[Pride 2021] Staring Into the Light: The Lighthouse (2019) as a Metaphor for Bisexuality

There’s a storm brewing for Ephraim Winslow. It’s not just the incoming Nor’Easter that threatens the lighthouse he’s been newly stationed at, rain whipping across the rocky shores on which it stands sentinel over the sea. It’s the storm brewing in Winslow himself, the tumult roiling his desires and his  inner self as his boss/colleague Thomas Wake arouses feelings that he can scarcely reconcile in his volatile, turbulent soul.

Ephraim doesn’t want to admit it, but he is bisexual—attracted to more than just the opposite gender. Not only does he not want to admit it, he can’t accept it. And that will be his ultimate downfall. He is confused by his desire; his want of men and women, unable to reconcile either in his troubled mind. He leers after the sweaty, disheveled body of Thomas and fantasizes about the alluring, seaweed-drenched appeal of a female mermaid, and cannot seem to feel at peace with either of them. Torn between homosexuality and heterosexuality; desire for man and desire for woman, and refusing to embrace either side of is sexuality, Ephraim is set on a path to his own destruction, observed by the screeching caws of the gulls that circle above him.

Robert Egger’s The Lighthouse came out in 2019—the same year I came out. I remember sitting across the table from my girlfriend in a quaint little Italian bakery in my hometown that no longer exists. It was the first Saturday of May, the day my hometown hosts its own local Pride parade. Sitting there with a coffee and tiramisu, watching a proud assortment of rainbow-clad queer folk of all ages walking past the windows, I quietly asked my girlfriend—who was already openly bi—if she would date a man who was also bisexual. One would think that a bisexual woman would be perfectly fine with dating a bisexual man, but I had discovered the opposite; in my closeted days I encountered at least two bi females friends who told me that it was fine for women to be bisexual, but “unmanly” and unnattractive for men to be so.

I shyly beat around the bush asking my girlfriend what she thought, but she knew what I was getting at—and yes she was perfectly fine with her partner being bi (unlike those so called friends.) But I long ago discovered a terrifying vulnerability to coming out, even to others who identify as queer.. Up until that point, I spent nearly 36 years negotiating a miasma of confusing feelings, attempting to reconcile myself with thoughts that I, in the wake of a Catholic upbringing, thought were impossible. Wrong. For decades, I lived with the pain of thwarted identity rippling under my skin, taught by a society to refuse to acknowledge my own true self—even to myself. 

It’s a maddening, heartbreaking feeling to go through, something everyone reading this no doubt already knows. It’s also something that is driving Ephraim Winslow to his doom. Trapped on this windswept rock after running away from a logging job in Canada, his only company is craggy older colleague Thomas, his own ravaged sexual fantasies and the taunting seagulls whose caws represent the crying of Ephraim’s soul.  Initially arriving as a taciturn and aloof young man, hired to work alongside the older and experienced wickie, Ephraim opts to distance himself, rebuffing Thomas’s sociable entreaties during dinner. But that doesn’t stop Ephraim from spying on the man as he sleeps, ogling the man’s half exposed ass. It is not the only time Ephraim opts to spy on Thomas in a moment of personal intimacy, watching with rapt awe as Thomas masturbates to the glowing light they are sworn to care for.

The Lighthouse is a film replete with imagery and scenes designed to suggest Ephraim’s bisexuality and his inability to accept it. The voyeuristic reverie inspired by Thomas’s self-pleasure is broken by a Lovecraftian tentacle slithering across the screen, shocking the younger man out of his hypnotized gaze—a manifestation of the sliminess he feels towards himself. Thomas’s dialogue frequently pokes around Ephraim’s inner torment, threatening to make the younger man suck on nails for failing to mop a room properly, or inquisitively, compassionately asking if the man has something stirring in him. The lighthouse is evocative of multiple genders, its phallic form topped by a glowing light with yonic circles etched into the glass.

The light itself becomes a force of competition for the two men. Thomas is protective of the glowing lantern he frequently calls “she,” refusing to let Ephraim near it, much to the subordinate’s jealous chagrin. Thomas has a possessive, fetishistic relationship to the light, and Ephraim is drawn to that entwinement, like a proverbial moth, as evidenced by his mesmerized reaction to Thomas’s masturbation. As the movie progresses, the chilly relationship between the two men softens as the men begin to drink, bond and develop something akin to an oblique romance—complete with Thomas taking sad offense when his cooking is insulted. The feminine coded light becomes a third leg of a love triangle, with both men drawn to it as much as they are to each other.

Early in the film, Ephraim begrudgingly admits to be a God-fearing man, albeit one who doesn’t pray as often as he likes too; later on, after a divorced Thomas freely admits to sleeping around during his off-duty months, Ephraim asks if he is ashamed, to which Thomas answers in the negative. It’s easily clear that Ephraim’s attraction to women is as much a bringer of shame to him, as his love for men. He stumbles upon a mermaid on the craggy rocks and runs away terrified when she shrieks at him; later on, he furiously masturbates to a wooden carving of her, flashes of the same tentacled beast from the lighthouse troubling his mind. 

Ephraim’s inability to deal with his inner demons will ultimately lead to death, destruction and tragedy. Midway through the film, Ephraim kills one of those screeching gulls tormenting him, setting about a chain of bad luck -- superstition says it is unlucky to kill a gull, for they are imbued with the souls of (male) sailors lost at sea. This precipitates a savaging of the island by a storm, preventing the men from leaving their post, destroying their rations, and sending them into a drunken oblivion. The Lighthouse builds to a fever pitch as Ephraim turns the tables on Thomas, beating him and making him act like his “dog” before burying the man alive -- burying his shame. Ephraim becomes immediately regretful after killing Thomas, and finally ascends the lighthouse to behold the light, but he is overcome upon doing so; we are left privy to Ephraim’s terrified face -- his screams turned into haze by the sound mix -- as the burning power of the torch becomes far too much fro him to handle. The movie ends after that, with Ephraim’s broken body laying on the rocks, pecked by the gulls, driven to madness and then death by his own refusal to embrace his own self.

The Lighthouse came out just months after I did, and upon seeing it, I was immediately able to see a metaphorical semblance of my own lifelong struggles in those of Ephraim, albeit to a less frightening and ultimately tragic degree. I felt myself seen in Eggers’s chiaroscuro nightmare opus, my inner torment splayed out onscreen in a misty muck of salt water, lamp oil and a weathered old wickie’s spunk. For decades, my soul was embattled, on fire with the lingering destruction of Catholic guilt and social shame and the toxicity of bi-erasure even in queer circles. Unlike Ephraim Winslow, though, I was ultimately able to wrestle with those demons and come out alive and better for it. For once in my life, I looked into the light -- and I did not blink.