‘The Lighthouse’ Is About A Job From Hell
Working yer beans off drives men mad!
Director Robert Eggers isn’t just an evocative and provocative horror filmmaker (as anyone who saw his haunting debut The Witch knows.) He is also a master of scatological humor and, even more surprisingly, is able to find the pathos in dick & fart jokes. His most recent offering, The Lighthouse, is a hallucinatory black & white horror-comedy about a job from hell. The movie stars Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe as two hard-working men of New England who maintain a lighthouse at least a century ago. The pair pass the time, and gas, while lusting after a mermaid statue (to put it delicately.) Anyone who has ever had a blue-collar job will identify with the gags and language used in The Lighthouse. The mundanity and boredom, too.
It’s not a stretch nor a disgusting notion to suggest or directly state that, through the hypnotic insanity shown in The Lighthouse, the lofty moments of offensiveness and camaraderie between Pattinson and Dafoe reveal the most sinister scare of all: working stiffs get along and tear apart to the whims and stress of capitalist expectations of labor.
And, as an ex-associate of overnight Wal-Mart, this terror rings true.
In the months before the 2008 financial bailout, my late-nights and early-mornings were made…
