Gorman On Gore EP8 The Lighthouse (2019)

Smell the sea air? Feel the roar of the surf? Join us, Jacob and Peter, as we romp through the magnificent tale of grimy maritime isolation and madness that is Robert Egger's The Lighthouse (2019). Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe portray festering misanthropes wonderfully well. We pick the whole movie apart for your listening pleasure, scene by scene. We cover how much of it might be real and how much might be hallucination. Is Dafoe a god of the sea? Did seagulls poo on Pattinson? Does gin taste like pine needles? All these questions and more will be braved on this episode.

Our Website: https://gormanongore.buzzsprout.com/

Spotify:  https://open.spotify.com/show/7hjbpX0bPx79p0YY9ACvq7

Apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gorman-on-gore/id1579271619?i=1000530712722

Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3Byb3V0LmNvbS8xODI4OTY0LnJzcw==

Email us! gormanongore@protonmail.com

Twitter: http://twitter.com/gormanongore

Light the beacon of our hearts below
buymeacoff.ee/GormanOnGore

gormanongorecom.wordpress.com

Transcript

0:16
[Music]
0:32
welcome back everybody and new listeners hello this is gorman on gore a podcast about
0:37
horror films i'm your host peter gorman with me as always is my long-suffering compatriot
0:43
jacob say hello to the nice people jacob jark
0:49
what what's up you say yarg i said hark it's making a reference to the yeah okay
0:56
anyway all right no no no no finish the thought no no it's fine just
1:02
let that die on the vine all right i'm excited for this one are you excited
1:09
hell yes i'm excited yeah we got a good one for you today ladies and germs this is the stuff
1:14
dreams are made of go on jacob tell them tell them what we got for them this week
1:20
uh they can already tell from the episode title but what if they're auto playing on a
1:26
playlist you know i mean this is important dude oh no that's true that's no that's a good point that's a good point
1:31
uh we're you know talking about the lighthouse by keeping secrets are ye
1:38
no it's not a secret i just don't know who i can't remember who directed it robert akers there you go
1:44
that's actually the tagline of the movie oh okay wait is it it really is oh no
1:50
yeah keeping secrets are ye [Laughter]
2:04
tell me what's a timber timberman want with being a wiki
2:11
she's looking earn a living it's like any man starting new on the run
2:21
keeping secrets on you also why just feel your beans
2:38
[Music]
2:48
be
3:06
how long have we been on this rock five weeks two days
3:12
help me to recollect
3:24
it's robert eckerd's master class and black and white cabin fever the lighthouse and in case you've never
3:30
listened to the podcast before we do a detailed analysis of the whole film from beginning to end we spoil everything
3:38
i would recommend you see this film for yourself first however even if you did
3:43
there's no spoiling the film all of the events depicted might have
3:48
happened or or none of the events depicted might have happened or some of the events depicted might have happened
3:55
i prefer to take the entire plot literally it all happened
4:01
really all of it amazing i like this stance i appreciated the
4:07
pause like cody would even uh have you even deal with that no i did i
4:13
have my own interpretation but uh yeah it's funny to think of the whole thing as
4:19
being entirely like a literal thing that happened it's all true
4:25
well it's a mess what if this movie had begun with that which is like based on a true story
4:33
uh i mean it is sort of like a man another man and a mermaid
4:39
it is kind of no i kind of similar i do know it's roughly based off that
4:44
lighthouse or whatever i heard it was called the smalls lighthouse incident off the coast
4:52
of wales you know there have probably been there have probably been multiple instances where uh
4:58
people have just gone nuts and dis well here's this is the 2019 lighthouse by the way
5:04
there's also a 2016 lighthouse it's a british production it's slightly more
5:10
faithful to the thing that they borrowed the most of this from
5:15
it's about two men off the coast of wales i think it's called the smallest incident it's like these
5:20
small islands off the coast of pembrokeshire and one of the men died
5:26
and uh the other one had to run the lighthouse by himself he had to lash the dead body of his
5:32
co-worker to the side of the lighthouse and during storms the
5:39
the arm of the dead body got knocked loose and was waving at him through the window
5:46
brutal and they were trapped in a storm yeah yeah they were trapped in a storm and they
5:52
never well i mean well they i mean it was just him at this point he was able to keep the the lighthouse lit
5:59
but he was never the same afterwards the guy was just ruined and so after that they changed the whole policy for
6:05
lighthouses where it used to be only two men and then it became three men so there you go also i think it's fair
6:12
to say that's nice he just thanks for to say they the other guy was there in spirit
6:18
