Analysis of 'The Lighthouse': Beginning & Ending

As the vessel, a lighthouse tender draws closer, we cut to a shot of its prow. Ploughing through the frigid sea, a chain clanking with each wave. Then we're on deck. The passengers have their backs to us. They sway back and forth. We are over their shoulders, now in between them, and, out of the fog, it appears - almost all at once. We see the ‘light,’ we see the ‘house;’ we see the island; the foghorn whales.

I consider the lighthouse to be a stone-cold masterwork of filmmaking. I find it impeccably taught from top to bottom. Honestly, its craftsmanship leaves me in awe and the culmination of its choices in just these first four shots are demonstrative of, well, every single shot that follows.

The synergy of sight and sound; the way it plays with what we can see, what we cannot see and what we will soon see. Similarly, we hear things before we see them, with the proactive use of frequent ‘L-Cutting’ throughout. The sound element is a marriage of the sound design, effects and composer Mark Korven’s original score; they feel interwoven to a degree that it creates its own soundscape by engulfing the viewer with its cacophony of sensory data, we can almost taste the sea salt of this momentous arrival. This opening is as strong a barometer as you are likely to find its reading, in a word, brooding. Without any words, the opening of ‘The Lighthouse’ tells us that what follows will not be pleasant, displaying an acute attention, by the film-makers, to building the film’s suspense and deliberate foreshadowing.

Once ashore, the musical score has dissolved amongst the elements. The passengers, now heavy laden with luggage, make their arduous trek in. Like displaced hermit crabs, they shuffle across the top of the frame.

It is with this shot here that I will speak to what gives ‘The Lighthouse’ its distinctive look. Shooting on black and white 35-millimetre negative with vintage lenses and a custom filter, making the film resemble something closer to a hundred years ago than anything contemporary. Even the aspect ratio squeezes more than the four-by-three we've seen in a rising number of contemporary works making its art house comeback. Here, it is closer to square at one-point-one-nine-by-one, a dimension Eggers sighted is ideal for scaling the verticality of a lighthouse.

As you can see, this shot captures the changing of the guard, as it were, the newly arrived pair relieve another. The previous lighthouse keepers. Their watch has ended. They pass each other like two ships in the night; nary a word is exchanged. At last, we glimpse our characters faces and what faces they are, what stories they tell.

Thus far, the filmmaking frankly speaks for itself, but the screenplay, penned by director Robert Eggers and his younger brother Max, is a work of art unto itself.

The opening and closing scenes of the lighthouse are dialogue free, and yet the dialogue is one of my favourite parts of their film. From this, let us take a moment to appreciate the writing you don't hear in this opening of the film where the two characters, played by Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, are described on the page and how that has been transcribed on screen:

The new wikies stand utterly still, next to each other, their gaze is fixed on the same distant spot.

One man is YOUNG (early 30s). Tall, athletic -- but starved. His deep set eyes are haunted, and his left eye is healing from a week-old shiner. His crooked expression is severe. There's an eerie disquiet about him. He's like a dog that’s been beaten and caged too many times. A small moustache shows his vanity.

The other is OLD (Haggard 60? Spry 70?). He's weathered, feral bearded, and hunched, with hands like vices. His lack of visible lips suggest some missing teeth. He tremors a bit, but he's lean and sturdy as a lead pipe. His high cheekbones smile even when he grimaces. His wild eyes shine like jewels. He's an old Pan. A Satyr.

Both of them seem like the kind of man you might find muttering to himself in the corner of an empty bar room with a distant look in his eye.

Terrific stuff, isn’t it? All this scripture conveyed and brought to life through one, still shot - lingering, without distraction, on the subtle yet palpable performances of the actors. In fact, the shot is held long enough for us to assess the men we will be stuck with for the rest of the film.

When the foghorn bellows. louder than ever, we see how it rattles the young man; conversely, the old man cannot be bothered. After he exits frame left, we remain with the young man who is staring dead ahead. He looks like he's trying to put on a brave front in the face of something daunting. We then see what he sees, a shot that mirrors the very first as the steamboat disappears back behind a curtain of fog. Within 3 minutes of screen time, our characters have arrived on Pilot Rock and are left all alone; well, with the seagulls to keep them company.

Before we dissect the insanity on display at the end of the film, we best trace the steps the characters take to get there and scrape off some meaning along the way. The context leading up to this mind-boggling finale being paramount in this analysis.

The younger 'wikie,’ who we come to know as Ephraim Winslow, is new to this particular trade. He formally worked as a timber man on Hudson Bay. Now, he labours under the supervision of the older Thomas Wake, whose metaphorical ‘wick’ is all but burned out. At night, Winslow spies on Wake, who appears to worship and find all manner of gratification at the altar of the lighthouse - within the Lantern room, where Winslow is never allowed. This forbidden fruit grows increasingly tantalising to the young man (and for the audience to some degree) who is haunted by his past and whose sexual frustrations are exercised via mermaid scrimshaw. To scrub more salt into his wounds, his efforts are mocked by a one-eyed seagull; and, despite Wake's warnings, “Bad luck to kill a seabird,” Winslow eventually snaps - changing their winds of fortune.

