Aptly for a director so invested in orally told tales – superstitions, fisherman’s stories, Icelandic sagas – Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse is already accruing its own legend. It’s one of the few modern films to have a legendarily tough shoot, all of which is unpacked in the three-part making-of documentary on this 4K Blu-Ray from Arrow Video. It’s also one of modern cinema’s greatest examples of a wild gamble paying off. As Eggers reflects in another bonus feature, the feature-length Art of Darkness: Making the Lighthouse, the director was struggling to develop some bigger-budget films in the wake of his 2015 debut The VVitch. During a particularly frustrating lull, he wondered if he could use that film’s heat to get something smaller off the ground, something that would be easier to finance but held out the possibility of more artistic freedom.
And it worked. The VVitch and The Northman are both more accessible than The Lighthouse, and yet in some ways this is the film of Eggers’s that made the greatest impact: you see more memes of it than you do the other two films, and that has to be considered a very modern metric of success. It’s already becoming hard to recall the mixed reception it got on release, a reception that is and isn’t hard to understand. On one level, The Lighthouse is a very easy film to understand. It is a film about two men, completely isolated in a hostile environment, slowly losing their minds. You could watch it on that level, interpreting every piece of abstruse symbolism as nothing more than the product of unravelling brains, and it would be completely satisfying.
The fact that people don’t want to do that, that even the film’s detractors seemed exercised by the question of what it all meant, is credit to the depth and richness of Eggers’s vision. As with The VVitch and The Northman, he is very good at picking out genres that are familiar yet unfamiliar: you sort of know what a lighthouse-keeper’s story will be like, just as you have a sense of what a “New England folk tale” or an Icelandic revenge saga will be like, even though they rarely appear on screen. The visions of Willem Dafoe’s Thomas Wake as some kind of titanic sea god, or Wake and Wicklow’s obsession with the unspecified mystic properties of the lighthouse’s lamp, might come across as strained attempts at weirdness in a less thoroughly researched and imagined film. With Eggers, though, there is a sense that this all means something, that there is a paper trail to follow somewhere.
One of the more unexpected lenses the extras throw on The Lighthouse is that it depicts a collision of acting styles, theatre-trained and film-trained. It’s the sort of thing that students of late Golden Age Hollywood will point out in films from the early days of method acting, such as A Streetcar Named Desire or The Prince and the Showgirl, and it’s fascinating seeing it at work in a modern film.
And this new disc allows you to follow it, to an extent. There was much speculation on release that The Lighthouse was a retelling of the myth of Prometheus, though in her interviews and commentary track (shared with Guy Adams) critic Alexandra Benedict argues that Proteus is also an inspiration. Eggers himself talks about the antique books and records he consulted to get the period detail right, as well as the script’s literary roots in Poe and Melville. Melville’s Moby-Dick is, of course, the OG when it comes to stories apparently about the wild open sea that are really exploring inner demons, and Benedict also pulls out a wildly homoerotic passage from that novel to show that the aspect of Wake and Wicklow’s relationship is foreshadowed here as well. In the film’s less fraught moments, the two lighthouse keepers feel like a bickering old married couple, and those sitcom overtones are not inappropriate at all. For all its Pabst and Lang-inspired visual and jags of transgressive imagery, The Lighthouse is a very funny film. Dafoe pitches his performance up to the rafters, the ideal odd-couple counterpart to Robert Pattinson’s simmering irritability as Wicklow.
One of the more unexpected lenses the extras throw on The Lighthouse is that it depicts a collision of acting styles, theatre-trained and film-trained. It’s the sort of thing that students of late Golden Age Hollywood will point out in films from the early days of method acting, such as A Streetcar Named Desire or The Prince and the Showgirl, and it’s fascinating seeing it at work in a modern film. Against the usual stereotype, it’s the American actor who has the theatre-trained ethos of getting the most out of the first take, while the British Pattinson preferred the cinematic style of developing a performance over multiple takes. The quality noted above, where Dafoe is wildly artificial but somehow completely believable, while Pattinson is terse and interior, can also be read as coming from this culture clash.
Another lens you can view The Lighthouse through is that of, er, the lens, with the extras going into great detail about how exhaustively the titular lighthouse’s giant light-emitter was researched and constructed. After watching it, you might find yourself agreeing with Wicklow and Wake: there definitely is something mysterious and sacred about this thing. The making-of extras deserve credit for giving so much credit to Eggers’s fantastic crew, interviewing cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, costume designer Linda Muir and the light-bringer himself, production designer Craig Lathrop. Eggers himself contributes a typically erudite second commentary track, there is a very fine video essay from Kat Ellinger about the film’s folkloric roots, and the 4K Ultra HD presentation allows you to see every cold, disgusting thing flung into Pattinson and Dafoe’s faces in unbeatable clarity.
The Lighthouse is available on 4K Blu-Ray from Arrow Video
Graham’s Archive: The Lighthouse (2019)
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