Commentary
Surreal Talk
Disclaimer: I love surrealism, which isn’t surreal at all. There’s nothing that tickles my interest like characters spiraling into insanity until we get a break from reality to parse through and interpret. So a 19th-century lighthouse ghost story casting Willem Dafoe as an old sea captain on a bender with the glittery vampire boy from Twilight? I’m locked in, chief. I went into The Lighthouse (2019) convinced I was going to love it, and I did. It’s absurd, it’s atmospheric, it’s tragic, it’s funny, it’s beautiful.
As far as depicting substance abuse, I view it as one cog in the movie’s psychological machine that gains significance from the the larger whole. Drinking accelerates other character dynamics instead of being a central theme itself, so the best way to interpret the depiction of addiction is to start with the movie’s broader ideas and see how substances operate within them.
The movie builds on a minimalist core structure that permits us to use its many references to earlier artists when seeding the development of our interpretations. The characters explicitly mention the mythology of Greek gods and Captain Ahab from Moby Dick. More subtly, the symbols and dialect reference poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe, and Sarah Orne Jewet. In interviews about production, the cast mentions finding influence from H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Louis Stevenson. Robert and Max Eggers, the brothers who wrote and directed the movie, were raised by a professor who taught Shakespeare and introduced them to a revolving array of colleagues like Hyman Bloom. Robert describes having wanted to make a movie that Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, giants of modern psychoanalysis, would enjoy together over popcorn.
Eggers Can’t Be Choosers
“My brother was working on a script called Burnt Island that was a ghost story in a lighthouse, and that’s all I knew about it at the time. I thought it was such a good idea, and a couple of months later, he said it wasn’t really working out, and I asked if I could take a crack at the concept. My version, of course, became a period movie and I called it The Lighthouse.” — Robert Eggers
The movie stems from the interest of the creators, Robert and Max Eggers, in using New England Protestant ghost folklore to tell a tragedy about a dualistic identity crisis. We see dichotomies between old settler and young wanderer, head of the household and domestic subservience, maritime sailor and urban worker, task manager and grunt worker, static fulfillment and unmet craving, enlightened mystic and mystified skeptic, have and have-not, strict father and rebellious son, fart-maker and fart-sniffer, etc. It’s even shot in black-and-white.
When thinking about the intergenerational tension in the film, I wondered about the frame of influence that the directors themselves are acting within. In interviews, they’re open about their story’s references to Greek mythology like Proteus and Prometheus, classic American writers like Thomas Melville and HP Lovecraft, and psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. They compare their approach to directing with Martin Scorcese and Guillermo del Toro’s approaches. Robert never knew his biological dad but when he was young, his mom married a professor who taught Shakespeare and introduced him to notable artists of their day like Hyman Bloom, and Robert would attend the same art conservatory in New York as Christopher Jackson who played George Washington in Hamilton.
“New England is where white European culture has been around for the longest, so if you’re going to be exploring these kinds of old-timey stories, you want a place that’s been around long enough to have ghosts, so to speak. I think, clearly, both of these movies are me trying to commune with the European non-indigenous folk culture of my region… we would drive up north to Maine to settings like The Lighthouse for vacations…”
Robert’s interest in the historical accuracy of his project is rooted in part from his own interest in the subject as part of his heritage.
“The idea of a fable or a myth is definitely at the forefront of our process… As we’re doing all this work, we start to see a story take place. And then we’re saying, ‘Okay, what fairy tales or folktales or myths is this starting to line up with?’ Then we realized, ‘Well, Prometheus and Proteus never hung out in any Greek myths before, but that seems to be what is kind of happening here,’ and Prometheus might be taking on some characteristics that he hasn’t in the past. But you know what? The classical authors did that all the time.”
“I think we’re all derivative in the beginning… I think you can identify influences in The Lighthouse for sure, but I feel like collectively I think I’m starting to become myself a little more, which hopefully I’ll continue to do.”
Armchair psychoanalysts might guess that Robert Eggers projects his idea of a tragedy about identity through the tensions between Young and Old in the movie’s plot from the perspective of a young filmmaker on his second project with a background learning from classical works. He’s self-aware about the tendency for artists to be noticeably derivative of older works before finding their own style. For Robert, the artists of these classical works he references might themselves be figures like Old, representing an older generation who hold their secrets to success in some metaphorical lighthouse. His dad being a professor is the cherry on top to guess the existence of some paternalistic character within the legacy of the classics to be honored.
