Lighthouse

Mrs. Filthy likes culture. She likes to pretend what might have been if she had chosen a different life. She always pretends fancy, artsy shit. Like going to college campuses and walking around make-believing she’s a professor there, yelling at kids on bikes that their homework is late, or to come by her office hours, or to pick up a candy wrapper she drops.

That’s one of the two reasons we ended up on the CU Boulder campus Friday night. The other is that sometimes she likes to get all fancy and go to their Independent Film Society to watch artsy-fartsy movies in uncomfortable auditoriums with shitty sound systems. These are the sort of movies that you can watch in the privacy of your own basement apartment any time you want, scratch your head and go “What the fuck was that?” without a bunch of snooty art major kids making fun of you.

Last Friday, we saw The Lighthouse, a black-and-white movie that came out last year. I had heard it was a horror movie, but that’s just bullshit people said it’s sort of hard to characterize and because the guy who directed/co-wrote it (Robert Eggers) also made The Witch a few years ago. It’s not scary. Rather, it’s more just intense and grim and full of building dread, the sense of being stuck with ugly, desperate people who can’t help but do awful things. Like being stuck in a dentist’s waiting room for two hours with the Bravo channel on full volume.

The Lighthouse isn’t a groundbreaking story, either. Way back in the 19th century, two men (Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe) work at a remote lighthouse along the eastern seaboard in the wet and storm and cold, gray days for more than a month, alone with each other, with no comfort and no distractions. Just thankless, repetitive hard work and no stories to tell after the first couple of nights. The only entertainment they have comes from gallons of booze, which is crazy dangerous. I would rather keep booze to myself or share it with many others. Never with just one other. Never.

You already know what will happen. The two men will slowly go nuts. Or, in Dafoe’s case, have gotten there already. Donald Barthelme covered the same topic in his story “Game” almost 40 years ago, except the two men were stuck in a tiny nuclear missile bunker underground in the Midwest, bored out of their skulls and each with one of the two keys required to launch a missile. All the paranoia, distrust and machinations of an idle mind were there as they are in The Lighthouse.

All of this is not to say The Lighthouse isn’t good. It’s actually really fucking great at several things. First it sets a dismal tone very well, if maybe taking more time than it needs to. Ninety minutes of this movie is just a tone poem about the cruel sea, isolation, filth, anger and monotony. There is little joy, just a slowly tightening of a knot in the stomach as you see two miserable, silent men whose hate for each other is building pressure like a blackhead in your ear, and you know it’s going to hurt like hell when it pops, and it’s going to be messy as fuck, but you keep digging in there with a pencil, an old nail, a fork, whatever you can find. A seabird is killed, despite the warning it is bad luck. The weather grows worse, the sky darker and the waves bigger.

Second, Dafoe and Pattinson both do fine, if unsympathetic work. Pattinson’s character Winslow is the new, taciturn and unhappy guy, he’s never worked a lighthouse before being set on the tiny island for four weeks where Dafoe’s character Wake already is and treats it like his little kingdom. Pattinson keeps a sour face that bottles up a rage you know is going to come out, just like it has in the character’s past.

Dafoe is fucking brilliant. He’s exactly as you imagine an old sea captain or public art school teacher, all scruffy and surly and drunk and full of more horseshit than a Clydesdale. It’s a ballsy, unlikable portrayal, and easily the scariest thing in the movie.

Winslow’s trying to escape a bad past and start fresh. He’s young enough, though, to need companionship and the lack of it, along with backbreaking labor, slowly drives him to hallucinate and to resent the older Wake and his imperious demands. Also, his farting. God, the farting. The movie is so grimy you can smell it. Actually, wait, no, that was the college kid next to me.

Plus, Winslow has to deal with Wake, whose been working the lighthouse for a long fucking time and has been nuts for probably most of it. Nothing he does is good enough for the old man: not the way he scrubs, or carries coal, or pisses or shits, or that he refuses to drink. Wake only drinks hooch, never water.

Winslow would have barely made the four weeks he was supposed to be there, but a storm sets in and his replacement never arrives. Then the desperation he’s bottled spills out and he can’t stomach anymore good behavior. The once spic-and-span lighthouse is demolished as the men polish off the booze and turn to drinking kerosene mixed with honey. They fight, they dance, they argue, all while the waves whip against the rocks, the roof leaks and their patience with one another grows thin.

The lighthouse floods. The furniture, dishes and cabinets are demolished. They brawl. The lights swing wildly and gray shadows grow long. Like Scientology, the two men use the secrets they revealed in moments of weakness against each other. Dafoe’s keep cleaves Pattinson’s shoulder with an axe. There is no way two men will survive.

All in all, the Lighthouse is an interesting movie, Three Fingers worth. Not one I’d want to see again, though, because it’s so fucking grim and, ultimately, there’s not enough there to think about later, or enough there to be worth enduring twice. The college kids were nuts for it, though. After all, it’s in black and white so it must be pretty fucking important. And, it’s not fun, so it must be good for you. They couldn’t wait to go talk about it, and Mrs. Filthy went with them while I sat in a courtyard watching college students ride by on their bikes in the dark, and I thought about what could have been. I imagined my own story, and how I might have ended up here too, one day, maybe cleaning the toilets in Mrs. Filthy’s office.