Looking at the cover, absorbing it all. And that was my background to working in Virgin. When they started releasing the early Tangerine Dream records, German music didn’t sound like British music at all. And the weirder it was, the more fascinated I was. The first Kraftwerk albums were like jazz rock, with flutes and stuff, totally unlistenable to for all my mates.

I knew Tony Wilson from very early on. He’d come in at weekends, just before closing time. I was the person designated to unpack the boxes in the morning and then write up all the records and put them into stock. So I knew every single record that was coming into the shop, even more than the people who actually worked there. I’d have to tell them what had come in—they had no idea. They’d just look at the list, and they had no idea if things that they’d ordered had actually come in or not.

Tony would ask me to put a record aside for him so he could have a listen, then I could put it back in stock on the Monday if he didn’t want it. He’d come in, and it would be all, “Darling!”—and that’s how I got to know him. I got to know Rob Gretton because he used to come into the shop all the time and just hang around. It’s what I would do as well—go into record shops and just hang around there all day, talking about records and about music.

Ian would come into Virgin when he started working in Manchester and just hang around, complaining about things. He said, “You can smell the drugs in Virgin.” I told him that’s why we burn incense to disguise it, but he thought that was the smell of the drugs. He was always joking, very funny, playing tricks and stuff.

Paul Morley: We had head shops like Eight Miles High, the Manchester Free Press and the Mole Express, and the lefty end of things. That was your great salvation at the time—music and the lefty press and weird bookshops where alternative culture seemed to be thriving. Down in London obviously there was Compendium, and we had weird little versions of that where you might find some sanity and discover things. Everything was not easily available; you had to search it out and find it.

I worked in this bookshop in Stockport, and the shop sold all the great Pelican blue books, which were my education. I didn’t get educated at school, I got educated in this bookshop, and they had a science-fiction section—Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions, all the J. G. Ballard novels—they would have really weird magazines, underground magazines, and weird folk singers from the backwoods of Derbyshire would come in to get their weekly fix of odd alternative culture.

But we made money in the bookshop out of the soft porn and the Mills & Boon, so you had a weird kind of strange thing where old ladies would totter in every month to get their ten Mills & Boon, and men would come in to get their soft porn, which we had to order off a van that came in every week. Then I would be selling second-hand records. I would go into Manchester, buy bootlegs for £2, bring them back to my bookshop and sell them for £2.50.

You’d get the people coming in to buy war books, all those Sven Hassels. Of course, if you were going to open that kind of independent bookshop in the northwest at that period, you would have lefty tendencies, so you’d be pushing that, but to make your money you would have to sell Whitehouse and Mayfair, and the dreadful thing is you could bring them back to exchange, so these grubby copies of this soft porn would come back glistening with some suspect substance.

But what was interesting were the creatures that would come in to check out the weird combination of books, which sounds fairly standard now but at the time was unformed and raw: Ballard and Philip K. Dick and Burroughs. William Burroughs was definitely part of it. They were prophets of something that we were about to enter, this weird commercial entertainment landscape that would become where we are now sat, but at the time it was very odd, and it was a beautiful attachment to your love for weird music. There was no doubt that it was connected. There didn’t seem to be any difference between reading Ballard and Dick and Burroughs and listening to Faust and Velvet Underground and Iggy and the Stooges: you were constantly curious to find out strange things that might explain your situation, even though it didn’t directly have anything to do with where you were.

And there were characters. There was a guy that used to come into the bookshop called Paul, and he did the first fanzine I’d ever come across. It was called Penetration and it was basically obsessed with Hawkwind. He used to come in and he always used to wear all black. He had the whitest skin I’d ever seen, and his girlfriend would always wear white lace, and they used to float in bringing ten copies of Penetration every so often. In fact, that’s where I first wrote. I wrote a piece about Lenny Bruce for Penetration, which Paul pasted up in the wrong order, incidentally. I think it’s influenced my writing ever since, because I quite liked it being in the wrong order.

