[Eggers, The VVitch and The Lighthouse]


Eggers is a cultured, well-prepared and truly good author. He conquered me. I had high expectations, which were confirmed in a big way. Indeed, with The Lighthouse they went even further. I loved this movie. Amazing.

I'll try to say what I think.

Both The VVitch and The Lighthouse have the theme of finitude at their center human, of the individual's relationship with the transcendent, with the divine, the anguish deriving from the awareness of being mortal, the fear of death and the desire to go further, to overcome the limits of the miserable, wonderful, human condition.

The VVitch explores these themes starting from the myth of the witch, around which an incessant religious dialogue of Catholic origin is based. References abound. They are never ends in themselves. The themes of sin, of guilt, of the unknown that lives in us even more than what we inhabit. The apple that the boy vomits during the possession phase (sublime scene!), His ecstatic expression, the same one found in Dafoe on the lighthouse. Here, these are the two main moments of the divine manifestation - in The Lighthouse the metaphor is decidedly more explicit. A god who as such is unattainable, dazzling, immobile. The ending of The VVitch is the encounter with the devil, or at least the darkness. At first it seemed "out of place" to me, but I thought about it all day and I told myself that Eggers had studied it well: the girl, having left that sterile Eden that was the family farm, enters the woods , naked, until reaching that Sabbath. She takes flight. Lost and lost as only a human can be. She is finally free to be herself. Because it is in the darkness of the forest that the path that leads home is found (Holzwege, Heidegger's interrupted paths). It is in the dark forest that every birth takes place.

In The Lighthouse there are references to different myths, a plurality of worlds is evoked. As you well said. Everything is inspired, in my opinion, even if perhaps in a veiled way, by the mythologeme of the mermaid.
The VVitch: witch.
The Lighthouse: mermaid.< br />The goat and the seagull.
The myth of the mermaid is born from blood, from death, from terror, but in the imagination she is transfigured into a creature that is at once sensuality, charm, attraction; on the contrary, the myth of the witch, which arises from opposite conditions: nature, progress, discovery, etc., has been transfigured into a dark, frightening, terrible figure. In my opinion, Eggers' two films recover, in some way, this dichotomy: The VVitch is a rebirth in the darkness, The Lighthouse is a dying in the light. Billy goat and seagull. Witch and mermaid.

(Two myths that have always fascinated me. After all, my city owes its name to the mermaid Partenope, but mine is also a land of witches: the janara, for example, is typical of the Beneventan hinterland above all).

Among other references, there is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge, in which the sailor kills the albatross, a sacred bird, divine metaphor, creature that symbolizes God (among other things, the albatross is the same animal that Baudelaire compares to the poet, an intimately divided creature, condemned to live between two worlds - heaven and earth). The sailor kills the god-animal (Pattinson and the seagull) and the storm breaks out.

And, from a certain point of view, the seagull, in addition to being a metaphor for the divine, is also another manifestation of the mermaid, as happens in Nordic or inland cultures, for which the mermaid is a being half woman and half bird. In short, perhaps this possibility is not entirely unfounded.

In any case, there is also a clear reference to Ulysses: Pattinson, like the Homeric character, is attracted by the "song" of the sirens, but unlike the Greek hero who lets himself be tied to the mast of the ship, he gives in, dares, goes further, like Icarus, like Prometheus, like the man who tries to look God in the eye but cannot sustain his gaze.

And then in The Lighhouse there is so much more, what a wonderful film! There are Prometheus and Icarus, Sisyphus and Abraham, and then Poe and Lovecraft, but also Rimbaud's drunken boat (when I saw these logs in the sea I immediately thought of him) "happy to drown in the lapping of mirrors" as Brodsky would say (but I'm pretty sure this isn't there, only I saw it). And there will be many other references that I didn't catch. How beautiful. I love when a film overwhelms me and makes me make a thousand connections, often arbitrary and which perhaps have little to do with the film itself. In any case, the themes of sin, atonement, the beyond (passage), the dialogue - interwoven with contradictions and ambiguities - with the transcendent return here, which is at the same time darkness that gives birth (witch) and light that extinguishes (siren).

The idea that the boy (Pattinson) and Dafoe's previous partner are the same person is suggestive, plausible, but it doesn't fully convince me. In my opinion, these are single, separate individuals, united by the fact that they have tried to look God in the eyes, but his gaze is unbearable. They tried to solve the mystery inside us, rather than live it. And they ended up exploding, going crazy, fading into the existential storm, devoured by the souls of our remorse, of unlived moments, of alternative pasts, of lost opportunities, thrown to the wind, left to wither. Pattinson, and all the men who came before him and all those who will follow him, is each of us. Or at least that part that dares to look God in the eyes, and that inexorably falls from the height of the stars, finding itself dying on the rocks, devoured by earthly life.

Behold, The VVitch yes ends with her taking off, The Lighthouse with him falling to the ground. I would say that Eggers has summarized the human condition with great effectiveness, with these two films, capturing its peculiar traits, the underlying dichotomies: light and darkness, incompleteness and immensity, rationality and irrationality, heaven and earth, the fragment and the infinite, the need to advance and the temptation to stop, the need for discovery and the fear of the unknown, poetry and prose, mythos and logos, here and now and then and elsewhere.
Witch and mermaid.