Eggers had positive and encouraging experiences from other artists growing up, like Hyman Bloom who gave him a book on Northern European engravings that ignited a passion for visual arts.
“…my dad taught at the University of New Hampshire, and there was an art show by this Latvian immigrant, Hyman Bloom, and he was a New England painter who had this retrospective that was really amazing. And he had all these hellish imagery of demons and astral planes and stuff, huge scale. My dad met him, and my parents got along with he and his wife, and he would come over a lot. I was just enamored of this artist because, at the time, I wanted to be a visual artist.”
Unlike Old who tightly controls access to the lighthouse for himself, the mentors in Eggers’ life gave him some of their inspirational light that fueled his passion, encouraging his growth instead of controlling his direction. Consequently, Eggers seems comfortable adopting the aesthetics of classic authors while telling his own story, knowing full well that artists were constantly reconstructing myths and stories to fit new narratives, although he does lean heavily on researching historical authenticity while conscious about his credibility. The Lighthouse as a tragedy is a foil to his journey: Eggers feels integrated into the tradition of classic story themes through his welcoming experiences while Young feels excluded by the supervisory position that Old flaunts to discourage and discipline him.
With this theory in mind, let’s look at The Lighthouse as a young director’s idea of a tragic fable that involves losing one’s identity in order to be free enough to satisfy one’s desires.
The Lighthouse started as an idea called Burnt Island from his brother Max Eggers who wanted to adapt Edgar Allan Poe’s unfinished The Light-House about a lonely lighthouse keeper whose diary entries depict him hearing things in the walls and questioning his sanity. When I say unfinished, I mean it was about 800 words long, so it’s understandable that Max struggled to adapt and launch the project.
“…it really happened, in Wales, in the early part of the 19th century. The way the story is told and ends is like a folk tale, so how much truth there is to this “true” story, who knows. Very little of that story aside from the fact they’re both named Thomas came into The Lighthouse, but the idea that they were both named Thomas struck a chord. I was like, ‘Okay, this is a movie about identity, and can devolve into some weird, obscure places.’
Eventually, the brothers found the Smalls Lighthouse Tragedy, a 19th-century Welsh legend about two lighthouse keepers working together named Thomas who were known to fight all the time. One Thomas dies in an accident, and so the other Thomas, worried that he would be accused of murder if he just pushed dead Thomas into the sea, put the corpse into a coffin. As a result of the wind, dead Thomas’ arms come out from behind the coffin and sway as if beckoning living Thomas. The experience of keeping the lighthouse lit with the dead Thomas calling him was so stressful that living Thomas wasn’t recognizable to anyone who knew him before. This inspired Robert Eggers to craft a movie about identity in isolation.
“And then when we would go on family trips to colonial Williamsburg, and Plimouth Plantation, things that a lot of people thought maybe were boring, I fucking loved it. I was like, “Yeah. I want to be a blacksmith. This is great,” and I loved talking to the living history nerds. I thought it was the coolest thing.”
The Eggers brothers grew up in New Hampshire, so they have a personal attachment to the New England region and its history. Robert’s style is heavily focused on research and authenticity to construct an atmosphere, with the story building on top of the setting’s time, place, and idiosyncracies. In order to add their regional flavor to the story of an isolated lighthouse, they dug into writers of the 19th century who discussed maritime living. In terms of the dynamic between the directors and their older inspirations, their admiration for their home’s historic culture extends to the historic writers as well.
“It was a tremendous amount of research. Being that we’re setting the film in New England, [Herman] Melville seems like the first place to go take a look. [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge and [Robert Louis] Stevenson, on the other side of the pond, are some other usual suspects. We began trying to write both characters in dialect from the beginning… we both find that thinking in dialect, even if you’re still trying to sort it out, keeps you better in line with the thought process of the character.”
The brothers seem to take a process that starts by researching the outer world before building the inner one. Within their premise of a lighthouse ghost story, they focused on making the setting appear as authentic as possible to the time periods it was modeled after. The 19th century had plenty of photographs they could use to reconstruct sets from, including the entire lighthouse that was built from tools of the same period. As for the characters, their actions in the story come after the context of their life is assembled. For instance, when writing dialogue, knowing the specific dialect they articulate their thoughts in is important and defines the context they’ve lived in where that language is used. Their sources include Thomas Melville who wrote Moby Dick, Samuel Coleridge who wrote The Rime of an Ancient Mariner, and Robert Louis Stevenson who wrote Treasure Island.
