Robert Eggers’ psychological horror film The Lighthouse draws on some of the oldest and most primal fears in the human psyche: abandonment, madness, the unknown, isolation, darkness, and, perhaps most horrific of all, being stranded on a deserted island with your boss.
The film is about two lighthouse keepers (or ‘wickies’ in late-19th century slang) stranded on an island off the coast of New England by a horrific storm. Initially contracted for one month to perform maintenance work on the titular lighthouse, Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson), a young man trying to outrun his sinful past, suddenly finds himself trapped with his tyrannical, garish, and vulgar boss, Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe), an old ex-sea captain and the self-appointed sole protector of the lighthouse lamp. Pushed to his limits by Wake and the grueling work he is made to complete, Winslow slowly unravels. The Lighthouse concludes with Wake’s murder and Winslow pecked to death by seagulls.
The Lighthouse’s story of cabin fever is uncannily familiar in the horror genre, with titles such as The Shining and It Comes At Night showcasing isolation’s devastating effect on masculinity and familial relationships. Yet The Lighthouse manages to produce a fresh and valuable take on male anxieties and masculinity that extends well beyond the film’s late-19th century setting and into the modern-day. Though extant criticism of The Lighthouse has rightly identified the film as a masculinity crisis text or, at least, showing concern with the performance of toxic masculinities, I believe that a more specific language is needed in order to fully encapsulate why the men in Eggers’ writing cross the line into ‘toxic’ masculinities, more so than simply the fact that Winslow and Wake are horrific people. I believe the answer lies in the film’s depiction of manual labor and, more broadly, work culture.
Until quite recently, Western culture has understood that work maketh the man. For men, a job is not merely access to income, but an essential component of manhood. And, certainly, it needed to be; work was the very thing that defined a man as ‘not a woman’ until feminist activists rightly interrupted this Western myth. Men venture out into the public sphere and go to work, while women remain in the house and raise children. Men perform labor to grow the economy. Women go into labor to produce a family. The double meaning of the term is not lost on feminist critics of this social phenomenon and it is no coincidence that one definition of ‘labor’ is more prized than the other. Hence employment, not birthright, is the central factor in the myth of the American Dream – not inheriting wealth, but patiently and honorably climbing the capitalist ladder by “working hard” until the man moves from humble janitor to kingly CEO.
It is even more recently that workaholism has been understood as a behavior that crosses the line into ‘toxic’ masculinity, as much as behaviors like binge drinking or drag racing do. Consider the negative effects, for men and society at large, of understanding employment as an ideal of manhood. Work culture exacerbates an already straining class divide, especially when men are pressured to be The Boss rather than a corporate drone. Not to mention the emotional constipation that must come with putting business before familial relationships and depriving oneself of play and leisure in the name of “productivity”. No wonder men who conform to this hyper-competitive culture find themselves with sleep disorders and abuse alcohol as a coping mechanism. If a man has no job, is he truly a man? This is the dilemma The Lighthouse grapples with, using male characters who sit at both ends of the spectrum: Wake, whose persona is completely subsumed by his role as a sea captain, and Winslow, who has floated from contract to contract while never really finding a long-term position to his contentment.
Wake is a man defined by his job. Though no longer a sailor or captain, he remains utterly engulfed by sea life. On the men’s first night at the lighthouse, Wake immediately corrects Winslow’s “Yessir” to a more sea-worthy and appropriate “Aye, sir.” From this moment on, his persona as a begrudged sea captain barking orders at his crew of scurvy dogs to swab the deck will only intensify to the point of, in Winslow’s words, “a goddamn parody”. From his pipe, pirate-esque limp, and vocabulary ripped from the pages of Moby Dick, Wake is less of a human being than he is a monstrous caricature of his profession (at one point, Winslow imagines him with tentacles). This is a performance of American masculinity gone awry, the capitalist script that work maketh the man is too closely followed for comfort. Indeed, rather than enamor the audience with what should be a familiar and charming character archetype from American literature, Eggers follows the Gothic tradition and instead inverts Wake’s persona so that he becomes a grotesque, repellent figure of masculinity: smelly, perverted, creepy, drunken, and always either snoring, farting, or hacking up phlegm. Paradoxically, becoming a real man has made Wake a caricature at best (“Captain Ahab horseshit,” as Winslow rebukes) and a monster at worst.
