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Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse: a Gothic Masterpiece

December 3, 2019

affect, film, Gothic, grotesque, horror, review

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 — As a trope, the lighthouse is a Gothic castle, containing the same kinds of allusions of hierarchy

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Gothic, Metal, and the Concept of the Unspeakable

November 27, 2019

Criticism

defiance, Gothic, metal, music, politics, society

First, a warning: This article is not about “Gothic metal” but about Gothic as a literary genre and metal as a music genre. In this post I explore their interconnection, with the concept of the unspeakable as a bridge.

In simpler terms, picture that there is something connecting, say, Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Jinjer’s “Pisces”. This something is what I refer to here as “the unspeakable”.

Two disclaimers before we begin:

the unspeakable is only one possible link between Gothic and metal. There can be several ways to connect them, but I choose the unspeakable as a neat “umbrella term”, in a way.
I’m not breaking any new ground here. Literary criticism has analyzed these concepts extensively. At best, I might be just popularizing these analyses.

And with these out of the way, let’s see how Gothic and metal might be siblings – and, more importantly, why we should care.

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Home for Fiction is Two Years Old: Looking Back and Dreaming Ahead

November 22, 2019

Home For Fiction

book, creativity, home for fiction, literature

Time flies like an arrow (fruit flies like a banana). It was exactly two years ago when the first post of the Home for Fiction blog appeared. A lot has happened since. The blog itself has grown a lot in terms of readership, and I’ve made apps, I’ve written books, and I’ve even composed music – I certainly didn’t expect that when I began this journey.

Ultimately, however, I’m definitely not the kind of person who focuses on numbers. I’m a fiction writer, after all, and writing fiction is not about accurate figures, but about abstract beauty.

And so, to put it bluntly, I write and code what I feel like, and I simply do not care about audience receptionAren’t you disgusted when you see creators - writers, coders, painters - begging their audience? Few things are more pathetic than degrading yourself for audience reception (be it in terms of attention or money), and that’s especially the case when dealing with audiences plagued by unfathomable stupidity. I have basically stopped responding to so-called reviews left for my Android apps, because I’m exhausted by dealing with people complaining that… the app is coded in English, not their native language..

Presently, I feel like blogging and coding. However, both the blog and the Android apps might disappear one day, if I feel they no longer serve their creative purpose.

We can’t discover new oceans if we don’t have the courage to lose sight of the shore.

home for fiction — “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore” — André Gide.

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