But there were lots of characters like that floating around and, obviously, Ian Curtis. I get the sense wherever he was at the same time—’74, ’75—he was coming across similar sorts of routes, similar source material out of which he could piece together his vision.

Stephen Morris: I’d get the train and go in to Savoy Books—before it was Savoy Books it was called The House on the Borderlands—and we used to have a right laugh at the old blokes looking at the porn. There was science fiction, weird books, and over in a corner there’d be naked ladies, and surprisingly enough the science fiction had little appeal for the vast majority of the clientele, who were going over to the naked-lady corner. I’d just be trying to negotiate some sort of discount on a large, expensive book: “Yeah, have you got Michael Moorcock’s new book?”

Ian had The Atrocity Exhibition by Ballard, Naked Lunch, William Burroughs, and also a collection of Jim Morrison’s poems. I seem to remember that you could go to W. H. Smith’s and they had a lot of Burroughs and a lot of Ballard, and it was just mixed in with the rest of the stuff.

Michael Butterworth: Bookchain was opened in 1977. It was alternative and youth-culture stuff, both second-hand and new. I must clarify, though, that this was the most famous of our shops and the one everyone remembers, but it is not the shop Ian Curtis first came to. There were two Savoy shops before this one, and David Britton’s most vivid memories of Ian are of him coming into the first shop.

All three shops were modeled on two London bookshops of the period: Bram Stokes’s shop in Berwick Street, Soho, called Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed—which sold comics, sci-fi, drug- related stuff, posters, etc.—and a chain called Popular Books. David Britton used to visit a branch of the latter in Camden Town when he was living in London in the late 60s. They sold everything from Private Eye, girlie books, pin-up stuff and Penthouse to film stills, posters and any sort of media ephemera.

These two bookshops inspired David (with his then partner, Charles Partington) to open a bookshop on Port Street, off Newton Street, in Manchester centre. The shop they opened was called The House on the Borderland (after the William Hope Hodgson novel), and they had all this kind of stuff in the window. There was a strong emphasis on alternative culture and American imports. The window looked very exotic, and this is what probably attracted Ian and Steve Morris inside, once they had followed the yellow-brick-road poster trail leading to the shop. The attitude radiating from the shop was, “Fuck everybody in authority,” and that’s what they responded to. The shop played loud rock’n’roll over the speakers, which sounded out into the street years before other shops were doing the same kind of thing. And I mean loud.

They were disparate, alienated young men attracted to like-minded souls. They wanted something offbeat and off the beaten track, and the shop supplied this. They probably saw the shop as being a beacon in the rather bleak Manchester of the early 70s. Ian was interested in counter-culture and science fiction. David remembers them being enthusiasts about Michael Moorcock, whose hard-edged fantasy writing and lifestyle were a great influence, very rock’n’roll.

Ian bought second-hand copies of New Worlds, the great 60s literary magazine edited by Moorcock, which was doing something very different, promoting Burroughs and Ballard, and it’s possible Ian picked up his interest in these writers from these magazines. In exchange for their help in the shop they were allowed to take whatever books took their fancy. They came in every couple of weeks, sometimes more often. Steve was the most frequent. This close contact came to an end gradually, as Ian and Steve’s interest in a band was getting more serious.

Stephen Morris: Once I started going out, my first concert was Hawkwind and Status Quo. I was into psychedelic music really. Apart from Hawkwind, the first two groups that I got into were Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, and the week after that it was the Velvet Underground, and that was it. I liked collecting groups and I remember I liked Alice Cooper until everybody else started liking Alice Cooper, then I decided I didn’t really like Alice Cooper that much. That’s a bit pretentious really, but that’s the way it was.

After that glam happened. Actually, after saying that Macclesfield was a cultural desert, once a year there was a discotheque—there were two discotheques, one at the rugby club, where you could go and dance to the Faces and Jeff Beck and get in a fight, or you could go to Boddington Civic, which was later on, where there was a big glam-rock following and you had the Sweet and Bowie and Roxy Music, and so we went from psychedelic to glam rock—again, till everybody started liking it.

