illustration by Ben Turner

I. The Hoax – New England, 1890s

It came in a dream—a vision of salt and gold, water and rock; two clenched fists submerging a rusted metal sieve in frothy seawater and emerging with shiny golden kernels—the rhythmic lapping of waves replaced with the rhythmic churn of a water wheel in a gristmill, a heavenly idea overtaken by automation.

This is what Prescott Ford Jernegan told all who would listen—that in a feverish dream, he saw gold being mined from the temperamental waters that wrapped and warped the shorelines of New England. It would revolutionize science, it would fill the pockets of investors with coins until they sagged to the ground. A triumvirate union of nature, science, and money.

Jernegan was a Baptist minister, born in Edgartown, Massachusetts in 1866, who had grown up familiar with the ocean, raised sailing on his father’s whaling ship. His time as a minister for a Connecticut parish left him dissatisfied and disillusioned, and by the mid-1890s, his path had once again crossed with his childhood friend Charles Fisher, also a sea captain’s son—and by all accounts, a clever manipulator. Joined by William Phelan, a private investigator-turned-accomplice, in 1896—the same year that, on the other side of the continent, gold was discovered in Yukon, setting off mass industrial and agricultural development as hundreds of thousands of people took to migrating north in what we now call the Klondike Gold Rush—the men put an audacious scheme into motion.

Jernegan, Fisher, and Phelan fooled their investors with a simple trick: Jernegan would bring prospective partners to the edge of a pier, where he would drop a bucket lined with zinc and filled with mercury into the water. A battery under the sea, he explained, would be activated that would issue an electric current to mine the gold from the water. It’s a salacious promise, combining the ancient allure of gold with the new seduction of electricity, the first current having been created less than a century before. But the process happening underwater was far more primitive: Fisher, an accomplished diver, would be waiting beneath the pier and would dive to the bucket to fill its contents with gold-infused mercury.

Though they amassed millions of dollars in investments, the scam came undone as haphazardly as it was put together. Seeing the success of the operations, Phelan demanded more money, only to be refused by Jernegan and Fisher. He published an exposé in the New York Herald, and Jernegan and Fisher went running—the former to Europe, the latter to an unknown location. Despite this revelation, many plant workers in Lubec were still convinced that their machines would work and continued running the mills, hoping they could yield more gold.

The trio behind the New England Gold Hoax of 1898 would not be the last to try to harvest gold from the ocean. In the 1920s, German chemist Fritz Haber tried to find a way to distill gold from seawater, hoping it would help his suffering country, and only giving up when he realized that the process was uneconomical, not unfeasible. History tells us of men who tried to mine wealth from the ocean, and there’s a certain poeticism within their failures: scams send their perpetrators on the run, away from the shorelines that first inspired their dreams; chemists recognize that a successful discovery does not equate to a successful economy. Getting rich off the ocean is only one method man has employed to try to tame his surroundings—for is something, or someone, really within our control if we cannot exploit it?

II. The Madness – New England, 1890s

It came in a dream—a nightmare of moonlight on a deceptively calm ocean. A strip of white light illuminates floating logs that part to reveal a bobbing, bloated body, suspended face-down in the water. And so begin Ephraim Winslow’s (Robert Pattinson) visions and hallucinations concerning corpses, mermaids, and tentacled beasts thrashing and thriving in the sea waters that surround the dingy lighthouse where he works as a wickie in Robert Eggers’s sophomore film, The Lighthouse.

Released in 2019 and set in 1890s New England just off the shore from where Jernegan and Fisher were running their scam, The Lighthouse is a feverish parable of labor and obsession, taking as much from Greek mythology as it does from Marxist thought.

Shot in black-and-white 35mm film by cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, who cites the films of Fritz Lang and Robert Bresson as visual influences (M and The Pickpocket, in particular), it’s a purposefully bleak and dreary work, mining dread from narrative and visual monotony, as our two characters are confined to three limited locales that grow increasingly more oppressive as they bide their time: the interior of a lighthouse, its attached tower, and the rocky island on which it stands.

We arrive at this solitary rock on a foggy day. The first shot is of a boat cutting through murky waters carrying two swaying men who soon settle into the laborious routines that the lighthouse keepers will have to follow for four weeks. Ephraim is joined—or rather, supervised—by his superior Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe), a flatulent former sailor with a bad leg and a worse drinking problem. The division of labor is apparent from the first task, and it’s one that Ephraim immediately resents: Ephraim is to do the hard manual work such as shoveling coal into roaring machines, cleaning chamber pots, and carrying heavy loads, while Thomas stays at the top of the lighthouse tower in the lantern room, locked by a key he keeps on his person at all times.

