To the Lighthouse: Cinematic Lighthouses in Shutter Island, Annihilation, and The Lighthouse

Through their own fragmentary narratives, which resemble Poe’s stream-of-consciousness diary, Shutter Island, Annihilation, and The Lighthouse mount challenges to our own perceptual abilities as viewers. They locate us in the strange, unfathomable world of the lighthouse, thereby forcing us, like their protagonists, to question our place in space and reality. These films are mind games that strain cognition, that impress upon us the power of human irrationality. The cinematic lighthouse, I want to suggest, is a topography of the mind that throws the supposed stability of the self, vision, and space into chaos. This destabilization of consciousness is especially ironic given the lighthouse’s historic role as a source – a literal beacon – of light and direction.

 * * *

“Occupied myself in exploring the lighthouse,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote in what would be his last short story, “The Lighthouse,” which consists of only a few diary entries composed by a nobleman, who, looking for escape, takes up a post as a lighthouse keeper off the coast of Norway.

“It seems to me that the hollow interior at the bottom should have been filled with solid masonry . . . – but what am I thinking? A structure such as this is safe enough under any circumstance.” The lighthouse overtakes the nobleman’s imagination. We see in Poe’s unfinished work a blurring of identity and the space in which one dwells. The provisional language, insistence on first-person perspective, and nagging anxieties about the tower’s sturdiness suggest that this man’s trip to the lighthouse is a journey into the self, which will culminate in madness – a recurrent theme of Poe’s. “I could half fancy there was some echo of these cylindrical walls,” the nobleman says, “I do believe I am going to get nervous about my insulation.” He’s already talking to himself, hearing his voice ricochet up the tower’s eddied walls. The nobleman’s worries about physical space (claustrophobic interiors, the specter of bottomlessness) emblematize the pressures and unknowability of his own mental geography. The architectonics of the lighthouse incarnate the man’s deteriorating psychology; physical space collapses into psychic space. And what better symbol for the twisting turns of the psyche than the spiral staircase at the center of any lighthouse? This helix-like composition embodies the coils of the unconscious – one spiraling upward, the other downward. The nobleman’s nightly ascent to the lantern is, in fact, a plunge into the irrational nature of identity and desire. In Poe’s lighthouse, one goes up to go down.

The lighthouse in Poe’s text is a site of psychosis. As if using Poe as a model, three recent psychological thrillers – Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010), Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018), and Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse (2019) – all variously follow characters who descend into madness in lighthouses. These dilapidated buildings forebodingly loom in the backdrop of these films, and, once entered, kick into motion identity crises and meltdowns – sometimes literally – of the severest kind. Those who reemerge from the lighthouses (if at all) are fundamentally altered, psychically shattered with a weaker grasp of themselves and their perceptual realities. But why this renewed cultural interest in an architectural relic of the nineteenth century? Perhaps because lighthouses challenge our modern-day ambitions and preoccupations to systematize space. Whether through navigational apps, gentrification, smart homes, or urban planning, our collective imagination has been caught up in the ways in which we can optimize the spaces around us and our own processes of inhabitation and movement. Yet the on-screen revival of the lighthouse in the 2010s suggests a lack of faith in our ability to make sense of space and ourselves in it, much like Poe’s nobleman. These towers reveal just how little we know of ourselves.

Through their own fragmentary narratives, which resemble Poe’s stream-of-consciousness diary, Shutter Island, Annihilation, and The Lighthouse mount challenges to our own perceptual abilities as viewers. They locate us in the strange, unfathomable world of the lighthouse, thereby forcing us, like their protagonists, to question our place in space and reality. These films are mind games that strain cognition, that impress upon us the power of human irrationality. The cinematic lighthouse, I want to suggest, is a topography of the mind that throws the supposed stability of the self, vision, and space into chaos. This destabilization of consciousness is especially ironic given the lighthouse’s historic role as a source – a literal beacon – of light and direction.