I discovered Krautrock about that time, and Can—I was into Tago Mago. I should say we were forming a band, me and this other guy from school—Mac, he was called. We were going to form this avant-garde jazz combo called the Sunshine Valley Dance Band. Everyone thinks it was just going to be like a dance band, and Hooky thinks it was jazz, but no, we were going to be avant-garde, and people would book us on the strength of the name and we would shock them with our appalling performances.

It never got off the ground, but through Mac’s elder brother I got into Can and then, after Can, Amon Düül and Neu!. I was into the punk rock before punk rock, which was the MC5 and the first Stooges album, which I bought from Kendals in Manchester. Anything that wasn’t disco. I later came to regret that opinion, but at the time disco was shit, and so it was anything that was a little bit long-haired but not like the boys in the year above me, who would wear RAF greatcoats and walk about with copies of Disraeli Gears or The Best of Cream. I wasn’t too mad on anything bluesy; it was just anything a bit unusual that was not Eric Clapton.

Paul Morley: You were looking round to see if there was anybody like you. There was nobody like me at school. Eventually we all found each other at a particular show, but for two or three years before that happened we didn’t really know where each other was. If you went to a Pink Floyd or David Bowie concert at the Free Trade Hall, you didn’t really find anybody else. They were probably there somewhere, but you didn’t find them because there was a bigger disguise going on.

At that point—’74, ’75—music fundamentally came to Manchester. We used to think of the local bands as not being right. Even bands that were local, like 10cc or Sad Café, didn’t seem to be Manchester. They seemed to be more LA, they were already in Las Vegas. There were a couple of kind of strange heavy metal clubs in Manchester where local bands would play, but you wouldn’t take them seriously at all because they just seemed like bands you’d see at school. There was just no way that that music would ever come from Manchester.

Excerpted from This searing light, the sun, and everything else: Joy Division: An Oral History by Jon Savage. Published with permission from Faber & Faber.

“I Still Don’t Know Where Joy Division Came From” By Jon Savage. LitHub , May 17, 2019.

Other excerpts here : 

The Birth of Joy Division.  Rolling Stone,  April 21, 2019.

‘Ian Curtis wanted to make extreme music, no half measures’ The Guardian , March 24, 2019 

Music journalist Jon Savage, 65, has wanted to write a book about Joy Division for as long as he can remember. But the spark for his new oral history of the band, This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else, is easier to pinpoint. He assisted on Grant Gee’s 2007 documentary film Joy Division and knew how much material had been left on the cutting-room floor. Lead singer Ian Curtis was long dead of course (he killed himself in 1980), but there were in-depth interviews with the remaining members of the group – Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris – as well as material that Savage had compiled over four decades following, thinking and writing about Joy Division. The result feels like a definitive account of one of the most exciting and enduring bands of the post-punk era.

Why did you want to do an oral history? In some ways, it’s a more ego-less approach for a writer.

JS : That was an attraction for me because I’ve written a lot about Joy Division. And people tend to get superheated about the band, so I thought: “Oh God, let them speak!” Besides, I like the cadences of the way that they speak, there’s a kind of poetry. And it’s very immediate.

Did compiling the book change how you feel about the band or the personalities?

JS : Well, yes. There is disguised autobiography in the book: it’s about me moving to Manchester from London in 1979 and working with [Factory co-founder] Tony Wilson and becoming friendly with Rob Gretton [Joy Division’s manager] and Martin Hannett [the band’s producer] and seeing Joy Division a lot. And me trying to make sense of how powerful Joy Division were: they are probably the most powerful live group I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen hundreds.