in spirit watching him waiting for his moment to strike
6:23
this is the kind of movie i think where the destination is not nearly so important as the journey
6:30
it's really kind of a one-size-fits-all movie it's whatever you want it to be you know what i mean
6:37
um yeah i think so you can get a lot of different things out of this movie
6:42
i well okay personally if what i mean is yeah i mean we all have our theories i
6:48
mean i assume you've got some theory sure i mean but like i just yeah like what i'm saying is like i like to think
6:53
of this movie as a story about two dudes just having a good time together
7:00
just hanging out just just being dudes i mean
7:05
most of the time i mean okay so in almost every scenario that part of the movie is probably true
7:13
i think they always get drunk and you know and fall over each other i think that's true
7:19
so there is that we have to hold on to our kernels of knowledge in this film because everything's up for grabs
7:26
i mean i don't usually like going for that you know as they say the jacob's ladder scenario where someone's in a dream or
7:33
dying the whole movie but this movie could be that and i i don't want it to be that but it
7:39
could be no i feel like that's that's the most boring interpretation it is absolutely the most boring it's
7:45
like waking up from a dream at the end of a movie which is like oh man that was scary yeah no thanks
7:53
at best we can try to lay out a few of the most plausible scenarios as i've said i've
7:58
got about six but ultimately the story is like a mirror reflection
8:04
it's just it's whatever you want it to be uh yeah in a way it's like a reflection on you
8:10
what you think it is yeah or like staring into the reflective light at the
8:15
top of a lighthouse for hours and an hour
8:21
and hours there is a lighthouse up at uh alki
8:27
beach that's near my grandfather's house in seattle i love that beach i was once abandoned
8:33
there that was kind of a whole other story we have a big white lighthouse there and
8:38
i always thought that was the coolest thing we used to be able to go visit it but that was just like a little wimpy
8:44
thing and it's right on the shore i think well for me personally but i think also
8:50
for a lot of people there's a lot of melancholy and kind of romanticism for a lighthouse
8:56
yeah also san francisco well known for uh
9:01
its lighthouses or at least it's got a lie i don't know if it's maybe not well now
9:08
whatever have you seen how many have you seen uh i've only seen two but i know there are
9:14
like a lot i've only seen two but i know that there
9:20
are more than two yeah i saw like uh i mean i'm just looking at now there's
9:26
like a top 16 or something lighthouses oh my god yeah so i guess there's a lot
9:34
us west coasters we're we're real big on the whole like you know romance of the water thing and you know that's not fair
9:40
i think everybody who lives near water is real in love with the water that they are near yeah
9:45
because the ocean invariably drives you bad
9:50
yes it's eternal and it wants to pull you down into its dark depths don't tell me you haven't
9:57
the hardest thing you haven't thought about looking at those those webs the gray uncertain waves of the puget
10:03
sound it's misty complacent ambivalence absolutely
10:10
the pacific ocean is way more impressive the puget sound is pretty pretty weak i mean well i like it but
10:16
it's what i mean is like it doesn't have that terror and majesty that the great dark ocean of the pacific does no
10:23
but then again what does yeah so few things do in life terrify
10:29
you quiet as much as the pacific ocean on that note so jacob my wiki
10:37
would you recommend this film uh are we doing that already no i mean this is like just the initial
10:43
oh sure i mean yeah absolutely i love this movie yeah thanks for listening to the podcast
10:48
all right later now there's there's gonna be slightly more
10:54
like several hours probably we'll see i would absolutely recommend it though i
11:00
would not begrudge anyone for playing something on their phone while they watch it you know that kind of no i also
11:08
it's a little undemanding of your attention if you don't wish to give it to the film if you know what i mean yeah
11:13
i also i i did give some thought into like how how would you explain to someone
11:20
what it is specifically well i don't know just
11:25
what do you like about this movie what makes it such a good movie and it's very hard to explain it without uh sounding
11:32
like a crazy person yeah because in the end it's just two
11:38
relatively unpleasant men just kind of sniping at each other and slowly going mad
11:44
which as a description it just sounds terrible but i mean but it's also it's it's great
11:49
it's so much more than that it's fart jokes people drinking gin yes
11:56
people jerking off all of life's little pleasures
12:04
all of them yeah okay so what do we got for the cast here
12:10
i mean this might take a minute because there's let me just let me count let me count two people in this movie
12:18
