THE LIGHTHOUSE: This is great. I love art.

Rating: 🤲🤲🤲🤲🤲🤲🤲

If I could change this I probably would, but there’s a single image that comes to mind whenever I think of Willem Dafoe. In my teenage years, before I knew any better, I think I watched The Boondock Saints like 15 times. There’s a lot to unpack there, but suffice it to say, the movie works very well if you are a boy going through puberty. Especially if you are in a phase where all you want to do is consume media that would make James Dobson disappointed. 

Willem Dafoe’s character in The Boondock Saints is a genius homicide detective who is also gay. In 2019, “who is also gay” should read as a clunky version of person-first language. In 1999, the year The Boondock Saints came out, it was delivered as a punchline. 

Towards the end of the film, Dafoe’s character has joined up with the murderers whom he has been chasing. Together, they invade a big mansion filled with (I think) Russians. For some reason, it is necessary for the detective to dress in drag to infiltrate the building. One of the (big, dumb) Russians sexually assaults him in a hallway. Dafoe falls down, pulls a gun out of his purse, does a full sit-up, and shoots the man dead. There’s a slow-motion shot of his reaction to having just murdered a man. His wig has fallen off, and he’s sort of just trembling there for us to ogle. This was a really long buildup for me to say that Willem Dafoe’s face is fucking wild. Do a quick google and you’ll find a GIF of this. Or go watch The Boondock Saints. I assume it is on Netflix. 

On top of introducing me to Willem Dafoe’s crazy-ass face*, I think that movie introduced me to the concept of a character actor. 

I was introduced to Robert Pattinson by the movie tie-in book covers of The Twilight Saga. I was working at Books-A-Million when the film series took off. For that reason, I think my relationship to The Twilight Saga is pretty much analogous to a McDonald’s employee’s relationship to Szechuan sauce in 2018. Pattinson played the primary love interest, vampire Edward Cullen. Edward’s hair was quaffed, his face was gorgeous, his body was lithe, and his skin literally shimmered in the goddamned sun. 

So this is how I think of these two guys. And if you’ll allow me to project my worldview onto the zeitgeist for a moment, I think we all think of them similarly. Maybe you think of Dafoe as the Green Goblin or Pattinson as Cedric Diggory, but those are both just a stone’s throw away from my position. They are, in a sense, an odd coupling. 

But not really. 

Robert Eggers’s 2019 fever-dream The Lighthouse has a cast list of three: Willem Dafoe, Robert Pattinson, and Valeriia Karaman. The screeching-laughing mermaid of the film is Karaman’s sole acting credit on IMDB. Her Instagram reveals a career in modeling, commercial acting, and art. 

The Lighthouse is set on a remote and rocky island off the coast of New England. The film opens with our two keepers arriving amidst the crashing waves. The boat that brought them disappears into the fog, leaving them in isolation.

As they watch, Pattinson sneers at the sound of the island’s foghorn that will underline the film’s haunting score. Dafoe stands behind him, dangling a pipe from his mouth. It’s upside down. There’s something about the confidence with which he does it that makes you say, “Well that must be how people dangled their pipes back then.” 

By the end of the film, two major transformations have transpired: (1) Pattinson has been driven absolutely insane, and (2) the power dynamic between the two men has rollercoaster-ed so wildly and believably that by the third act, Pattinson walks Dafoe to his own grave like a dog—leash and all—and it doesn’t feel like too big of a leap.

This would be quite a feat to pull off with a full cast and horrors galore. The Lighthouse does it with two men and a few well-placed seagulls. This of course puts an enormous weight on the actors’ shoulders to deliver “capital A” Acting.

Add to that weight Eggers’ blessed obsession with period-accurate dialogue: “Why’d ya spill yer beans?” is one of the most inherently funny lines of dialogue I can imagine. And yet, with the aid of some incredible sound-editing and mixing, Dafoe makes it haunting. The thick reverb added to his voice during what I’m going to call “The Beans Sequence” helps anchor his character to the island through their shared rusty aura.

Add to that weight the physical stress of a demanding location. The harsh and torturous conditions were well-documented in the promotional lead-up to the film’s release. Here’s a Pattinson quote from a conversation the two actors did for Interview magazine: “That’s the closest I’ve come to punching a director. However much I love Robert [Eggers], there was a point where I did five takes walking across the beach, and after awhile I was like, ‘What the fuck is going on? I feel like you’re just spraying a fire hose in my face.’ And he was like, ‘I am spraying a fire hose in your face.’”