And I really got a sense finally – which I haven’t before – of why what happened with Ian happened. It’s a combination of pressures. Also the severe nature of his illness, and the poor treatment he was getting for his illness, and it all just suddenly really made sense to me. He was actually having fits on stage, and that’s not sustainable. So in a way it was the laying of a ghost.

What do you remember about when Ian Curtis died in May 1980?

JS : I have no memory. It’s a blank. In a way, keeping on at this subject is a way of filling in the blanks. And I think that was just being young. I was 25 and I hadn’t really encountered death before, and so I just didn’t know what to do. Also back in the day there was not really the language to talk about it, and people say that in the book. And I was only on the periphery, so I think it was a completely shattering event.

How would describe your relationship with the band during the time you were writing about them?

JS : I was quite rigorous about not becoming that friendly with groups, because it could be a bit embarrassing; you don’t know whether they’d turn round and make a crap album and you’d have to say so and there would be trouble. That happened to me with Siouxsie and the Banshees and a couple of other people and I just got fed up with people coming up to me and calling me a cunt because I’d actually told the truth about their lousy art in that particular case. So I’d say I was an acquaintance.

It’s been 40 years since the band released their debut studio album, Unknown Pleasures. What’s the enduring appeal of Joy Division?

JS : The main thing about Joy Division is that they were great. The music really stands up; I still listen to Joy Division with great pleasure and it’s not just nostalgic. Also I had a very interesting experience: I did an event at the BFI and they showed [Anton Corbijn’s film] Control and the Joy Division documentary to a bunch of inner-city kids, 16, 17. They were slightly bored, polite but restless – as you’d expect. Then Ian came on in one of the bits of live footage and oh, they tuned right in. They immediately snapped to attention, because of his total intensity, total commitment. He was, in that degraded phrase, “for real”. So there is something about Joy Division that transcends their time and place.

Is this the end of your journey with them?

JS : I certainly won’t do another book about them, but I do feel that I’ve got a greater understanding of what happened then and why it’s continued to nag away at me until now. A very good friend of mine said to me once: “Jon, sometimes in life, you have to do the obvious.” Actually that’s very good advice and this book is an example of that, I think.

Jon Savage: ‘Something about Joy Division transcends their time and place’. By Tim Lewis. The Guardian , March 24, 2019. 

Another interview :

Joy Division and Jon Savage's Latest, 'This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else' By David Chu. PopMatters,  April 2, 2019. 

Jon Savage’s “This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else” documents the formation, brief life and sudden end of the phenomenal Manchester, England, band Joy Division.

Much has been written about this band; some of the sharpest music writers have given their best trying to capture its essence. As brilliant as some of this work is, Joy Division seems to remain in the shadows, just out of reach of critical assessment. Joy Division’s music doesn’t “rock” in the classic sense as much as shudder, roar and convulse. The songs are readings of temperature, light and lack of light. They walk silently for hours on city streets and return alone to small rooms with full ashtrays and no messages on the machine. It’s a fantastically difficult question to answer: Why do you like Joy Division? The more dedicated the listener, the more likely you’ll get an inhaled breath held for a few seconds, an exhale and a shrug.

Savage is one of those aforementioned very talented scribes, who perhaps understands all too well how difficult it would be for any one person to create a clear picture of Joy Division. What better way to tell the story than to ask others to tell its story? By interviewing remaining members and those who bore witness, Savage’s oral history of the band carefully connects the dots.

Joy Division was Peter Hook on bass, Bernard Sumner on guitar, Stephen Morris on drums and Ian Curtis on vocals. The band’s first release, from summer 1978, a four-track 7-inch record called “An Ideal for Living,” could be labeled functionally as post punk, one of the best results of punk music’s exhilarating flash-pot bang. The songs are great but show a band only somewhat in control of its talent. Hearing what came next, you wonder if at that time, the four had any idea of what they were capable of.

The following year, the band released its first full length album, the brilliant “Unknown Pleasures.” None of the demos or surviving live recordings hints at what the band would bring to bear with this record. The music seems uninfluenced by any music that came before it but instead by the sheer fact of existence, the sound of your blood rushing through your veins.