Eggers and Blaschke use shadow and grit to visually cement the inequality of hardship: Ephraim’s tasks are marked with assaults from which there is no respite; when he is indoors, he is caked in soot and choking on smoke, while the work that takes him outside exposes him to violent thrashes of seaspray. Warmth and water are adversarial, not comforting. Thomas’s work, on the other hand, is introduced to us with a heavenly sheen; the lantern room is clean and pristine, overwhelmingly white. At its center is the source of the light in the lighthouse: an impressive Fresnel lens, a massive glass egg that looks like it’s going to hatch a mermaid or a seabeast. The room is not exposed to the elements or to man-made exhaust; instead, it’s a pocket of divine peace—the only such one on their island.

And perhaps, it holds something even more, for Ephraim observes immediately that Thomas is aggressively protective of the light and behaves weirdly (namely, disrobing) when in the lantern room. "I’m damn-well wedded to this here light," Thomas confesses to Ephraim during dinner one night, "and she’s been a finer, truer, quieter wife than any alive-blooded woman."

Ephraim is desperate to be let into the room to see the light at its brightest, but he is constantly refused by Thomas, who warns him that his predecessor had a similar obsession that caused him to go mad.

With all of this preoccupation with attaining light, the mind jumps to the myth of Prometheus, the Titan who disobeyed the Olympian gods’ orders and took fire from them to share it with mortal humans. For this, he was punished to be bound by chains and to have eagles peck out his liver every day, only for the lobes to regrow and for the process to continue on for eternity. He is martyr and uplifter, an enduring symbol of enlightenment and sacrifice, commonly attributed to scientific and cultural revolutionaries who, in one way or another, are punished for delivering their progress.

All three of Eggers’s films dabble with mythology and folklore, either directly or referentially: The Witch (2015), Eggers’ debut, borrows heavily from Puritanical superstition in its tale of a witch haunting an English settler family in 1600s New England, while his third film The Northman (2022) focuses on Amleth, a prominent figure in Scandinavian legend, and surrounds him with creatures and figures from Norse mythology. Even in The Lighthouse, Prometheus is not the only mythological reference: during a particularly nasty argument that initiates a nastier still hallucination for Ephraim, he perceives Thomas as Proteus, a prophetic sea god, donning a chest piece and crown made of barnacles.

And much as Prometheus has long been adapted to fit stories about societal progress—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein punishes its titular doctor to be a Promethean inventor, for example—Eggers adapts the tale to warn of the doom of capitalism. He is not the first to make the link between the myth and class disparity; in fact, Karl Marx explicitly references Prometheus in the first volume of Das Kapital, noting that despite initiating important progress, capitalism eventually constrains people’s creativity and "rivets the laborer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock."

Eggers is explicit in his depiction of class stratification on this island: Ephraim does all the hard labor to power the light in the lighthouse but is never able to access the fruits of this work. Thomas, meanwhile, benefits from Ephraim’s work, deriving sexual, emotional, and spiritual pleasure from the light and reacting with hostility to any requests to share in its splendor. Thomas imparts these hostilities on many occasions: in supervising or assessing Ephraim’s work, at the dinner table, or when doing routine maintenance.

In one scene, Thomas berates Ephraim for missing a spot when he was washing the floors, delivering one of the film’s many booming monologues:

"If I tells ye to yank out every single nail from every moulderin’ nail-hole and suck off every speck of rust till al them nails sparkle like a sperm whale’s pecker, and then carpenter the whole light station back together from scrap, and then do it all over again, you’ll do it! And by God and by golly, you’ll do it smilin’, lad, ’cause you’ll like it. You’ll like it ’cause I says you will! Contradict me again, and I’ll dock yer wages."

What’s puzzling about Thomas’s assumed position over Ephraim is that it is contradictory to the manner in which we are introduced to them: at first, they are posited as relative equals, arriving on the island in the same garb—soon, this too will be a signal of distinction, as Thomas always wears his peaked cap with the lighthouse service insignia, while Ephraim wears a sou’wester or a flat cap—and are positioned symmetrically in many scenes in the film’s 1:19:1 aspect ratio. When we’re first introduced to their sleeping chambers, a small alcove with slanted ceilings on either side, a column bisects the room, showing that neither has any luxuries the other does not; both sides have plain beds which are equidistant from the window.

Yet the chasm between their responsibilities and freedoms appears immediately, one whose origins are perhaps more rocky and complex than they may seem.

At their first dinner together, Thomas lists off the tasks Ephraim will need to do (polish the brass, clean the cistern) and barks a sharp correction when Ephraim acknowledges his duties with a "yes, sir" instead of an "aye, sir!" Not only is Thomas controlling Ephraim’s workload, he is also policing his language, and refers to him with subordinate nicknames, calling him "lad" instead of his name, something Ephraim asks him to stop later on. At this same dinner, Ephraim attempts to challenge his partner, mentioning that they are supposed to have alternating shifts manning the lantern during the nighttime, but Thomas immediately shuts him down, noting that he is more experienced and will take this "harder" shift.

