Some Notes on Enchantment

Critic Ben Lewellyn-Taylor shares thoughts and cultural commentary from A24’s The Lighthouse

To write of whiteness is to write of white supremacy. One cannot invoke the former without the latter: the false light from its source.

The continued use of black and white technology in film is an artistic choice, though one that rarely serves to draw attention to constructs of race. 

That is, until The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers’ 2019 film about two lighthouse keepers who antagonize one another during their month-long stint on an otherwise deserted island.

Eggers has not explicitly stated that he intended The Lighthouse as a commentary on whiteness. He did state that he did not initially intend feminist readings of his first film, The Witch, but that he opened himself to this reading through the course of filming—the process of creation becoming a conduit to new understandings of his own work.

The lighthouse is, first and foremost, a phallic symbol. It stands between Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) and Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) as a symbol of what the former wishes to wrest from the latter. Winslow desires the masculine ownership Wake denies him.

 If The Witch lends itself readily to feminist readings, The Lighthouse lends itself readily to readings of toxic masculinity.

“Of course it’s phallic,” Eggers says of the lighthouse. Denied access, Winslow says he never intended to be “no housewife,” a double negative.

The men desire to be with women but to live without them. Women appear only as objects given feminine qualities (the sea, the light) or as symbols (stories, jokes).

On one drunken night, Winslow and Wake almost kiss. Because they cannot (their homoerotic feelings projected onto the lighthouse), they fight, backing away to raise their fists instead.

 A friend tells me The Lighthouse can be filed under cosmic horror alongside The Shining. In the latter, Stanley Kubrick elicited genuine fear from Shelley Duvall by terrorizing her, having her and Nicholson film the scene with the baseball bat 127 times. Though Duvall would later say she learned more from Kubrick than any other filmmaker, she said she would never do it again. 

When asked why he does not try method acting, Robert Pattinson rejected the practice as something praised only in men acting cruelly: “You never see someone being lovely to everyone while they’re really deep in character.”

To prove his manhood, Winslow lifts and drags a large canister of oil up the long, winding staircase to the top. When he arrives, breathless, Wake tosses a smaller canister at him: “Use this next time,” he barks, “unless you’re fixin’ to burn the whole light down.”

Unlike whiteness—which by its nature implies white supremacy—one can speak of masculinity without its toxic add-on. That is, while the latter can be saved from malicious renderings, the former implies an irredeemable state. Impossible to wrest from toxicity, it must be destroyed.

Winslow desires contact with the light, but Wake refuses him. His excuses range from the logical (Winslow’s inexperience) to the primal (“Mine!” he yells). Both the white light and phallic symbol—twin possessions—belong to him.

In the same breath that he claims he never intended to be “no housewife,” Winslow also says he never intended to be “no slave.”

When Wake asks Winslow his backstory, he pretends he has none, that he is “just like any man.”

Winslow is not unlike the Man With No Name of the Western: a static figure, without a past, undefined except by what he does in the here and now. The manifestation of isolation as his ultimate end, if only to bury ghosts.

“No man is an island,” quoted as advice. Not unlike a warning.

 Winslow and Wake are not exactly isolated, since two are present. Yet the fact of the other does not signify community.

Winslow finally reveals he sought a clean slate, white as the crest of a wave. The crest: defined as the point of maximum displacement.

Winslow fled his previous life after killing a man and taking his name—his life—as his own.  

Displacement as the transfer of an intense emotion from its original object to another. A redirection or substitution: maximized, made ultimate.

Winslow reveals his real name: Thomas, just like Wake’s. They are the same, no distance between their bodies.

Although water droplets are transparent, they appear white at the crest.

Wake has Winslow paint the lighthouse white. The pulley—unstable—drops him. It does not hold the weight of his task. He falls while whitewashing.

The men believe the light brings them closer to the divine. “What made your last keeper leave?” Winslow asks. “He believed there was some enchantment with the light.” Winslow chuckles, and his laugh visibly wounds Wake. “Tall tales,” Winslow says. “Just tall tales.”

To be closer to the divine: in this instance, a desire to exist apart from humanity.

 A myth is not made real by its factual occurrence but by the belief in its truth. We live by myths. “We are what we pretend to be,” the oft-quoted phrase from Kurt Vonnegut, has an additional line, which he believed to be the moral of his novel Mother Night: “We should be careful what we pretend to be.”

 Wake warns Winslow about his Promethean dream of attaining a kind of enlightenment, even if Wake himself has been taken with the light. At various points, Wake resembles Zeus, or perhaps a ghost haunting Winslow. When asked if his character is even “real” or merely a figment of Winslow’s imagination, Willem Dafoe reflected that it does not matter: “Characters are real through actions.”

Put another way: what we perceive as real has consequences beyond its fiction.

 As Zeus strikes with lightning, the first film to play in the White House was The Birth of a Nation, which President Woodrow Wilson reportedly compared to “writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

My only regret. As if he wrote the history. Was responsible for it. To it.

The eagle that eats Prometheus’ liver each night is here replaced by seagulls (nearly homonyms). Seagulls, known to feast on live whales, are not classified as birds of prey, like eagles. Still, we know what they are capable of.

 In some versions of the myth, Prometheus was chained to rocks in the Caucasus mountains for his nightly punishment. Caucasus: the origin of our white myth, pseudoscience cast into the heavens.

The way we say toxic masculinity but not toxic whiteness. As in: one cannot be reconfigured. The myth must be habitually undone.

Come down from the mountain. Identify yourself otherwise.

 “I ain’t the kind to look back at what’s behind him, see,” says Winslow. 

Where Percy Shelley celebrated Promtheus’ striving for genius, Mary Shelley warned against creation without accountability. Frankenstein was not a warning against creation, rather a warning against chasing immortality at the cost of community. Dr. Frankenstein does not turn to face what he has made. In this way, he loses everything. Everyone.

 Our solitary heroes, so often male, made heroic by their isolation—their apartness—from humanity. We should be more careful.

 When Winslow finally bludgeons Wake, the blood darkening his face approaches blackface. If the film were not shot in black and white, this effect would not appear so explicitly.

Winslow ascends the lighthouse, where the light makes his face white again.

As he laughs, the laughter becomes distorted, made monstrous. Which is not, to say, apart from the human.

The screen turns utterly, blaringly white. You want to look away. I do.

Winslow falls while whitewashing the lighthouse, then again after the light whitewashes him.

Put another way: let go the light’s myth.

Ben Lewellyn-Taylor lives in Dallas, TX. He is an MFA student at Antioch University. His essays and reviews can be found at bentaylorblogs.com.