Avoid Killing a Seagull: Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse

It’s not a happy film, first off — but it is a fascinating one.  The docent at the Indiana University Cinema showing last night ended his introduction saying “the film must be soaked in.”  Soaked in . . . immersed?  Or, as I did, settling in my chair, leaving my mind open, and just enjoying the ride.  No thought, no attempt to decipher symbols — all that can come later; and, in the moment, I think the film worked.  A massively unreliable narrator (stay in his head, enjoy the ride!) and certainly not a happy one, but a film I think is worth seeing.

Here’s what the IU Cinema program book says about it:  From Robert Eggers, the visionary filmmaker behind modern horror masterpiece THE WITCH, comes this hypnotic and hallucinatory tale set in the 1890s on a remote island off the coast of New England.  Two lighthouse keepers (Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson), trapped and isolated due to a seemingly never-ending storm, engage in an escalating battle of wills as tensions boil over and mysterious forces — which may or may not be real — loom all around them.  The film evokes a wide range of influences, from literary classics by Herman Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson to the supernatural tales of H.P. Lovecraft, while presenting a story and film [image error]unlike any other.  Contains mature content, including violence and sexual situations.

But wait, there’s more.  The docent mentioned that one source of inspiration, some details of which may be in the film too (note, e.g., the names of the two men), was an incident at an actual lighthouse off the coast of Wales.  The old lighthouse brought about a change in lighthouse policy in 1801 after a gruesome episode, sometimes called the Smalls Lighthouse Tragedy.  The two-man team, Thomas Howell and Thomas Griffith, were known to quarrel, so when Griffith died in a freak accident, Howell feared that he might be suspected of murder if he discarded the body into the sea.  As the body began to decompose, Howell built a makeshift coffin for the corpse and lashed it to an outside shelf.  Stiff winds blew the box apart, though, and the body’s arm fell within view of the hut’s window and caused the wind to catch it in such a way that it seemed as though it was beckoning.  Working alone and with the decaying corpse of his former colleague outside Howell managed to keep the lamp lit.  When Howell was finally relieved from the lighthouse the effect the situation had had on him was said to be so extreme that some of his friends did not recognise him.  As a result, lighthouse teams were changed to rosters of three men, which continued until the automation of British lighthouses in the 1980s.  (Wikipedia, “Smalls Lighthouse”)

As for the seagull, well, killing one’s bad luck — the same, one recalls from high school English, as with albatrosses.  See, part of the fun is assembling pieces together after you’ve seen the film and decided you want to know more about it.  For instance the title, THE LIGHTHOUSE, as well as the movie’s initial idea came from a fragment by Edgar Allan Poe, though with just one character rather than two, which I’m not going to quote but which you can read by pressing here.  (And note the meerschaum pipe and the dog.)