well okay there's actually a couple of other stand-ins you know and the mermaid i guess counts yeah but yeah it's really
12:24
just two guys yes so we got we got willem dafoe
12:30
he's playing a craggy-faced wiki named thomas wake
12:35
and then we have robert pattinson who will be future batman
12:41
he's playing ephraim winslow question mark uh yeah
12:47
or possibly another man at any rate whoever he is he's the assistant wiki
12:53
are you confused yet everybody you will be
12:59
you win so let's get to it shall we
13:05
sure okay so right off the bat it's black and white it's a boxy
13:12
frame it doesn't take up the whole screen so right off the bat you just get this feeling like oh well this is some kind
13:18
of like dickensian kind of moby dick type situation boo i don't want to watch an old movie
13:25
boom don't pretend to be old what are you doing this young
13:30
frankenstein crap there's like a terrible noise i believe
13:36
it's the the like a fog horn or something some kind of a boat horn
13:42
and out of the mist walks i'm just gonna call them our pats for most of the movie because no i'm not sure which person no
13:49
you call them you don't want to call them our pets peter that's dumb we're just calling him winslow okay i'm
13:55
stopping that right here now that's not okay
14:01
all right fine we'll call him carl winslow all right you twisted him fair enough
14:07
there's a changing of the guard two men approach a lighthouse two men leave a lighthouse
14:14
that's right we can enter two mainly
14:19
yeah i mean it's pretty it's pretty generic you know just like oh we're done so and now it's your turn to be isolated
14:25
on this island of horrors so yeah we have the grizzle old wiki
14:32
who's willem dafoe and his new assistant winslow or robert pattinson
14:38
they don't introduce themselves early on so i might go back and forth on the names that's what this kind of movie is like
14:45
they don't even bother to be like yeah here is who i am they're just people they're just people
14:51
walking up to a lighthouse peter you don't get they're dudes dudes can just hit all right dudes yeah
14:56
two manly mans can just hang out with manly bushy beers dudes can just hang out together and not give each other
15:01
lambs or like know anything about our you know their lives that's just how dudes are just give each
15:07
other that knowing nod yeah ah fellow man yeah
15:13
so who robert pattinson i'm going to try to call him winslow i want to call him our
15:18
pats this is going to be hard for me okay so winslow walks in on willem the foe's character
15:25
you know wake kissing into a chamber pot and and farting and uh their room looks really cramped
15:32
yes it's kind of weird because it's weird because when you see the outside of the building there's this big
15:38
tall lighthouse and then there's a long building connected to it that has another building
15:44
to me it looked like popeye's arm like flexing there's like quite a lot of building so i can't figure out why
15:50
they're in this horrible room it's like at the top of an attic or something it's just you could you've got the two angles
15:56
of the roof you know intruding on their space so they have to almost like bow to each other to get into and out of bed i
16:03
imagine that building is probably full of supplies that they need
16:09
yeah except for you know in this instance when they very badly need it and it's not well yeah well
16:15
later later on we'll get to it okay so yeah winslow already looks
16:22
miserable but that is one i know our pets fine looking i i want to keep saying ah
16:29
defoe's character calls him pretty as a picture in the film and he honestly he is he's got a good lumberjacky look he's
16:35
got a bushy mustache he's got a i don't know what it is like kind of a boston accent he's got the kind of ahs
16:42
on his a's yeah like i just goddamn farts i don't know
16:47
what the hell will defoe's that is it's salty old sea person
16:55
the ageless accent of the sea yes yeah i'm not sure it's kind of
17:02
a little bit pirate and a little bit uh willem dafoe like i guess yeah
17:09
i mean without going into it too much i almost feel like giving some things said later on that
17:15
it's gotta be like intentional put on on his part but he never he never lets up on it
17:21
yeah i mean he's always he's always talking in rhyme or or saying something bizarre
17:27
he uses the the what's in that old-timey wrong way that i hate you know
17:33
angry at those what cross him you know that kind of yeah even the way we should use what and need to go back to
17:40
i really don't like it it was in guardians of the galaxy volume 2 when taserface kept saying the the what's that way and it just drove no
17:47
i don't even remember that yeah you know it's not worth it yeah
17:52
the character is horrible he existed just to be laughed at yeah okay so
17:59
as i said all right winslow this is his first time there or at least it's assumed because i mean like i said
18:04
there's not a lot of talking early on at least not about things that are important so he's unpacking and he finds
18:10