This self-imposed power imbalance is partly born from the stories the two men tell about themselves: by their own admissions, Thomas is a former sailor and Ephraim is a former logger who needed a change of pace. If these histories were in fact true, it’s easy to see why Thomas would occupy a superior role to the other.

However, as the film alarmingly unravels, we learn that both men have lied about their pasts; Ephraim, most notably, is not a simple jack of all trades looking for new work. In fact, his name is not even Ephraim, but also Thomas (in Eggers’s script, the characters are never called by their names, and are exclusively referred to as OLD and YOUNG). In a drunken confession, he reveals that he had taken the identity of his former superior, a cruel foreman who oversaw him while he worked as a log-driver in Canada. Though he had thoughts of killing the foreman, his eventual death came from an accidental drowning, one Ephraim observed; this foreman’s body is the same one that appears to Ephraim in his first nightmare.

This backstory adds an intriguing layer to Ephraim’s subordinate status: in escaping a troubled past, he traps himself in two ways: physically, on this secluded island, and hierarchically, in being Thomas’s junior.

And as the work continues for Ephraim, so does the degradation. Thomas isn’t solely content with tasking his junior with the hardest chores; he routinely humiliates him. At one point, he purposefully issues vague instructions that result in Ephraim lugging a large tank of kerosene up the winding narrow stairs of the tower, only to be gleefully told to bring the tank back down and transfer the kerosene to a smaller container. Later, Ephraim is hanging in a suspended scaffolding system to paint the tower white, only to fall to the ground.

His daytime frustrations mingle with his sexual frustrations, and he grows increasingly plagued with nightmares and visions of beached mermaids, severed heads caught in lobster traps, and Lovecraftian creatures. But these hallucinations are not the only sign of his growing discontentment—he turns violent as well, brutally beating a seagull to death.

This vicious murder dooms Ephraim, literally and esoterically. To murder a gull, Thomas had warned him, is to attract bad luck, since gulls are said to be the incarnated souls of dead sailors. And this superstition is quickly realized: as soon as the bird is killed, the wind changes directions and a thundering storm attacks the island, leaving the two men marooned without hope of leaving. But this murder is also notable as the first instance where Ephraim disobeys Thomas, his first act of rebellion being against not just Thomas, but also their profession’s custom and environment.

Stranded in a raging storm, the sea so furious and the wind so violent, the relationship between the two men increases in intensity, oscillating between intimate friendship and adversarial hatred: they drink as comrades and then fight one another, dance together and then grow paranoid of the other’s presence. Their food soon runs out, and when their alcohol does as well, they make do by drinking turpentine sweetened with honey.

After a particularly temperamental night, the ocean finally breaks into their living quarters, wrecking the furniture and flooding the place. It is a discovery in these knee-high waters that sends Ephraim on his final spree of madness: floating among the human waste and debris is Thomas’s journal and as Ephraim leafs through its sodden pages, he learns that Thomas had been writing down all of his actions over the preceding weeks, noting them as inadequate, and recommending that he be let go without pay.

He kills Thomas and gets his hands on the keys to the lantern room, ascending the winding staircase and finally having his chance at enlightenment. In the room, he stares into the light of the Fresnel lens, which disorients him and sends him tumbling down the stairs. The final shot of the film is of a naked Ephraim, laying on the rocky shore outside the lighthouse, moaning and groaning as seagulls peck at his abdomen–a Promethean punishment for finally reaching the light

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Eggers’s film is an expert foray into a psyche bending under the pressure of subservience, driven mad by a concoction of grueling manual labor and psychological degradation. The ocean and its mysteries, both in its temperament (calm one moment and furious the next) and in its hidden secrets (home to many a beast, sunken ship, and drowned man), are fertile ground to coax Ephraim’s madness to bud and grow.

Its presence is felt in every moment of the film, both by us and by the two marooned wickies. Even when the sound of waves hitting rocky cliffs is drowned out by the long moan of the foghorn or the rhythmic harmonies of machinery, we recognize that everything we see onscreen—the manual labor, the hypnotic lantern, the mental and physical deterioration of the two men—is in service of a waged battle against the sea, not to supercede it, but to coexist. By nature, the sea is an entity that drowns and engulfs, hiding jagged rocks that can tear up a ship’s hull in lucious frothy waters, and fermenting fogs that inundate even the strongest light, only allowing wisps of sound to travel through.

Yes, even the beautiful Fresnel lens can only light so much. The light represents the ultimate achievement for the two men working so hard to keep it going: enlightenment and a freedom from the gruel of their wind-swept, salt-stained world. In a similar way, wealth is the ultimate goal within capitalism, promising its own kinds of freedom. Yet the light, like wealth, has limitations to what it can illuminate. The trance of the light and its demanding maintenance only serves to entrap us in an arduous, monotonous routine, as a thick mist encloses, dooming the light we produce powerless to nature’s more abstruse darknesses.