Whether in spite of or because of these conditions, Pattison’s descent into madness is powerfully delivered, and Eggers gives both actors plenty of space to cook in long shots that trap the audience. One of the highlights is a single-take monologue from Dafoe, wherein he witch-style curses Pattinson for insulting his cooking. I would hazard a guess that Dafoe doesn’t blink for approximately two minutes of non-stop crescendo. In his hands, a scene that starts as drunken melancholy scampers towards a cliff of doom with surprising ferocity.

And how is that fantastical harangue punctuated? With a joke. There’s a few bits early in the film where the audience, expecting the austerity of Eggers’ previous film The VVitch, is unsure of how exactly to respond. I’m thinking specifically of the first of Dafoe’s farts. 

Imagine: You sit down at the only theatre in town playing this movie. It starts. It’s in black and white. Half the fucking screen is just empty because it’s in a 1.19:1 aspect ratio. The opening shot is the sky? Then Pattinson and Dafoe stare into the camera for a little bit while Robert Eggers takes a break to rewatch The Seventh Seal and listen to some sea shanties, and you’re going, “This is great. I love art.” The next shot, they are unpacking in their new, shared bedroom, and Dafoe does that thing uncles do and pauses mid-stride to let out a quick fart. This is like the third-funniest fart in the movie.

There’s a great scene where Dafoe asks Pattinson why he’s here on the island. Does he even want to be a “wicky”? Pattinson tells him that he’s hoping to earn some money and then start a new land-locked life. He doesn’t want this one. “Same old boring story,” says Dafoe.

In 1999, another film was released directly to dorm-room poster. It was called Fight Club, and it starred a very attractive young man named Brad Pitt. Pitt plays an imaginary friend named Tyler Durden to an unnamed-protagonist/narrator played by Edward Norton. Tyler Durden is the embodiment of testosterone, violence, and don’t-give-a-fuckery that Norton’s character desires/represses. Over the course of the movie, Norton slowly loses his mind while having sex with Helena Bonham-Carter before eventually holding her hand at the top of a tower while shit blows up and the Pixies are invented.

Anyways, Pitt is an interesting actor. I think he’s my favorite actor. Like, I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to A River Runs Through It or not, but I like a lot of his characters. There’s just something cool about someone that attractive that also wants to bring something different to every flick. None of this is profound, but it’s worth mentioning that being “pretty as a picture,” as Dafoe’s lighthouse keeper calls Pattinson, goes hand-in-hand with the characters one chooses to portray.

According to his interview with Paul MacInnes of The Guardian, when Vince Gilligan made Breaking Bad, he pitched it to the studio in this way: “I told them: ‘This is a story about a man who transforms himself from Mr. Chips into Scarface.’”

Is Eggers taking a crack at this in The Lighthouse? We’ve got our Mr. Chips in Pattinson, an actor known for his boyish good looks entering an isolated and ugly world. His only companion is so wrapped in mystery and salt that he feels a part of the very scenery he’s constantly chewing. Most two-handers have shifting power dynamics. A double-feature with Persona would work well for this film in a number of ways. But the shifting of power is often truly felt by the audience through our ability to empathize with the dominated. That doesn’t happen here. Here we stay with Pattinson through it all. We can’t BE Dafoe. That way lies madness.

Recently, when Quentin Tarantino was interviewed by Paul Thomas Anderson about his new film Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, he talked about his decision to cast Brad Pitt as the handsome stuntman, Cliff. Tarantino recalls telling Pitt that he’s “too handsome for Cliff.” “Yeah, I know what you mean,” replies Pitt in the story. So Tarantino says, “I want to just put a big scar right across your face, but I can’t do that because I’ve done that already!”

There’s no scar on Pattinson in The Lighthouse because this is a film about transformation. But where do we end up? One could argue that Pattinson becomes more like his gaslighting tormentor as time goes on. But he never really gets there, does he? Mr. Chips can’t BE Scarface. That’s not how life works.

What if Icarus got all the way up to the sun? What if the wax wings didn’t melt? Is that who Pattinson is when he finally sticks his hand into the light? His face—and the very medium through which we view it—cannot handle the intensity of the moment. Icarus falls back to earth and becomes carrion for the real birds.

Pattinson isn’t the first actor to come out of a major franchise with a strong desire to zag. Daniel Radcliff did that movie where he literally becomes the devil or something. Then he played a dead guy opposite Paul Dano. It’s possible this piece should have been about famous boys doing two-handers with character actors. Or famous boys being gaslit like Elijah Wood with that stoner dog. But what’s the second role you think of when you think of Mark Hamill? Probably the Joker in the animated Batman series. I think it’s just what we want. Suck on that, James Dobson.

*The author would like to note that Willem Dafoe does not have an “ugly” face. He has an interesting face, and he probably took some clowning lessons. The point is that Willem Dafoe’s face is objectively and irrefutably buck-wild.