Winslow, on the other hand, is a literal fish out of water the moment he begins his job. The island’s inhabitants, an omnipresent flock of seagulls, immediately recognize Winslow as an outsider and relentlessly mock him while he struggles to complete his duties to the tune of shrill, cheeky caws. What is more, seagulls, Wake informs Winslow, are reincarnated souls of sailors who have died at sea —not even in death can a seaman untangle himself from his profession, it seems. Wake goes as far to question Winslow’s motive in becoming a wicky, mocking him as too “pretty” for the rough work of a seaman. The scene self-reflexively draws attention to the casting of Robert Pattinson whose star image was built as a teen heartthrob after the enormous success of the Twilight series. Wake’s comment, “pretty as a picture,” is emasculating at the same time as it directly correlates real or acceptable manliness with the ability to perform manual labor. But no matter how hard Winslow works, the quarters never seem to stay clean, the machinery always breaks down, and his boss is never satisfied – epitomized in the scene where Winslow takes out the men’s chamber pots and a great gust of wind whips urine and feces straight back into his face. The ‘maintenance’ work he has been contracted to perform seems to be less about tending to the lighthouse than it is maintaining the current status quo, where, as a blue-collar worker, he is more or less a “slave” to pointless busywork with no real value or goal and Wake, the tyrannical boss, does no work at all, treating his time as a wicky as a kind of natural progression from sailor, to captain, to retiree.
As different as the day and night shifts which divide them, Winslow and Wake in their pursuit of work enact a gap between young and old that remains relevant even in the present day. Winslow describes himself as having done “every kind of work that can pay a man”. The audience learns that his previous role was as a timberman in Canada – a line of work completely different, in both environment and duties, to his current job maintaining the lighthouse. By contrast, Wake’s experience of what seems to be life-long employment as a sailor could not be more different. He gloats to Winslow about having missed “thirteen Christmases” away from his family at sea and now, in his current role, in his own words, “I am a wicky, and a wicky, I is” (Eggers’ circular dialogue perfectly emphasizing how Wake’s concept of himself is entirely based on the work he performs).
Extending the metaphor for young versus old, each character also enacts the tension between contract and full-time employment. Winslow, in modern language, personifies the dreaded ‘gig economy’ which forces young people to jump from job to job and, thus, identity to identity. For this, Wake dismissively calls Winslow a “drifter.” Thus, Wake represents older generations who have benefited from the security of full-time employment all their lives, yet harbor a disdain for young people who, in their view, are failing to “make something of themselves” (literally failing to make themselves an identity). In one pivotal scene, Wake reprimands Winslow as “A bitch what wants to be coveted for nothin’ but bein’ born, crying ‘bout the silver spoon what should have been yers”. In a monumental feat of writing and historicization, Eggers has managed to translate the flippant “entitled millennial snowflake” insult of the late-2010s peddled by the boomer generation into 1890s sailor jargon. In Wake’s view, Winslow’s manhood is something of a Frankenstein’s monster of contract positions – a man made up of parts or periods, but not entirely whole, not a real man. The Lighthouse cements this metaphor when, in a drunken stupor, Winslow admits that his real name is actually ‘Thomas Howard’ and he took on the name of his last boss, ‘Ephraim Winslow,’ who died in a logging accident that Winslow/Howard failed to prevent. “How else am I gonna find work?,” Winslow muses, without a (male) identity of his own, and how is he supposed to find his identity without work? Work, masculinity, and death are all related in The Lighthouse, each informing and confirming the other.
When Winslow and Wake become marooned on the island, we begin to see a breakdown of the strict borders around these concepts of ‘work’ and ‘masculinity’. The men neglect their duties and turn instead to alcohol to weather the storm — thus the lighthouse becomes more of a home than a workplace. “Why’d yer spill yer beans, Winslow?” Wake rambles, indicating that the relationship between them has changed from purely professional to something far too intimate for a traditional workplace. Since their professional relationship has been breached, so has their masculinity: the men share a homoerotic slow dance, an almost-kiss that leads to a rough and tumble fight, and end the scene with what could be construed as a post-coital cuddle. Indeed, the fight is a masculine substitute for sexual intercourse. At this moment, when the boundaries between personal and professional have become muddled, the men have both turned on (physically attacked) each other and turned on (aroused) each other. The homoerotic elements of The Lighthouse have been extensively mused on and, when analyzed through the lens of work culture, the film quite literally shines a light on how deeply engulfed and entangled masculinity is in capitalist systems.
