Hark, Triton, hark! Bid, our father, the Sea King rise from the depths full foul in his fury! Black waves teaming with salt foam to smother this young mouth with pungent slime, to choke ye, engorging your organs til ye turn blue and bloated with bilge and brine and can scream no more -- only when he, crowned in cockle shells with slitherin' tentacle and steaming beard takes up his fell be-finned arm, his coral-tine trident screeches banshee like in the tempest, and plunges right through gullet, bursting ye...
Thomas Wake, the Lighthouse
The Lighthouse, like an earlier scifi horror take on exactly the same film, Cold Skin, owes a visible debt to H.P.Lovecraft particularly Dagon and the Shadow Over Innsmouth. As part of the Unifying Colour Theory the film is situated in the Black Phase of 2019, the Year of Malkuth, and explores the themes of the Nigredo. I'd argue that the film is also strongly influenced by the playwright Harold Pinter in dialogue and portrayal of two men locked into a claustrophobic isolation induced powerplay. In fact, this film is a Pinteresque Lovecraftian masterpiece, moving seamlessly between those styles - and it is highly recommended that you watch the film yourself before reading any further esoteric analysis. What follows is a few of the pertinent themes from notes, for our own immediate understanding, and I will probably return to this film for a closer study later.
TWINNING AND DUALITY
Although in the film their relationship begins as raw recruit and seasoned seaman, the power play is intense and various dualities are explored - god-man, master-servant, father-son, brothers, lovers are all on the table - in some ways this mirrors Crowley's suggested appeals to the deity in Liber Astarte Vel Berylli moving through a variety of different relationship styles, if we imagine that the film is a theurgic ritual to Dagon Neptune. In the end, with the who's who-ing - along with the revealing of the twin name - Thomas Wake (DaFoe) and Thomas Howard (Pattinson) - the twinning theme that ran throughout 2018 and 2019 returns to the centre. This is also similar to the Astarte ritual as it is all about uniting with deity.
SEAGULLS AND SIRENS
An idea, introduced early in the film is that the seagulls contain the souls of dead sailors, later on in Wake's powerful speech they are likened to the harpies i.e. the sirens. Howard commits a sin against the Gods, when he murders one of them and brings a storm wind curse on the island. Later he is himself cursed by the Gods, or rather that his ego-identity will be rotted and ultimately dissolved, forgotten by everything, even the sea. We also see Howard beguiled by a siren himself, eventually having sex with her WAP, or masturbating over a carved idol of her.
THE LIGHTHOUSE
The superobjective of Thomas Howard is to gain access to the lamp at the top of the lighthouse as throughout the film he is confined to the equivalent of Malkuth and Yesod (the rocky island, the cesspit, the base of the house, and the machines that drive the lamp, i.e. the vision of the machinery of the universe again). This lamp represents Kether, the first sefira, and the fire of the Gods; the source of all Ideas. This is hammered home both by the reveal of the lamp's true nature and, finally, by Howard's Promethean punishment, a seagull pecking out his liver on the reef for all eternity.
NIGREDO
Presaging the pandemic, the Lighthouse focuses on themes of isolation and supplies and as a film released at the end of the Black Phase of the Year of Malkuth, it neatly foreshadows the Black Phase of the Year of Lilith. Remember the Black Phase is the Nigredo or Putrefactio/Mortefactio, death, decay, and degeneracy - the death of the ego so that the birth of the archetypal self, the Rubedo, may occur. Since this film plays forward through psychological alchemy - the Rubedo produces Prometheus as the archetypal self of Howard and Neptune as the archetypal self of Wake. We see imagery of the Nigredo in the one eyed head recovered from the ocean, the bodies dissolving in the cesspit, and in the drunken degeneracy.
During the lockdown many wrestled with alcoholism, alone, or with companions which only helps dissolve the ego and also the power of inhibition (executive will). The problem with what is happening currently is that the process is now being ran in reverse - in this case the alcohol does not push you towards archetypal realisation - but assists in dissolving the ego back down into the conflicted shadow-self of duality. Very simply if you encountered similar struggles during the lockdown, reduce the drinking and focus on the part of you that scales up to an idea like the hunter, or the investigator, or the muse, or whatever, etc, dignity and courage, as opposed to the part of you that wants to degenerate into one faction of a bewildered, incoherent and terrified mob.
...a bulging bladder no more , but a blasted bloody flm now and nothing for the harpies and the sirens and the souls of dead sailors to peck and claw and feed upon only to be lapped up and swallowed by the infinite waters of the dread emperor himself, forgotten to any man, to any time, forgotten to God and the Devil, forgotten even to the Sea, for any stuff, for any part of Winslow, even any scantling of your soul is Winslow no more but is now itself the sea.
Thomas Wake, The Lighthouse
LOVE this movie. Especially resonated with the hypnotic spiral stairway leading to and fro the Eternal and His light, especially since in my own death experience, there IS a seemingly infinite spiral stairway, made of steps of black stone hovering above oblivion, leading to and fro the terrifying/sublime glory of the Great God Pan among the stars.
ReplyDeleteEggers' first film, The VVitch, was also something to behold. Some directors, you give them over $200 million, they give you s**t, some like Eggers, you give them merely $10 million, they deliver masterpiece after masterpiece.