The band became immensely popular. The group performed live and recorded new material. On May 18, 1980, Curtis took his life at age 23. A month later, in June, perhaps Joy Division’s most well-known song, “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” was released. In July 1980, the band’s second album, “Closer,” came out. Joy Division would reach its peak posthumously. Hook, Morris and Sumner carried on as New Order to great success all over the world.

I became a fan, never having heard “Unknown Pleasures.” Many years ago, I was playing my current favorite record for someone, who said I should cut out the middleman and listen to the band it was desperately trying to emulate: Joy Division. I’m not aware of anyone in any of the bands I was in having any interest in Joy Division’s music. I knew of the band but had heard only “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” Then I remembered that in the remaining space of many of the tapes I had received in trades from a fellow cassette enthusiast, he had put on tracks from Joy Division shows. I listened to them and was knocked out by the incredible intensity of the band. There’s no way you would want to go on after Joy Division.

A key moment for Joy Division happened at a Sex Pistols show at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall on June 4, 1976. Reportedly attended by fewer than 50 people, the show proved to be quite a night. In the audience were future members of the Fall, Joy Division and two men who would prove to be of great importance to the group: Factory Records partners Tony Wilson and Martin Hannett. The Factory label was almost a perfect reflection of Wilson; rebellious, innovative and fiercely independent. Joy Division — and other post-punk art-bands like A Certain Ratio and the Durutti Column — found great support at Factory.

Post-punk music delivered on punk’s detonation of rock music’s predictability. Joy Division wasn’t the only band that started at some point in the punk din and evolved by leaps and bounds. Gang of Four, Killing Joke, the Fall, the Birthday Party and Wire were a few of the great bands that fell under the post-punk heading. (If you want to know more, the go-to book is Simon Reynolds’ excellent “Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984.”) And one of the greatest acts of punk-to-post-punk morphing was John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten) going from perhaps the most well known punk band of all time, the Sex Pistols, to the completely different Public Image Limited.

Yet what has baffled many a Joy Division listener is the band’s own evolution; how its members, all novice players, went from rudimentary bashing with songs like “Gutz” and “You're No Good for Me” in 1977 to utterly brilliant tracks like “Transmission,” “Atmosphere” and “Love Will Tear Us Apart” just a few years later.

 Without Wilson and Hannett, it could be argued, Joy Division's potential would have been greatly compromised. Wilson believed in the band completely, allowed it to flourish. But in “This Searing Light,” Sumner describes an isolated and workman-like environment at practice, where each player was in his own world. “We were not bouncing off each other,” he says, “we just completely ignored each other, we were all on our own island, and we just made sure that what we were doing sounded great, and we didn't pay any attention to what the others were doing, not consciously anyway.”

While this might sound like the members didn't get along, it is a quite Mancunian posture, when you consider that the greater Manchester area was infused with factories, warehouses and remnants of World War II. It's not surprising that being raised in this environment might engender a somewhat stark outlook and utilitarian work ethic.

“You were always looking for beauty because it was such an ugly place, whether again on a subconscious level,” Sumner says. “I mean, I don't think I saw a tree till I was about nine. I was surrounded by factories and nothing that was pretty, nothing.”

Manchester bands like Joy Division, the Fall and Buzzcocks were greatly distanced from the outrage and fashion that fueled the London punk scene, a little over 200 miles south, and while their surroundings could be grim, it made for quite a creative setting. In “This Searing Light,” you get the idea that it was a “resist or submit” proposition.“It gave you an amazing yearning for things that were beautiful,” Sumner says, “because you were in a semi-sensory-deprivation situation because you were brought up in this brutal landscape, but then when you did see something or hear something that was beautiful, you would go, 'Ooh, new experience,' and really appreciate it.”

