On the American Dream: The Lighthouse & Of Mice and Men

“He believed that there was some enchantment in the light. He notioned that St. Elmo had cast his very fire into it. Salvation, said he.”

I recently rewatched Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse for the first time in about a year, and I liked it even more than when I first watched it last January. I think the film can be better appreciated during a rewatch—it’s easier to revere Eggers’ symbolism and allegory when you’re not desperately trying to grasp what is going on.

The Lighthouse (spoilers ahead, obviously) follows two lighthouse keepers, former lumberjack Ephraim Winslow (AKA Thomas Howard) and his supervisor, the old, calloused Thomas Wake, stationed on a remote New England island in the 1890s. After Winslow kills a seagull in a fit of rage—supposedly unleashing a sailor’s curse on the island—an intended four-week stay at the lighthouse derails into a delirious, supernatural tempest (pun intended) where the two men chase each other with axes, worship the mysterious power of the light at the top of the lighthouse, and hallucinate mermaids, among other things.

Revealed amidst the chaos is that Thomas Howard—Winslow, same person—killed the real Ephraim Winslow, one of his old fellow timber-men, and assumed his identity to start anew. We also find out that Thomas Wake killed his former wickie before Howard came along and that Wake planned to not pay Howard for his work when the ferry came to pick them up. Winslow kills Wake, takes his key to the lantern room, finally confronts the lighthouse’s enigmatic beacon, starts screaming (?), and then falls down the stairs. The last shot of the film shows Winslow lying naked on the island shore as seagulls feast on his organs and rain patters the island.

I’ve encountered many interpretations of the film, a common one being that The Lighthouse is a loose retelling of the myth of Prometheus, as the final scene suggests. Subsequently, some theorize that the events of the film don’t transpire chronologically—rather, we see excerpts of Ephraim Winslow’s suffering as Thomas Wake (or the gods of the sea, or both) repeatedly punish him in a kind of purgatory, which would explain the obscurity of the film’s timeline. Other theories posit that Thomas Wake isn’t real at all, and instead represents Ephraim Winslow’s subconscious—this explains why the two only really interact when Winslow’s mental state is compromised.

I haven’t really decided one any one overarching theory to believe. Not that I ever will, I don’t think. A film like The Lighthouse isn’t meant to be solved, per se. Maybe it’s just meant to be experienced, in all of its 35-millimeter, black-and-white, carnal glory (and slight film-bro pretension.)

I have, however, settled on a fairly concrete interpretation of the film’s primary symbol: the lighthouse itself, specifically the mysterious light at the top of the stairs that only Thomas Wake has access to. Whether The Lighthouse is a reenactment of a Greek myth or just a story about two guys going crazy, the symbolism of the light remains largely the same.

The light is the physical manifestation of Ephraim Winslow’s American dream—a tangible beacon of promise, always just out of reach, that Winslow is led to believe he can reach through labor. The lighthouse promises to Winslow what the ideal of America promises to the worker: the possibility of upward mobility and the chance to redefine one’s future—given, of course, that one submits to the ruthlessness of American capitalism, as Winslow does throughout the first half of the film. Winslow takes up the entirety of the manual labor on the island: he shovels coal, paints the walls, and scrubs the floor, only to be ridiculed and punished further by Wake. His grueling labor ultimately gets him no closer to the light—in fact, his tasks seem random and disconnected from the lighthouse itself. Winslow’s toil is ultimately trivial; his descent into madness is a symptom of capitalism’s unfulfilled promises.

There is no possible happy ending to a film like The Lighthouse precisely because its story is so deeply American. Even if there hadn’t been that unexpected storm, and the ferry did come to pick up Wake and Winslow after four weeks, we know for a fact that Winslow wasn’t even going to get paid. The horror of The Lighthouse doesn’t just come from the unsettling atmosphere or supernatural sea monsters—a lot of it comes from the film’s brutally realistic portrayal of American capitalism.

The symbolism of the light as the American dream works really well with the Prometheus explanation, too. Winslow steals the “fire” of success under capitalism from the gods—something that was never meant for him to obtain—and he is punished eternally. Just as, perhaps, all Americans are.

A few months ago I wrote an essay about another horror film I’m obsessed with, Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018), in conversation with John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (the most American novel like… ever. And also my favorite novel, like ever.) So, as I was thinking about The Lighthouse and its scathing depiction of the American dream, I couldn’t help but think in the context of American literature—somewhat because of my previous essay, but also because the American dream, and the illusion of said dream, is the tenet of this country’s literature.

I again landed on a Steinbeck novel, one that I thought worked really well in juxtaposition with The Lighthouse. But I worried that another iteration of the Steinbeck/2010s-horror-movie thing was too contrived. I mean, it’s a pretty niche “subgenre,” right? Then again, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (and its similarly brutal depiction of America) is certainly terrifying—perhaps even more so than any horror film like The Lighthouse.