Originally powered by fire (later by electricity), lighthouses have been with us since antiquity. Navigational aids for sailors, demarcations of hazardous shoals and reefs, entry points into safe harbors – lighthouses have enabled our movement through space. These towers literally “throw light” on matters of geography, transportation, and weather, beaming across waters to lead seafarers to safety. Architecturally, they stand as testaments to industrial modernity.

The traditional lighthouse, originally modeled on the shape of an oak tree by the English engineer John Smeaton in the eighteenth century, features dovetailing masonry blocks (later replaced by concrete and steel) laid in a large cylindrical base that, rising upward, tapers off as it ascends in spiral formation. This curved pattern, besides making lighthouses visually appealing, could dissipate the energy of wave impact by directing stormy waters up the tower’s walls. Typically, lighthouse towers were accompanied by several outbuildings, such as the keeper’s quarters, fuel houses, and a fog-signaling station, which (initially powered by cannon fire) could issue thunderous warnings of inclement conditions. The most important part of any lighthouse, though, is the lantern room: a glass encasement at the top of the tower from which light is emitted. This room is the nucleus of any lighthouse. Beneath the lantern is the watch room, where fuel barrels were overseen by lighthouse keepers, who were for a long time referred to as “wickies” because they trimmed the wicks of lamps before lighthouse lanterns were electrically repurposed in the twentieth century.

In sum, lighthouses lit up the natural world, propelling the human gaze to distances unknown across seas and airs. Our line of vision, materialized by an undeviating beam of light, could reduce the world’s unknowability from a stationary vantage point. To see meant to know, thereby to master; a lighthouse is a tool of “enlightenment.” Lighthouses illuminate our own capabilities as travelers, inventors, and observers. They signal faith in human acuity. A lighthouse is itself the architecture of perception, a tower of light capable of conquering night and fog. Though lighthouses project outward, they shine a light inward: a form of (self-)discovery by means of light.

Despite their rationalist underpinnings, though, lighthouses have been mythologized as sites of lore and wonder. Given their secluded locations and ambiguous status – neither entirely seaborne nor earthbound – lighthouses have historically attracted renegades and hermits, weathered terrifying storms, and witnessed all sorts of disasters, such as shipwrecks and men lost at sea. The lighthouse especially captivated the imagination of the nineteenth-century Romantics and Gothics, who, like Poe, in a reaction against Enlightenment beliefs in knowledge and clarity emphasized the macabre and the mysterious. A premier tool of the Enlightenment, the lighthouse is repurposed into an emblem of obscurity and enigma; not a tower of light, but one of shadows.

A cult of adventure and enigma thus sprung up around the lighthouse in the nineteenth century, as best evidenced in works like Jules Verne’s 1905 novel The Lighthouse at the End of the World, until they began waning in cultural imagination as their functions were automatized in the twentieth century. The state of existing lighthouses, often abandoned in remote alcoves off coastlines, has only intensified their gothic mystique; lighthouses are modernity’s ruins. A neo-gothic interest in the lighthouse has infused some of the most acclaimed psychological cinema of the 2010s. Why? The lighthouse suggests renewed interest in how the complexities of space, self, and vision collide.

Shutter Island

A neo-noir thriller concerning two detectives sent to an island off the coast of Boston to investigate the disappearance of a patient from an insane asylum, Shutter Island begins with an image of its protagonist, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels –played by Leonardo DiCaprio –looking in the mirror. From the outset, Scorsese gives us an image of split identity. The film’s very first establishing shot of thick fog seen from a steamship also centralizes an idea of inscrutability. Audiences are immediately located in a world where perception is obscured and multiplied.

A lighthouse looms in the background of this misty New England setting. Though the detectives are told that it’s not of interest, the edifice comes to haunt Teddy’s imagination. He becomes obsessed with the tower, wanting to learn – throw light – on what’s happening in the outermost reaches of the mental institution (Figure 1). He eventually discovers that the severest patients are taken there to be lobotomized. Scorsese emphasizes the menacing qualities of the lighthouse with wide-angle shots backdropped by eerie (if melodramatic) orchestral music.