Still, how do four young men from the working class, in one of the toughest parts of a tough country, almost suddenly create not only some of the most enduring music from the late 1970s and early 1980s but also easily one of the most astonishing debut albums ever, “Unknown Pleasures”?

In the pages of “This Searing Light,” we get many clues from the testimonies of those in close proximity to the band.

Peter Saville, Factory co-founder and art director, is responsible for the “Unknown Pleasures” cover, one of the most recognizably reworked and repurposed music-related images of the last century. Saville isn’t the originator; it is a found image, part of the materials in a folder given to Saville by the band’s manager, Rob Gretton. There are, no doubt, people all over the world wearing a version of this pulsar spread out on a T-shirt who have no idea what it’s relating to. That being said, if you had to describe “Unknown Pleasures,” the image works perfectly; separate, straight lines randomly disrupted; peaks and valleys and then flat again. Such is life.

Hannett, who produced “Unknown Pleasures,” was a true visionary. There is no way the album would sound anything like it does without him. At times, Hannett seemed almost dismissive of his young charges: “They were a gift to a producer, because they didn’t have a clue. They didn’t argue.”

Hannett was notoriously idiosyncratic and difficult, and the band members endured him as much as worked with him. Hannett was obsessed with isolating and manipulating sound — the studio was his world; Joy Division was just hanging out in it for awhile.

“The studio was Martin’s,” says Morris, “and when you were in the studio you were working for Martin and his whims. There was an awful lot of pot smoked: whether Martin was completely stoned or did have a different outlook on what he wanted, he would be obtuse. He wouldn’t say to you, ‘I want you to do it like this.’ It was, ‘Great, do it again but more cocktail party’ or ‘a bit more yellow.’ Whether it was pot or whether it was the Zen school of production, it was definitely interesting, because he turned us on to the studio being a musical instrument.”

Kevin Cummins, the great photographer who took some of the most recognizable images of Joy Division, was witness to the band’s rapid growth and the mesmerizing stage presence of Curtis. “It always felt dangerous, because you always felt he was slightly out of control, and I’d not really experienced that with any other band,” Cummins says. “I’d seen the Clash and the Jam and all these bands, and I never felt that they were more than the sum of their parts. But with Ian, it was dangerous. The only other person who was that dangerous onstage was Iggy Pop.”

These are some of the nearly 40 people from Joy Division's inner circle whose accounts Savage, who was also there at the time, has deftly woven into an almost detective-style MRI of the band and the forces and factors that formed it. Almost particle by particle, from descriptions of Manchester's industrial beginnings to the area's cultural void, Savage makes you understand that the members of Joy Division were driven to create something of immense beauty, as if there were no other choice.

As matter-of-fact as the interviews are, and as carefully as Savage has laid out his case, the "how" of the band's amazing music is all but impossible to put your finger on. Liz Naylor, a writer at the Manchester fanzine City Fun, captures the band's close distance: “My thing about Joy Division is that they're an ambient band almost: you don't see them function as a band, it's just the noise around where you are.”

It's not up for debate. Joy Division was one of the most original bands of the last century and an influence on countless others that came afterward. “This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else” brings us a little closer to understanding the band and its incredible music. But still, even after the careful examination of almost every aspect of the band’s brief existence, its music still lurks deep in phenomenon and shadow.

Why Joy Division? Henry Rollins examines Jon Savage’s oral history of the post-punk band. By Henry Rollins.  Los Angeles Times,  April 18, 2019.

Inside a catalog of forthcoming books, Faber & Faber refers to Jon Savage's This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else: Joy Division: The Oral History as "the last word on the band that ended with the suicide of Ian Curtis in Macclesfield on May 18, 1980." It seems a little presumptuous to say that this book will be the "last word" on the subject of Joy Division, not that some closure wouldn't be welcome at this point. Between Peter Hook's memoir, Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (It, 2013) Bernard Sumner's memoir, Chapter and Verse: New Order, Joy Division, and Me (St. Martin's 2015), Deborah Curtis's memoir, Touching From a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division (Faber and Faber, 2005), both a biopic (Joy Division, Gee, 2007) and a documentary, and some repackaging of the same songs fans have known and loved over the decades, it feels as if Joy Division has been discussed into the ground, sucking all of the mystery out of a band that was once shrouded in the stuff. Is there any marrow left in that bone? Or is This Searing Light just another way of giving people their Joy Division fix when the cupboards are all bare?