“Robert Eggers is like a freak with research, so he made a lot of that available to me… I find the accent, I match it with a tone. Then that helps transport you to feel like another person and helps you be the text. Be the text because it’s a beautiful text pieced together from all these references, but it doesn’t necessarily feel like that. I only know that because he said, we liberally stole from Melville and Milton, this Maine writer Sarah Orne Jewett that’s where a lot of stuff comes from.” — Willem Dafoe
Willem Dafoe, who acts as Old, reflects this sentiment in his approach to the character. The accent allows him to hear the tone, which then helps him better feel that he channels the character out of the text. He knows secondhand from Eggers that they used Melville, John Milton who wrote Paradise Lost, and a Maine poet who interviewed lighthouse captains named Sarah Orne Jewett.
“The most helpful source became the work of the writer from the good old state of Maine, Sarah Orne Jewett, who was writing in this period. She was interviewing sea captains and sailors and farmers, and writing her Maine stories in phonetic dialect. So that was like a jackpot. And then my wife came across a thesis on dialect and Sarah Orne Jewett by a woman named Evelyn Starr Cutler, and she broke down the different dialects and provided rules, so that we were able to double check that what we were doing worked.” — Willem Dafoe
Jewett especially was influential as the source of the dialects for Young and Old. Her stories often reflect characters living outside of the framework of traditional marriage, such as widows, single women, or sea captains (like her grandfather) who lived in isolation.
“It’s the end of the 19th century where a Fresnel lens is commonplace in the top of a lighthouse beacon and you can have a bellowing foghorn. That steamship is a bit dilapidated. We happily say that it’s Maine, but it is somewhat ‘once upon a time,’ and certainly ‘the most remote lighthouse station at the end of the earth’ is also very much the intention.”
As an extension of that process, the story’s themes and characters are built out of the setting of the lighthouse itself as one of isolated repetition for its inhabitants, welcome beacons for wandering travelers, and liminality between ocean and land. Lighthouses are markers of transition for those on a journey who may be lost to, literally, continue traveling on more firm footing. Young is a wanderer adrift in his life who comes to the island to work at the lighthouse and find salvation for his shady past. They also feature a lot of monotonous isolated work by nature of many being positioned awkwardly away from dense living environments. As Old warns Young to encourage him to drink, one of the biggest dangers sailors encounter is boredom which can drive them insane. By nature, lighthouses are found along borders between sea and land on islands or coastal regions. Young himself is on the threshold of change, having just changed his name to start fresh.
Eggers reveals that he’s aware of how much creative liberty past authors took towards adapting older stories and how he doesn’t feel bound to mythological canon as much as he does to the actual historicity of the time period. Although he enjoys the aesthetics and representations of fables as vehicles to tell a story, he doesn’t see these stories as reflecting some universal psychological truth— or at least doesn’t feel the need to repeat them as he gives his own interpretation. Prometheus is historically depicted as a trickster-god who stole fire from Zeus to give to humanity out of compassion, although sometimes he is portrayed as simply rebellious since Prometheus was part of the Titans who Zeus overthrew to establish the rule of the Olympians. Proteus is historically depicted as a wide old man who possesses knowledge of the past, present, and future but is constantly changing shape to avoid being captured and forced to share it. Prometheus and Proteus don’t have any shared stories in traditional myths, but they still represent contrary archetypes that Eggers chooses to write about as part of his depiction of an identity crisis. Prometheus seeks knowledge and Proteus guards it, mimicking the dynamic between Young and Old.
“You got these guys that are put in this situation that’s like a purgatory and then the little personality, the little sense of self that they’ve created for themselves starts to get stripped away. You see what their real nature is and that points them into a kind of desperation that leads them to the liquor and the fantasy and all this stuff going on and it turns murderous and destructive because of the male toxicity of it all and it doesn’t work out for either of them.” — Willem Dafoe
Dafoe offers the comparison to “purgatory” where the identities that Young and Old have made for themselves are stripped back because of their indefinite isolation together, which exposes certain dysfunctional ideas of masculinity fueling their egos in conflict.