The patients Teddy meets claim that they have some sort of strange relationship to him, thereby triggering his own set of traumatic flashbacks to his time at war in Germany. He becomes convinced that Andrew Laeddis – the man who set his house on fire and killed his wife and children – is somewhere on the island. It’s revealed, though, that Teddy is on a search for himself. Not only has he been imagining his interactions with the island’s inmates, but he is, in fact, Andrew Laeddis (an anagram for Teddy Daniels) – that is, the man who went insane after his wife drowned his three children and made up a biography as a coping mechanism. This whole time we’ve been watching an invented self, whose revelation, importantly, comes in the lighthouse. It’s a place where truth is pursued, but results in unexpected encounters with fantasy and irreality.

And like a lighthouse, Scorsese’s island is mazelike. Teddy/Andrew repeatedly finds himself in staircases, dead ends, and trapdoors. These interior geographies incarnate his own twisted mental geography. Space in Shutter Island is a product of Teddy’s split identity (Figure 2). The weather, too, exteriorizes Teddy’s condition; it gets stormier as the film proceeds. The inside becomes the outside, unstable and unpredictable. One shot even shows Teddy/Andrew woken up by water dripping in from a ceiling leak. A difference between indoors and outdoors collapses in Shutter Island. What is a shutter, after all, but a material mediating inside and outside topographies? The unconscious in Shutter Island bursts through attempts at control over it, such as the elaborate role-play game designed to help Teddy/Andrew avoid being lobotomized in the lighthouse.

Shutter Island’s twist ending thus challenges confidence in our own perceptive abilities as viewers. Several images – like a blood-spattered wall and the corpse of his partner – are products of Teddy/Andrew’s imagination. Scorsese requires that we replay film backwards and, in doing so, scrutinize our own mental processes. What did we fail to pick up? This mind-game movie, with a lighthouse at its center, asks us how we know what we know. This lighthouse is a hall of mirrors, where space, self, and perception are thrown into disarray.

Annihilation

Garland’s Annihilation, a psychological horror film that follows the exploits of a team of soldier-scientists into a mysterious otherworld, begins in a quiet way. A man in a hazmat suit is interrogating a professor of cellular biology, Lena (played by Natalie Portman), about the whereabouts of her colleagues. An image of a meteor hurtling toward Earth backdropped by an acoustic guitar then overtakes the frame. The fireball strikes a lighthouse on an isolated coastline, whereupon the screen fills with an image of purplish plasma. This lighthouse becomes the nucleus of what is called the Shimmer, a strange glittery force-field that distorts the genetic makeup of all organisms within its reach. Besides recalling the Zone of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), Annihilation paints a portrait of life within the Shimmer as Garland’s characters make their way to its source to unlock mysteries. The lighthouse, per tradition, is presumed to be a site of knowledge. In Annihilation, it’s a literal beacon of light – albeit of a dazzling, kaleidoscopic kind (Figure 3).

After encountering a series of night terrors, flower people, ice trees, and plant reindeer (Figure 4), Lena arrives at the lighthouse. Inside, she encounters an overgrown space and the blackened remains of her husband, who had entered the Shimmer several weeks before her, with a camcorder. This film within a film shows her husband committing suicide with a phosphorous grenade. Yet as he burns in a kind of electrical haze, his own likeness walks into the frame. Unable to fathom this bizarre doubling, Lena closes the camera. As in Shutter Island, in Annihilation, the lighthouse is a site of split, mistaken identities. It’s a place of mental breakdowns and confusion.