Author Jon Savage (interviewed with David Chiu, here on PopMatters), the compiler and editor of all the interviews here, was a source close to the band as well as the Factory Records team that helped launch a musical movement in Manchester. Given all of the front line accounts during this furtive punk moment in the late '70s, it appears that Savage was able to come away with some new angles to the old story -- Ian Curtis's personal dilemmas in addition to his epilepsy, the severity of said epilepsy, the band's inability to understand it all, the manager and the label boss's failure to act properly, and the multitudes that witnessed it first hand and have never forgotten the impact it left on them. As much as the story of this band has been pillaged, This Searing Light proves that there were still more Joy Division stories to be told. As far as I'm concerned, it's perfectly okay if there's now nothing left to tell.

This Searing Light pulls together recent interviews with the surviving Joy Division members, members of their contemporary bands such as the Buzzcocks and Cabaret Voltaire, photographers, and eyewitnesses, and is supplemented with past interviews with the now-departed Factory Records founder Tony Wilson, record producer Martin Hannett, the band's manager Rob Gretton, and journalist Annik Honoré. Surviving Factory players Alan Erasmus and Peter Saville are there to round out the picture, with a few rare reproductions of Saville's distinctly cryptic graphic designs. Photographers including Kevin Cummins, Jill Furmanovsky, Daniel Meadows, and the legendary Anton Corbijn describe snapping pictures of the band, both onstage during their mesmerizing sets and offstage when no one knew how to pose like a rock star. Music journalists Mary Harron (now a director) and Paul Morley share stories of interviewing the band and reviewing various shows. Eyewitness accounts from fans like Jon Wozencroft and writer Liz Naylor provide a surprisingly reliable narrative to compliment the professional angle.

Unlike other oral histories, Savage lists the interview subjects and their roles in the story in a table of contents at the start of the book rather than giving them the full description as they are introduced. As a result, a reader not equipped with an iron-clad memory may find themselves flipping to the beginning of the book quite often when they come across a new name. It's a minor detail, but it certainly disrupts the flow of the book, something that it sorely needs in its early pages. The first chapters are where everyone is setting the scenes of '70s-era Manchester with its urban decay and lack of natural beauty. This is also the moment when the interview subjects begin to chronicle their individual childhoods, something that can only be of interest to people from Manchester, seeing as how they are constantly peppered with geographical tidbits and some local color. The differences described between Salford and Manchester don't exactly leap off the page.

It isn't until the third chapter when the story begins to move. Tony Wilson was looking to expand his musical influence outside of presenting cutting-edge rock bands on his Ganada Television program So It Goes. This included activities such as giving Manchester gigs to the Bolton-based punk band the Buzzcocks and sprucing up the town venue known as the Lesser Free Trade Hall. The Sex Pistols played a set there in 1976 that proved to be serendipitous for Manchester's forthcoming music scene. Despite the fact that this fortunate gig has gone down in the record as a turning point in the history of British rock 'n' roll, Joy Division guitarist Bernard Sumner and Joy Division bassist Peter Hook don't seem to recall it being all that great of a show. Memorable, yes. But great? Apparently, the Sex Pistols had set the bar so low, musically speaking, that more than a few people left the showing thinking "I can do that!"