a little carving scrimshaw mermaid in his bed and i'm just like score
18:16
like that's that's uh that reminds me of um i mean i guess we should we'll get into
18:23
this early it reminds me of an hp lovecraft story called the temple
18:29
oh it's the one that which one is the one with the uh nazi submarine crew where uh
18:36
lovecraft gets into his favorite kind of racism which is like inter-white people racism
18:44
which is like no it's great because he's like he the main characters like a nazi who's
18:50
constantly insulting the other crew members for being like filthy ryan landers and stuff like that
18:57
come on man oh okay yeah i don't remember that story at all
19:03
it's a good one to go back and and read them well maybe not i don't know i almost wish there was a racism
19:08
filter on the old lovecraft stories i you know whatever it's okay it's literally racism against other nazis
19:16
yeah well this time anyway well well sure for sure i'm just saying
19:22
this time it's just kind of funny and in case anyone doesn't know scrimshaw is i think it's just a term
19:28
for any carved ivory figure it's often uh like a tusk
19:34
or sometimes it's from the bone like it could be whale bone i assume this mermaid is is a is a scrimshaw whale
19:40
bone yeah i hope it's i hope it's the dork you know which is the whale penis
19:47
uh i think that could be no but it actually there's a bone in there yeah i did know
19:53
that i don't know why i knew that but yeah i picked i picked that up
19:59
at some point in my life okay so yeah like i said winslow has
20:05
unpacked his things for the first time he finds an idol william defoe's character who later introduces himself as thomas
20:11
wake he's grizzled he's gross he farts he seems real grumpy
20:17
i don't know they don't they already don't seem to like each other and they haven't even really spoken yet
20:22
and so then they have their first dinner together and willem dafoe basically forces him to
20:28
drink you know he wants to do a toast i mean in a way it makes sense he's like listen this is our first dinner together
20:34
and well he doesn't say it this eloquently but so this is our first dinner together and you know i want to toast you know like
20:41
uh this mission this journey we're taking together winslow is just like no
20:47
and i get the sense i don't know if they say i mean they show later but i i i get
20:52
the sense that winslow doesn't like himself when he drinks that he becomes too belligerent
20:59
or or maybe he doesn't feel like he can control himself when he's when he's wasted yeah that is the impression i got
21:07
also frankly i don't know how you feel about it but just drinking a cup of gem
21:14
straight just seems miserable yeah it's it's like i don't know i mean
21:20
for those who haven't had gin it's essentially what is it actually juniper berries or
21:26
yeah something but it tastes like pine needles yeah and it's pretty unpleasant you usually
21:32
have to chase it with something or mix it gin and tonic is the classic but you can
21:37
do lots of stuff i'm not sure that there's any version of it that i particularly like
21:43
but you know uh everyone's got their own things yeah i mean i don't mind jim but like just like the idea of just like
21:49
later on when they're just just straight up just chugging a bottle it's like that i would throw up at least too much
21:57
yeah so defoe says you know bad luck to leave a toast unfinished
22:03
which is really more how he talks he's just sort of i'm talking in a piratey tone
22:09
so he's you know a little superstitious a little overbearing uh he utterly insists on the toast
22:16
and then uh oh yeah that's right defoe and winslow winslow right off the bat is like okay
22:21
well what are what are our rounds and willem dafoe lays out all the things he needs to do he's like oh you gotta
22:27
you know you gotta scrub the floors you gotta clean out the cistern you gotta you know you gotta whitewash the
22:32
lighthouse all this mundane stuff and and then winslow's like okay well when do i get
22:37
to do the watch i mean i i want to when do i get to be up there with the lamp and the foe's just like ah never
22:45
i take the dread watch which is a night to morning apparently
22:50
right off the bat it's a little weird with willem defoe's character making a lot of strange demands
22:56
and being really bizarre saying little fun sailor witticisms which unfortunately i've forgotten i should have written it
23:02
down but it's also really hard to follow him so i mean i would have had to put on captions and
23:08
you know just pause for a while and try to figure out which old sea chantey he's saying or whatever yeah he's got some
23:13
good ones yeah there's a few good ones in here yeah so winslow has to shovel coal which he
23:21
does not enjoy who'da thunk it yeah and then you get the first shot of
23:26
willem dafoe's character up in the lighthouse up in the i think they call it the lamp room
23:32
he's just looking dazed and offering a cup to the light and just says to ye
23:39
because he's toasting the light oh yeah he's just i guess he's having a blast out there
23:44
