What is Illuminated and What is Shadowed
Emily Dickinson, salvation, and “The Lighthouse.”
BY BENJAMIN CRAIG
Since watching The Lighthouse, I’ve been thinking about an Emily Dickinson poem. It is number 1010, “Crumbling is not an instant’s Act.” It concludes with a reference to “Crashe’s law.” Dickinson seems to be inventing a law of physics here—a law to explain that the “crash” is only the climax of a slow process of ruin. She asks us to turn our attention to the methodical work the Devil has done to precipitate the climactic fall.
Crumbling is not an instant’s Act
A fundamental pause
Dilapidation’s processes
Are organized Decays —
In the film, a wickie, or lighthouse keeper, named Thomas (Willem Dafoe) and a new assistant/trainee, Ephraim (Robert Pattinson), attempt to coexist on a small island for four weeks, brave a storm that extends Ephraim’s stay indefinitely, and overcome the stress of a relationship that is doomed by several factors. Each man has some mysterious violent event in his past. Both prefer not to be known—Thomas through misdirection and Ephraim through silence. Each man begins this part of their story in an already advanced state of decay. The lighthouse reflects Thomas’s own state, run down and in need of an impossible number of repairs. Clues to Ephraim’s state come one at a time, with a hint of a latent addiction and a fixation on unfulfilled sexual desire. If there is a good end for either man it is in the lantern in the top of the lighthouse, which Thomas hordes access to for himself.
While their personalities sometimes seem incompatible and tension rises over the increasingly backbreaking and occasionally unnecessary tasks Thomas doles out, the lantern (the light) itself is the center of their conflict. Ephraim twice reminds Thomas that the regulations require tending to the lantern to be rotated between the two men. Thomas refuses, and retaliates by tracking, in his log book, minor and major infractions Ephraim makes, and by recommending Ephraim receive severance without pay. Ephraim only discovers this, however, midway through the climax. Access to that light is what incites their final violent confrontation. Its mystery and perceived power tip Ephraim toward insanity as he becomes increasingly desperate.
Throughout the film we see the light from both far and mid-distance. In the sharp, contrasty black-and-white landscape, it frequently fills the frame with a diffuse and intense brightness. It rotates around the lantern room, shifting its attention and seemingly changing the shape of what it sees. It also, quite literally, changes what we can know about the landscape we are seeing. It moves and obliterates shadows, providing information about the surrounding island and the two men on it, while remaining off limits to both Ephraim and the viewer, thanks to Thomas’s steadfast guarding of its secrets. The light has the power to determine, by controlling what is illuminated and what shadowed, what can and cannot be known.
The closest we, and Ephraim, get to the light prior to the ending is when he approaches it from below, inside the tower. The floor of the lantern room is a steel grating which Ephraim can see through in an obstructed way. He cannot lay eyes on the lantern itself, the source of the light, but its glow is intense, though it never reaches him on the stairs below. While observing, he remains in relative darkness.
’Tis first a Cobweb on the Soul
A Cuticle of Dust
A Borer in the Axis
An Elemental Rust —
It’s difficult not to see the lantern as a metaphor for god. The conflict between the two men is the conflict between a religious authority acting as a gatekeeper to that god, and a sinner after salvation denied access. Both men refer to the regulations, the book, in an effort to prove the righteousness of their position. The rules are weaponized against Ephraim to keep him both ignorant and subservient. Nevertheless, Ephraim refers to those same rules to carve out his path to enlightenment. The rules are inescapable, the hierarchy powerful, and the reward both absolutely necessary and jealously guarded. Nearly all conversations between the two men throughout the film touch on superstition, reinforcing this metaphor. Thomas is deeply attached to sailor superstitions, espousing them as Truth and warning Ephraim not to run afoul of them by, for instance, fighting with the birds. There are the rules in the book and there are the rules developed over time to explain the things the book cannot. Ephraim’s transgression when he kills a gull seems to set in motion the final events of the film. But in this film we see only the “instant’s Act.” The madness we witness is the end—the crash—of two stories which are and will remain opaque.
Ruin is formal — Devil’s work
Consecutive and slow —
Fail in an instant, no man did
Slipping — is Crashe’s law —
In the film’s final moments we, and Ephraim, do finally get our close look at the lantern. It reveals almost nothing. The light’s source is filtered through layers of cut and angled glass redirecting its rays and obscuring some ultimate central source of its power. It cannot be known. Still, Ephraim is mesmerized by it and attracted to it to such a degree that he risks his body and life to reach closer. In the end, knowledge is still withheld and the messy violence wrought by desire for the light remains. The Lighthouse at times seems impenetrable, a film without a story using the language of film to simply explore a psyche (or two) falling into insanity. That seems right, and appropriate. A more intelligible film might seem pedantic. Instead of understanding, The Lighthouse leaves us wondering about the prelude to all this ruin—and believing that it likely lies in the desire for salvation.
Benjamin Craig teaches at Portland State University and is a contributing editor at Propeller.