Sumner and Hook ride their scooters through the city, searching for an outlet for their newfound "skill". Ian Curtis makes an unassuming and paradoxical entrance on the Manchester music scene at around the same time. He wore a jacket with the word "HATE" scrawled on the back, yet he was very polite to everyone he met. He was drawn to William Burroughs and J. G. Ballard just as strongly as he was pulled to the titans of glam and punk, namely David Bowie and Iggy Pop. He was married yet wanted to ingratiate himself into a scene that marriage (and subsequent child-rearing) went against punk rock ethics. If Curtis ever struck you as a larger-than-life enigma that you couldn't wrap your mind around, everyone's personal accounts logged in This Searing Light helps to humanize him without demolishing the myth. The skeletons residing in his closet are easier to forgive once you remind yourself that he was only 23-years-old at the time of his death.

Indeed, it would be more difficult to imagine a rock band from this time that didn't stay up too late at night, drinking themselves silly while engaging in reckless mischief. He became very close to the Belgian journalist Honoré, an affair that, according to everyone concerned, never led to anything physical. This was more a matter of intellectual fulfillment, as Honoré was always giving Curtis the accolades his wife Deborah could never supply. At one point in the book, Deborah admits that she doesn't blame him for thinking this [NOTE: Savage lifts passages from Curtis's memoir to round out parts of the story]. Having epilepsy certainly wasn't his fault. The members of Joy Division and their manager take themselves to task for being ignorant of Curtis's physical as well as mental state. Crippling depression and grand mal fits? How are a bunch of 22-year-old men supposed to handle that? Somewhere in the second half of the book, you're reminded that there's hardly any adult supervision in the equation of constant gigging, constant traveling, poor health, and marital difficulties. Wilson and Gretton were older than the members of Joy Division, but not that much older. Everyone would have to come to grips with their maturity the hard way.

Depending on whose account you believe, Curtis's personal problems were exacerbated by the prospect of Joy Division touring America. According to Peter Hook, he was excited about leaving for the States. According to others, he was dreading the trip. The truth is, likely, a combination of the two. Curtis is portrayed as a people-pleaser, a man who would say whatever it was you wanted to hear, not least for his wife, his band, or his label boss. Rather than reconcile all of the differing promises he made to others, he let it all build to a painful tipping point. The night before Joy Division were to leave for America, Curtis hung himself.

Not surprisingly, everyone's recollection of that day is vivid. Tragedy certainly has a way of burning itself into your memory. Deborah Curtis was angry at Ian for having the "last word". Stephen Morris, Joy Division's drummer, had a reaction that was not dissimilar to the rest of the band: anger towards Curtis and disappointment in himself. He and everyone else are perfectly willing to admit that all of the red flags were there in hindsight, but they just couldn't bring them into focus at the time. The reader even gets the impression that Curtis's previous attempt at suicide didn't ring the alarm bells loud enough. To their credit, Curtis's need to please came through even during the worst of times. A simple "I'm fine" from him was enough to keep everyone rolling along, despite the fact that he was certainly not fine.

On page 304, Deborah Curtis admits that her late husband was "a very good liar, he was very convincing." It was at this point that I realized that there's room in the Joy Division universe for a book like This Searing Light, The Sun and Everything Else (the title comes from a series of words Tony Wilson throws together in a state of euphoria when describing Joy Division's sound, in case you were wondering) -- one that brings Ian Curtis back down to the status of a human being. She and many others close to Ian Curtis take turns chipping away at the Jim Morrison-sized myth that of Ian. Not to bring him down a peg, but to tell it as it was; Ian Curtis was a young man with a romantic angle, looking to channel his love of writing into a musical outlet. Life then became very, very tough as his band went on to surpass his expectations. The crowds grew as the reviews improved. Road manager and founding drummer Terry Mason puts it this way on page 316: "Everyone thinks there's some deep, dark, mystical secret, and there's not. He was a nice guy, got into a strange situation, and the only way that he would think of out at that time was to kill himself. Sorry, no secrets. Cut."

There's Room in Joy Division's Expansive Universe for Jon Savage's 'This Searing Light...' By John Garratt.  PopMatters , April 19, 2019.