Home For Fiction – Blog

A film review on Home for Fiction? Sort of. But this isn’t a typical review. Rather, in this post I plan to analyze how Robert Eggers’s 2019 The Lighthouse is a Gothic masterpiece.

To do that, I will really go deeply into Gothic tropes, to show the seriously great job the director did with this film. Indeed, to this Gothic specialist, The Lighthouse is a Gothic classroom. If I needed to pick only one work from the recent 10-20 years to teach someone about the Gothic, The Lighthouse would be the one.

I’ve tried to balance between not including any spoilers and still being able to talk about the Gothic tropes of the film. In all honesty, the Gothic as a mode doesn’t rely on strictness and linearity. That is, it’s about affect, not plot.

However, if you haven’t watched The Lighthouse yet and you’d like to enter the narrative without any interpretative prejudice, feel free to stop reading at this point. You can then come back to this post after you’ve watched the film.

Otherwise, if you’ve already seen the film and want to know why I consider The Lighthouse a Gothic masterpiece, read on!

The Lighthouse: Gothic Tropes Extravaganza

In my review of The Shadow of the Wind, I explained how sometimes all the usual Gothic elements are present, but the end result is still a failure. This happens when an author wants to present a work as Gothic, without really understanding what the Gothic involves.

Nothing could be further from the truth in regard to The Lighthouse. Not only every, single, Gothic trope that I know of has somehow found its way into the film, but – much more crucially – it happens in an entirely organic way, telling me that the director, Robert Eggers, was fully aware of all the why’s and how’s.

Plot Is Unimportant. Affect Is Everything

The plot of The Lighthouse couldn’t be more mundane. Two men – I will name them “the Keeper” and “the Lad” – arrive at a remote island to take care of the lighthouse there. It’s the late 19th century, and they need to stay alive (and sane) without mobiles, radio, or contact with the outside world. That’s it. That’s the plot, basically.

Of course, words can’t properly express the vastness of different narratives and the richness of language and meaning that – like a Lovecraftian entity – hide beneath this deceptively simple description.

The entire film is an intricate allegory (or several) pertaining to questions of existential anxiety, ethics, the nature of reality, memory, and identity.

Issues of Identity

The Keeper’s name is Thomas. The Lad’s name is Ephraim. And yet… it isn’t. As we find out at some point, his real name is also Thomas. This serves a double function.

First of all, it indicates that things aren’t what they seem in The Lighthouse. The Gothic relies heavily on the trope of misidentification, both literally – as in, of people and things not being who they appear – but, more importantly, figuratively: as a way of revealing how little we know of our own self; self-misidentification.

The second function of having two Thomases is, naturally, related to the timeless Gothic trope of the double. The Keeper (a superlative Willem Dafoe) is a master, an authority figure. Indeed he is a father figure.

Yet in the course of the film, as both the Keeper and the Lad (solid performance by Robert Pattinson) descend into madness, the roles are reversed to the point of absurdity near the end (and I mean that as a compliment).

The Lighthouse as a Gothic Grotesque: Aesthetics and Deviant Sexuality

One of the most intriguing aspects of the concept of the grotesque is its dual nature. It’s both comic and menacing. In a nutshell, the grotesque can create both hilarity and yet make you feel very uncomfortable (think of the uncanny valley or clown figures).

The same aesthetics inform the Gothic essence of The Lighthouse, too.

In its entirety, The Lighthouse – shot in black & white film with a very old camera – features dark aesthetics, in a properly Gothic fashion.

There is darkness, stormy weather, cliffs, isolation, blood, entombment, a hint at the supernatural and monstrosityRemember that, in its purest form, the Gothic should never actually embrace the supernatural. Rather, it should balance in the ambiguous in-between., death, violence, and, above all (literally!) the lighthouse lantern room itself. The top of the castle, containing the truth of all truths.

Sounds in The Lighthouse are Gothic, too. There are some subtle, discreet music accents here and there, but much of the effect is created solely by the sounds of the environment: mechanical, natural, and sometimes perhaps not so natural.