If the lighthouse symbolizes the phallic masculine ideal (the structure is basically an erect penis) then its light symbolizes masculinity in its most toxic, destructive form. Indeed, light is supposed to be illuminating and warm, as the purpose of a lighthouse is to guide sailors towards land. However, light is also blinding and can even burn. Much of the film’s tension comes from a so-called “enchantment in the light” that Winslow is desperate to unlock for himself. This enchantment is hegemonic masculine power. Wake covets that power in appointing himself as the sole guardian of the lighthouse lamp, despite workplace regulations which advise that the task be divided equally between the two wickies. In defying the handbook, Wake demonstrates that he views himself as more manly and higher up along the corporate food chain than Winslow. Wake is so consumed with his job to protect it that in one scene the film objectifies him as a lighthouse, a blinding glow emanating from his eyes ejaculated straight into Winslow’s face as he kneels in peril before his majestic boss. The problem that this shot re-enacts is that for one man to be in the light, another must be kept in the dark. For one man to be the boss, another must be a drone. Relationships along the corporate ladder are not so much an ecosystem as they are a binary, this dynamic recreated in the film’s black and white color palette. The exact same premise is equally true of how Western culture understands gender, including and especially hegemonic masculinity.
The Lighthouse cements this idea when the shining, hypnotic allure of masculine power leads to the deaths of both men. Wake’s final words are “The light belongs to me” and he dies trying to defend it. Winslow’s pursuit of the light exacerbates his pre-existing instability and it too leads to his downfall. In the scene where Winslow finally gets to see the light for himself, he literally climbs the ladder and unlocks the hatch to the lamp – the American Dream in full swing, with perhaps an image of a class-based equivalent to the Glass Ceiling. Mouth agape and with a maddening howl, Winslow is both consuming and consumed by the light as it almost pours from the lamp down his gaping throat. The motif continues into the film’s final scene where Winslow awaits his death on the shore and is eaten alive by seagulls.
The Lighthouse certainly presents a bleak and horrific view of two men literally consumed by work and capitalist culture. However, Eggers does manage to provide a ray of hope. The lesson of the film is that the way capitalist Western culture understands work and labor is merely a fiction, just another story we tell ourselves. Winslow brushes off Wake’s mythmaking about the seagulls as “tall tales” and Wake likewise challenges Winslow’s quiet and mysterious persona as the “same old boring story”. One of the film’s twists is that neither man is who they say they are – Winslow is just defeated and guilt-ridden enough to admit his falsities. Notably, he calls out Wake on his parodic persona by citing a list of authoritarian, patriarchal jobs: “You think you’re so high and mighty just ‘cos you’re a goddamn lighthouse keeper? Well, you ain’t a captain of no ship and you never was. You ain’t no general, you ain’t no copper, you ain’t the President, and you ain’t my father. And I’m sick of you acting like you is!” Wake, we find out, was never a captain and has been writing his history, literally ‘his story’, into the lighthouse’s logbook. Whether we are to believe Winslow’s account of the logbook is certainly a point of contention, however, as the film never offers the audience an objective shot of Wake’s writing. In any case, masculinity and work are stories, like the very film itself, that we tell ourselves about who we are, and exposing these facets of identity as fiction provides a chance for re-writing the narrative.
Overall, the representation of men, masculinity, and work culture is The Lighthouse’s strongest theme, shining through every interaction between its male leads. I do not believe that The Lighthouse is an anti-work film; instead, Eggers is asking us to uncouple work from the definition of manhood and re-write what it means to be a man. Not since The Shining has horror cinema seen such a searing critique of men who base their identities around the labor they perform. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” Jack Torrance madly rambles, but The Lighthouse goes a step further and suggests that when men are defined by their place in the corporate food chain they are literally eaten alive. “Boredom makes men to villains,” Wake warns Winslow, but I do not think the film’s audience is supposed to agree with him. In fact, I think The Lighthouse asks us to reconceptualize what ‘boredom’ means here: is it having nothing to do or, more insidiously, is it having too much work to do? What makes a man a villain is not boredom, but a toxic masculine culture of uncritical devotion to the myth of the American Dream.