yeah he's seen multiple times throughout the movie being naked up there i don't remember if he is the first time
23:51
but he certainly gets around to it quite quickly yeah i think he i think he like strips but he doesn't start naked
23:59
like he does in so many other scenes
24:04
so at night winslow sees a great raft of sawn lumber float
24:10
across the water to their volcanic island oh i forgot to mention that they are on a super remote island it's like
24:17
it's volcanic rock they are totally surrounded by water they have to take a boat to get there so
24:22
they are utterly isolated and they're going to be there for a whole month yeah
24:28
so this is the first instance where maybe winslow was dreaming or maybe he's not i'm not sure but he sees all these
24:35
logs floating across the water he swims out to them i don't know why he thinks to do that
24:40
but there's a body in the middle of them like there's like a circle of logs around a dead body but when he gets
24:46
there it's gone and then he sees a mermaid swimming out from the depths of the of the ocean and
24:52
emitting a piercing siren song or maybe a scream kind of depends on how
24:57
you want to take i i definitely got more scream out of that than anything
25:05
the next morning or maybe some other time uh winslow goes to i thought he was
25:12
cleaning an outhouse or a latrine he is not that is the cistern so he's
25:18
like he's plugging his nose as though he's like got the worst smell ever coming out of this hole
25:24
i was convinced when i first saw it i actually wrote it down that he was cleaning out an outhouse by pouring in some
25:29
a bag of white stuff some kind of disinfectant i'm guessing but it's not it's the water they're
25:35
drinking yeah he just pours in a bag of whatever that stuff is
25:41
and i guess that's cool i mean hopefully that's all it needed whatever was in that bag yeah
25:48
not quite sure oh i will say i did like that horrible bag that he has to carry with the strap
25:55
that goes around his forehead yeah it's very old-timey yeah
26:01
i'm not exactly sure when this movie's supposed to be set i mean the smalls lighthouse incident happened uh
26:07
i was either 1801 or 1831 i forget which one but anyway it's around that that time
26:13
this movie was originally based off of uh an unfinished story by edgar allan poe called the lighthouse
26:19
it was being written by edgar's brother i forget his name one of them is named
26:24
max i think the director is and then is oh i forget it it might be peter but i'll look it up afterwards i wrote it
26:30
down robert max oh is it okay i'll go with that robert and max anyway the brother uh was
26:37
writing this lighthouse story while his more successful presumably brother was
26:42
making the witch and so afterwards he's like oh we should just make this and so now this this movie has no
26:50
resemblance to the edgar allen poe story at all other than the title
26:55
the uh the edgar allen poe story is quite short since it's unfinished
27:01
yeah i hear it's unfinished i never read it so i don't know what it's about yeah yeah you really couldn't make that into a movie
27:07
wait so wait have you read it um no i i have like seen like a
27:13
summary of what it's about and it's just like it's like it is like all right boom boom
27:19
boom and then it's done oh okay yeah so i can't imagine there's much to it
27:25
okay so getting back to the story yeah i have it right yeah i'm sorry i i
27:31
actually have the story up right now it's like it's basically one long paragraph one very short
27:37
paragraph and then one like medium paragraph
27:42
oh really yeah okay they were his last words before he died
27:48
don't be sad if that's the last thing you're doing as like a successful writer you know you're you're starting to write
27:53
a story but it's like a bad draft and then you feel a heart attack coming on you're like no i have to burn this
27:58
before someone sees it they'll think it was important it wasn't
28:04
important that's good that's probably happened
28:09
you'd think okay so winslow's mending the shingles on the roof and he spies defoe um
28:17
acting strangely in his bed yes we could say yes acting very strange indeed
28:23
well okay i think he's humping a pillow i don't really know i don't i don't know if i want to know yeah i mean i kind of
28:32
personally like the idea that his bed also has a hole in it and uh well
28:38
oh
28:46
nothing but nothing but nothing but hair in there oh god
28:53
you're welcome okay so later
28:59
winslow was wheeling a wheelbarrow of coal but is interrupted by a rude seagull that flies down and refuses to
29:05
move out of his way damnable bird i've heard in descriptions that the bird
29:11
is one-eyed i didn't notice it when i watched it myself and i think this is the second time i've seen this film i didn't notice that
29:18
do you think it's odin you know i he used to take the shape of a bird no i
29:24
know i i was like i was kicking around a theory about that but i was like
29:29
i could never get it to go anywhere you know no it doesn't work it doesn't work
29:35