And yet, for all this darkness, there are incredibly comedic moments. Imagine the Keeper – that apparent old sea-dog – knitting, or some drunken nights ending with the Keeper and the Lad dancing like lovers.

The truly grotesque scenes, however, literally include both elements – the carnivalesque and the menacing – within the same instance. That is, there are scenes that make you laugh, though the laughter soon freezes and breaks into a thousand pieces.

Just imagine a dream(?) where the Lad is having sex with a mermaid (a scene with graphic, disturbing aesthetics), before he is pulled into the dark waters. Or the Lad being pestered by a seagull before grabbing it and, full of rage, smashing it against the rock in a gory, graphic display.

Dreams, Madness, Reality, Illusion

When it comes to The Lighthouse Gothic conventions, nothing reveals to me more than the way the nature of reality is treated by Eggers. Essentially, every other trope exists to serve the core issues of identity and reality.

Who is the Lad? Who is the Keeper? What are they, in the sense of their being representational instances of every one of us? To what extent do we make our own reality, and to what extent can we be certain of the narrative we tell ourselves?

These questions have no answers, and The Lighthouse doesn’t disappoint by trying to offer any. Ambiguity is what it’s all about, and the film is exceptional at not offering any solutions.

The nature of reality is disrupted not only by the plethora of dreams (or are they all dreams?) or illusions (ditto) but also by the continuous exchange between the two men, both spoken and unspeakable; both explicit and implied.

It’s surely ironic (though certainly not accidental; there’s nothing accidental in The Lighthouse) that a process of gaslightingGaslighting means to psychologically manipulate someone by making them question their own memory, perception, or sanity. is occurring at the lighthouse. The Keeper is clear telling the Lad not to contradict him; he is so persuasive that the audience are gaslighted themselves – having just witnessed the Keeper smashing a boat with an ax, they aren’t sure he’s lying when he convinces the Lad it was he who did it after all.

Time and the Guilty Past

Guilt eats a man alive. This is something that becomes almost literally true in The Lighthouse. Gothic narratives virtually always revolve around the concept of the guilty past, assuming the form of repression, regression, trauma, and a panoply of Freudian terms – with the uncanny always lurking in the shadows.

The Lad has secrets; so does the Keeper. But whereas for the latter everything unravels in an eternal now, for the former it’s a matter of the past rapidly accumulating, suffocating him with its weight.

This process includes the interpretation of time itself. “How long do you think we’ve been on this rock?” the Keeper asks, and the Lad as well as the audience begin to wonder – was it two days, five months, or even something more bizarre altogether?

The Keeper – perhaps still gaslighting the Lad, or perhaps in the capacity of the Lad’s own subconscious – offers the grand what-if: Maybe none of this is real; maybe it’s all the product of a mind gone insane with remorse.

The Lighthouse and Gothic Allusion

As any self-respecting Gothic work, The Lighthouse contains a vast number of references to other works. Some occur directly (such as Moby Dick), others conceptually, such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, or the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus.

Allusion in the Gothic is not just a way of creating context; of placing a work within the framework of its canon. Rather, allusion and intertextuality are about enhancing the symbolic power of the work.

Prometheus defied authority and stole fire (“light”) from Zeus. In a film where light acquires divine status and becomes the all-consuming target of obsession, it’s not surprising to see the Promethean myth materializing so explicitly.

Down to the last detail.

The Lighthouse: Gothic Excellence

To say that I liked The Lighthouse would be a major understatement. I loved it. I’ve been exposed to many Gothic narratives in my 12 years in the academic world, and let me tell you, few have been so hollistically flawless.

I literally can’t find a single flaw with the film. It’s a textbook example of what a Gothic work should be. But beyond such an analysis, deep down it’s an eminently thought-provoking narrative, that will keep you troubled for a long time after you watch it.

Click to display the embedded YouTube video