“I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head.”

Of Mice and Men takes place in California’s Salinas Valley, just like East of Eden, where Steinbeck grew up—basically as far away from the East Coast fog of The Lighthouse as one can get within the United States. I have always found the West to be a really rich backdrop for American stories (even though I have lived in the Northeast for my entire life. Perhaps that is part of the appeal.) Evidently, Steinbeck felt the same. From the small amount of his work I have read so far, he seems captivated by the concept of the West—either the West as in the Western states of America, or America itself as the global West—as the detritus of promise.

In only about one hundred pages, Of Mice and Men tells the story of two itinerant migrant workers in California, George Milton and Lennie Small, in their search for the American dream during the Great Depression. George is small in stature and hardened by the reality of 1930s America; Lennie is a giant, of enormous physical strength, and mentally disabled. The two find work on a rural farm outside Soledad, hoping to fund their dream of eventually “living of the fatta the lan’,” a dream Lennie repeats constantly to anyone willing to listen.

It soon becomes evident, however, that George and Lennie’s plan is nothing more than a pipe dream. With their economic instability and Lennie’s inability to function in society, their dream of land ownership and self-sufficiency—the classic American dream—is, quite frankly, impossible.

After Lennie accidentally kills Curley’s wife (Curley is the boss’ son and main antagonist of the story), Curley leads a group of farm workers to lynch Lennie, who has fled to into a nearby backwoods, waiting for George. If you haven’t read Of Mice and Men, I genuinely recommend you do before I spoil the ending, because I honestly can’t remember a time where I was as enthralled by a piece of writing as I was for Steinbeck’s last few pages. George meets Lennie in the clearing and, knowing a brutal death at the hands of Curley and his mob inevitably awaits him, shoots Lennie in the back of the head. But as George prepares to kill his best friend, he reminds Lennie of their ultimate dream, the dream that started all of this in the first place: their fantasy of “living off the fatta the lan” and tending to their very own rabbits. Lennie dies with the American dream in mind—the dream that by the end of Of Mice and Men is clearly unattainable, but maybe provides some sort of twisted comfort to both Lennie and George in their final interaction.

Like The Lighthouse, Of Mice and Men is a definitively American story—with a fittingly tragic, American ending. And when I first conceived of this essay, I thought that Eggers’ film and Steinbeck’s novel were practically the same: tales of American capitalism and its discontents, told through the eyes of the laborer (and with iconic male best friend duos?)

I think there’s something different, though, between these stories that’s actually really important. The American dream, though unattainable in both The Lighthouse and Of Mice and Men, functions differently for Steinbeck’s characters as it does for Eggers’. And while the unfulfilled promises of American capitalism ultimately lead to the demise of Winslow and Wake as well as George and Lennie, I think the endings of The Lighthouse and Of Mice and Men ultimately point me as a reader in a different direction.

Ephraim Winslow thinks that the American dream is genuinely achievable in a way George Milton knows it’s not. And through this distinction, I think we can interpret these two stories in really different ways.

In Of Mice and Men, it’s pretty clear from the start that George and Lennie are never going to get that farm. George is already exhausted by the time the book starts, having fled from a nearby town after Lennie is accused of assaulting a woman—the two have already sort of failed before we even meet them. And it soon becomes clear that George’s constant reminders to Lennie about how they are saving up to buy their own farm are just as trivial as his reminders not to pick up dead mice or to let George do the talking. I think George knows that his “dream” is never going to happen. Certainly not with Lennie, at least, and he truly accepts this by the end; in killing Lennie, he frees him from the relentless chase of a fantasy he knows is unattainable.

Ephraim Winslow of The Lighthouse, on the other hand, drives himself insane in his pursuit of success under capitalism, which he believes he can actually achieve if he works hard enough. Winslow’s descent into madness is the symptom of his Sisyphean struggle toward the American dream—the dream he has imagined as an escape from the wrongs of his past and that he refuses to accept is nothing more than an illusion.

In retrospect, I think that the ending of Of Mice and Men isn’t actually as bleak as that of The Lighthouse. While I was certainly more emotional reading George shooting Lennie than I was watching a seagull eat Robert Pattinson’s intestines, there’s some kind of solace in Steinbeck’s ending. George’s final act is ultimately one of love. Despite the horror of the world around them, a world that actively hates people like them, George and Lennie find a temporary comfort in their American dream, and Lennie dies peacefully—unlike Winslow, who kills Wake out of hatred and suffers an agonizing, painful death (maybe even in an eternal purgatory?) For Steinbeck, love persists in the darkest, whereas for Eggers, it’s unclear if it was ever even there in the first place.

I’d like to believe in Steinbeck’s interpretation, at least for now.

“Now what the hell ya suppose is eatin’ them two guys?”