Hearing the moans of another human, Lena steps into a black hole in the far corner of the room – a kind of symbol of the lighthouse’s unknowability. She finds the crew’s leader, who informs her that something has entered her. “I don’t know what it wants. Or if it wants,” she says. “It’ll encompass everything. Our bodies and minds will be fragmented into their smallest parts until not one part remains. Annihilation.” She explodes into light, expelling beams out of her mouth like a dragon. The particles coalesce into a metallic figure in a sequence backdropped by industrial synth music produced by Geoff Barrow, the instrumentalist for Portishead. Then one of the most baffling sequences of recent cinema unfolds. The featureless figure, in a kind of menacing dance, starts imitating Lena’s movements before it transfigures into her, thus giving us two Lenas. This perceptually disturbing scene confounds our ability to make sense of Annihilation. Garland wraps an alien, a cyborg, and a doppelgänger into one. The Shimmer’s secrets that were believed to be illuminated by entering the lighthouse are only further obscured. This lighthouse is a black box.

The presumably real Lena then gives the cyborg Lena a hand grenade, which it ingests and, crawling back into its black hole, sets the lighthouse on fire, thereby bringing the Shimmer crumbling down. The lighthouse in Annihilation is where people, space, and logic collapse, all haphazardly recomposing and decomposing (Figure 5). It’s a mystical site of psychedelic excess. The film ends with not only unanswered questions, but unanswerable ones. A final twist even shows a close-up of Lena’s eyes bearing a trace of the shimmer. The mysterious rainbow glow of Garland’s lighthouse has entered the body, making a trip from the outside to the inside. Like any lighthouse narrative, Annihilation collapses physical space into psychic space, and psychic to physical. It invites us to expand the perceptual possibilities of worlds and ourselves, mounting a challenge to anyone who (like Lena) believes that science alone can crack the world’s oddities.

The Lighthouse

Another psychological horror film that combines the neo-noir aesthetics of Shutter Island with the hallucinogenic visuals of Annihilation, Eggers’s The Lighthouse – loosely inspired by Poe’s unfinished short story – is perhaps the most forceful entry in contemporary “lighthouse cinema” that makes a case for the unknowability of the self and its complex relation to the space it occupies. The film follows two late-nineteenth-century lighthouse keepers, Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) and Thomas Wake (Willem Defoe), as they tend to a lighthouse off the coast of New England. The senior keeper, Wake, demands that keeper-in-training Winslow perform the more grueling jobs, while forbidding him to enter the lantern room. Lacking a narrative proper, The Lighthouse unspools a story of the mind. It proffers a mediation on the nature of desire and irrationality.

The movie begins with a gothic image of a lighthouse distantly glowing through a sea mist, beckoning human travelers onto its shores. An audio mosaic of Poe-like flourishes – the cries of seagulls, howling winds, and distortive fog horns – imbue the scene with a sense of dread. It’s never explained why Winslow isn’t allowed access to the lighthouse lantern, but this denial only increases its appeal. Cinematographically, Eggers entices our own interest in the luminous core by denying our view of it (like Winslow’s) in long tracking shots that spiral up the lighthouse but cut before giving us a full view of the lantern. Like the wish-room at the center of Tarkovsky’s Zone in Stalker, which his camera never enters, Egger’s lighthouse seems impenetrable. The lantern becomes a stand-in for desire itself. Indeed, Wake lies before it naked, basking in and sexualizing its glow. We desire it because we desire … nothing more. The Lighthouse turns a light onto the irrationality of covetousness and curiosity. Hence, in the rare views we get of the lantern, it appears as an enormous eye with a pupil at its center (Figure 6). To see is to lust is to possess.

This disembodied, rotating eye – think Foucault’s panopticon – casts its menacing stare over the island where Winslow dwells, voicing its disapproval (like when he tries to kill a seagull) in thunderous foghorns (Figure 7). The pressures of Winslow’s mind, fueled by a desire to see the light, distort the island into a phantasmagoria of wailing mermaids and octopi tentacles. The keepers’ continual efforts to optimize the lighthouse are belied by their inner demons. The outside becomes the inside, and vice versa. A ceiling leak, as in Shutter Island, drips water onto Winslow as he sleeps. The mind interfaces with its world; psychosis acquires human form in The Lighthouse, hence a graphic sex scene between Winslow and a mermaid. The lighthouse triggers psychic collapse for characters and spectators. We’re never sure if all we get are instantiations of Winslow’s mind. In black and white with dusky lighting, Eggers’s whole project feels dreamlike.

