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!
As a trope, the lighthouse is a Gothic castle, containing the same kinds of allusions of hierarchy(more…)
Note: the following article on the concept of the grotesque in literature is a modified excerpt (pp. 47-48) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see here.
What Is the Grotesque in Literature?
The grotesque in literature can be broadly defined as “a written form of expression which described that which could not be controlled by reason, was unnatural, and arose in opposition to the classical imitation of ‘beautiful nature’ and the rationalism and optimism of the Enlightenment” (Perttula 2011, 22).
However, it is important to underline that the concept of the grotesque underwent an important shift during the Romantic period, which “highlighted above all the dark, fearsome, and demonic nature of the grotesque”, though its comical aspect was still present (Ibid). The merging of what appear to be incongruent elements – comedy and horror, natural and unnatural, and so on – is precisely where the affective power of the grotesque lies. As Kayser argues:
The distortion of all ingredients, the fusion of different realms, the coexistence of beautiful, bizarre, ghastly, and repulsive elements, the merger of the parts into a turbulent whole, the withdrawal into a phantasmagoric and nocturnal world … all these features have here entered into the concept of the grotesque. (1981, 79)
A gargoyle in Paris: the archetypal symbol of the grotesque
Kayser reaches this conclusion examining the works of Edgar Allan Poe, arguably an important figure in this post-romantic form of the grotesque, but in terms of evolution in the concept of the grotesque, Victor Hugo’s contribution should be emphasized.
Whereas before him the grotesque was generally seen as something not existing in nature, Hugo, in his 1827 “Manifesto of the Romantic Movement”, introduced the idea that the grotesque was a part of natural reality (Perttula 2011, 22). The presence of something seemingly unnatural underlines the ambiguous placement of the grotesque between reality and fantasy, an element which is in fact visible also in the Bakhtinian grotesque, when its scope is examined more closely.