All the while, the plot thickens further with a pair of revelations: we learn what happened to Wake's previous apprentice, “Went mad, he did. Raven about sirens merfolk, bad omens, and the like... He believed that there was some enchantment in the light.” And later, we learn that Winslow isn't Winslow; his real name is Thomas Howard. Ephraim Winslow was his foreman back in Hudson Bay and Howard let him die in an accident, then stole his identity. Thus, he is increasingly tormented by his guilt.

As the storm sets in, so does their cabin fever. The ‘wikies’ are fuelled by alcohol and, when that runs dry, they resort to turpentine and their relationship becomes all the more turbulent. One moment they are at each other's throats, the next they are in each other's arms. Madness overtakes them until it turns deadly.

At its core, ‘The Lighthouse’ explores the covetous relationship between master and apprentice, the wisdom and status of the old, the health and beauty of the young.

When reviewing the use of cinematic verticality, I couldn’t help but draw a parallel with the analysing of social hierarchy on display in Bong Joon Ho's ‘Parasite’. Similarly, in 'The Lighthouse’, the titular ‘lighthouse’ encapsulates the power dynamic of its keepers: as Howard toils away in the bowels of the structure, Wake basks in its alluring glow. Wake’s exclusive access to the Lantern room shows that he has the upper hand.

What starts off simply enough as a master-apprentice dynamic eventually becomes something of a negative Oedipus complex. When describing ‘The Lighthouse’, Eggers was fond of saying, “Nothing good happens to two men trapped in a giant phallus.”

Indeed, the phallic imagery is there, even on the page, during Howard's masturbatory fever dream, it turns quote: “LOOKING LIKE A PENIS”. Thus, the film is both a slow burn of mania and homoeroticism. What starts with Wake taunting Howard, evolves to something physical, but the slow dance that almost ends with a kiss. The film's climax becomes extremely bodily to a point that could teeter into either death or consummation. Theirs is a love-hate relationship, a would be dominant, submissive relationship, but neither is keen to submit. What happens when you have two such wikies but only one lighthouse, one will come out on top.

Wake lords has seniority over Howard at every possible turn, and early on, Wake continually demeans Howard by calling him a dog - the same insult with which Howard’s former foreman derided him.

This all comes to bite Wake, in the ending of the movie, as the tables have turned. Contrast that with a shot near the end. Look who's on top now.

After burying and then killing Wake, in that order, Howard at last scales the spiral staircase to the Lantern room; and the light opens itself unto him. He stares into it. He reaches into it. He loses himself in it – as we lose ourselves in it.

What does Howard see in the light? Eggers is far too shrewd a filmmaker to show us. Besides, watching what it does to Howard is far more effective.

As a plot device, the light is something of a ‘MacGuffin,’ but not free from interpretive symbolism. Is the light power? Is the light knowledge? Is the light sexual satisfaction? What more could a man want?

Perhaps, the light is merely what our superiors possess, whether to keep from us or look down on us. In a dream sequence, Howard scales the lighthouse catwalk, coming across what looks like the body of his former boss. But it's him. Wake grabs Howard from behind. His eyes shine down on him like the lighthouse, an image paying homage to one of the rather homoerotic paintings of Sascha Schneider. Yet, when Howard finally sees the light, he is neither able to contain it nor himself. The rising non-diegetic music: the swell of a corrupted and continuous scream from Howard become overwhelming for him and us, the audience – the reaction is all we need to be overwhelmed.

Howard falls down the lighthouse and the last shot of the film shows us his demise.

This was foreordained when Howard buries Wake Alive:

“O’ what protean forms swim up from men's minds and melt in hot promethean plunder, scorching eyes with divine shames and horror... Them’s truth... You’ll be punished.”

Here he references Prometheus, a Titan deity in Greek mythology. He created humankind from clay, but he defied the gods, even Zeus himself, by stealing fire and gifting it to man. As punishment, Zeus chained Prometheus, setting him on the rocks in Caucasus, whereupon he sent an eagle to feast upon his liver, which grew back each day, only to be devoured again and again and again.

Many a painter have depicted Prometheus’ fate, but I especially like the gory scene that Salvator Rosa put to canvas, which seems echoed in the disembowelled display at the end of ‘The Lighthouse.’

Thomas’ eyes have been pecked out; his body bloodied and decorated in gull guano. Prometheus was punished for an act of overreaching, overstepping one's bounds. And so, Thomas Howard blighted before he even stepped foot on Pilot Rock meets a similar end. In a single shot, which pulls ever backward, we are treated to the chorus of seagulls - the same screeching with which the film began. Noticeably absent is the score because nothing need be foreshadowed anymore, this folksy psychological horror film comes to a close, almost as if a tableau dissolves in a hazy seaside mist.

In all, this stone-cold masterpiece by Eggers is a devilishly ambiguous affair. It’s meanings and symbolisms are seemingly endless. There is so much to unpack from this film (particularly the beginning and ending) and that is why I believe it to work so well as a whole. A tale of grand, mythological implications and imagery, set in an intimate, claustrophobic mise-en-scene.