Sexuality is Scary

The Sea and Monstrous Male Arrogance in The Lighthouse

Robert Eggers’ unhinged maritime folk tale places two men up close to one another and waits for the madness to unfold. In The Lighthouse, there’s deep mythology and omnipresent subtext – from historic superstition to vivid sexual tension. Steph Green dives into the murky waters of masculine horror.

“No sign is left of all the town/ Except a few forgotten graves;/ But to and fro the white sails go/ Slowly across the glittering waves”

Sarah Orne Jewett, a Maine-based writer known for her poems and novels set on the US Eastern seaboard at the turn of the 20th century, often invoked the power, mania and isolating nature of the ocean in her works – as articulated in the above lines from “On Star Island”. Using these seaweed-strewn vignettes of seafaring life as explicit inspiration for the poetic maritime dialogue in The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers drew upon this woman’s voice in a film that, bar the fleeting appearances of a mermaid with warped genitals, contains a distinct lack of female presence. What ripples on the surface…

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