Indeed, The Lighthouse begs for a psychoanalytic reading with its repressed characters, fantasies, homoeroticism, and thematization of the father. Yet, without getting too deep into the weeds, The Lighthouse attempts to visualize the subconscious on-screen. What motivates us to act? Where does desire come from? What makes us snap? A sequence that begins with Winslow furiously masturbating and ends with him wildly shrieking and flirting with suicide distills the contradictory urges animating the mind. The Lighthouse charts a physic geography that resists rationalization. The haunting tower at the center of the film stands as a memorial to the unknowability of the self, coldly mocking our attempts to come to grips with our identity (Figure 8). The closer we get to the inner light – going up a lighthouse’s spiral stairs or spiraling down into our own mental architecture – the further away any sort of resolution becomes. The interlocking, rotating glass panes of the lighthouse lantern that Eggers foregrounds in close-up in the scene’s closing episode materialize the impossibly complex web of consciousness. Lighthouses are as labyrinthine as the mind, full of twists and turns, rotating around inexplicable desire and sensations.

To the Lighthouse

The emergence of the lighthouse in contemporary film as a means to throw into question matters of identity, space, and perception is not without precedent. Unfolding right at the end of the nineteenth century, The Lighthouse importantly coincides with the first public screening of a motion picture. The Lumière brothers unveiled their cinematograph technology in Paris in 1895, whereupon they kicked into motion the rise of movies and filmgoing in the West. Besides offering a new form of mass entertainment, cinema also fueled an undercurrent of suspicion and mysticism among certain viewers. The perceptual world created by silent black-and-white images disrupted traditional modes of vision. Audiences were given access to a world of ghosts that didn’t follow the normative rules of time and space but operated in a kind of dream logic. It’s no wonder that one of the most popular filmmakers of the era, Georges Méliès, was a magician. The film apparatus gave him a new medium to practice his illusionism. This sentiment is best expressed by the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, whose essay “The Kingdom of Shadows” is cited in any film history:

Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If only you knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there – the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air – is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadows, it is not motion but its soundless specter.

Movies, like lighthouses, lit up a kind of netherworld inaccessible via our normative viewing positions. A film projector is itself a kind of lighthouse, a mini-tower of light that projects our gaze onto a distant world. The lighthouse and cinema are products of technical modernity. And given the low quality of film stock in the early twentieth century, there’s a dusky quality to silent movies – which Eggers recreates in The Lighthouse – that makes it seem as if moving images are being observed through a fog, much like the mist with which The Lighthouse and Shutter Island begin. The lighthouse is a metaphor for cinema not only for its ability to make use of light, but to distort and reimagine perceptual possibilities. These tools are the fruits of, and challenges to, human ingenuity. They question what it means to perceive by, ironically, expanding perceptual reality.

The most celebrated intersection between early moving images, lighthouses, and the problems of perception is, of course, Virginia Woolf. In her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, which draws on the perceptual revolution precipitated by moving image technology, unfolds like a montage sequence as it erratically jumps between different point-of-views of a lighthouse. The beacon becomes a channel to probe the ambiguities of subjectivity, time, space, and death. It’s a modernist novel that, like the films spotlighted here – Shutter Island, Annihilation, and The Lighthouse – lays waste to any notion of a knowable self. These lighthouse-centric works reveal that the self and the spaces we occupy are always in a process of discovery – not static quantities to be systematized. The cinematic lighthouse is a neo-gothic attack on the cult of rationalism, inviting an appreciation of the irrationality guiding so much our lives. What makes us us eludes us.

* * *

Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from the films’ DVD or trailers.