because i mean spoiler alert uh this bird dies later like real hard oh yeah yeah
29:42
he like mortal kombat fatalities
29:48
yeah it's shocking we'll get to it yeah we'll get to it all right so these these early shots are
29:54
kind of just establishing a lot of the mundane duties that winslow is doing over the course of the first few days
30:00
or weeks i'm not sure the movie's real weird about time so i mean it's it could be a day it could be
30:07
a couple of days yeah it could be months maybe i well okay so this movie's supposed to
30:13
happen or at least the first part is supposed to happen over the course of four weeks so that's probably what happens i think
30:19
everything's mostly tangible at the beginning you know a story you can understand with a
30:25
with a with a timeline but later on it gets a little weird so anyway winslow is carrying a great
30:32
tank of something up the spiral stair of the lighthouse i believe it's a tank of kerosene yeah
30:38
the foe tells them he didn't need to bring up the whole thing he's like you could have just brought up this little pot
30:44
to refill the lamps i i will say i i did write a note while watching the scene it
30:50
was basically to the effect of how did they not account for people laughing to carry that thing up a huge flight of
30:56
stairs and it's like oh okay yeah no they did they did all right yeah it's so impractical
31:03
yeah well the thing is the tank is enormous it's almost bigger than he is and he somehow he got it up
31:10
however many stories of spiral staircase yeah the foe tells him yeah he didn't need to
31:16
bring it up and then curses him for a slow dullard and says he's behind in his duties so he's not even cool about it
31:23
you know he's just uh he's giving grief like right off the bat oh yeah absolutely
31:28
oh i found out that lighthouse lights don't have one big light they actually have a bunch of little lights
31:35
so up there there was probably at least six lamps that were probably all individually refilled with the kerosene
31:42
and then those reflector lights kind of turned it into one big light in case you were curious
31:50
lighthouse facts they share a meal winslow is in no mood to chatter with
31:55
the old sea salty defoe defoe says something ominous about boredom making men evil
32:02
which is kind of true yeah it's kind of uh idle hands make the devil's work or something to that effect
32:10
i mean i think there's a little bit truth to that yeah there was something i was thinking about with old maritime stories i've
32:16
read where i've heard that people always need to be doing something
32:22
so when the old sailors would run out of stuff to do they'd have to pick okum out
32:28
of between the planks of the uh of the ship oakum was like part of the stuff that
32:33
was the [ __ ] that held the wood together or maybe it was something that was in there at any rate it was just like
32:38
little hairs so they would just have to you know bow down if there was nothing else to do the
32:44
whole crew or however many didn't have something to do would have to just pick hairs out of the floor
32:50
and the whole idea was just that they always had to have a job to be done because if you didn't have a job to do
32:56
you're just standing around in a boat that's trapped you know in the middle of
33:01
a vast unknowable ocean and you're only thinking about the existential dread of it all and so i
33:08
think there's probably some of that in the lighthouse as well yeah that's a good way to uh succumb to sea madness
33:16
yeah i would say wake does offer the alternative of uh just drink
33:23
yeah you can just do that yeah winslow asked what became of the prior assistant
33:30
and defoe tells him the man went mad saw mermaids believed there was enchantment in the
33:35
light winslow brushes off defoe's warning not to fight any sea birds
33:42
and defoe straight up slaps them right in the face yeah
33:49
bad luck to kill a sea bird well yeah he said something about the
33:56
the sea birds have the souls of the dead their souls of sailors what met their
34:01
maker yeah i believe is how he says it what matter maker
34:08
i've never heard of this before but i can't exactly rule it out well it reminds me of the
34:13
uh rhyme of the ancient mariner i think there's just something about not disturbing the the balances around
34:19
you when you are in such a precarious position and you are so at the mercy of wild forces that are just eons beyond
34:27
your control yeah i will say so when wake slaps winslow
34:34
winslow has such a look of just being taken aback that someone would slap him in the face it's
34:41
very wonderful yeah and then the foe just plays it off like nothing happened yeah
34:48
just imagine yourself this is like probably the second maybe third day on the job what would you do
34:54
if your manager just slaps you in the face yeah like i don't even know i don't yeah i
35:00
think i'd be about as taken aback as he was which is like i don't even know what to say here
35:06
yeah i mean what's he going to do complain to hr yeah and dafoe is just it's just like he
35:12
just acts a little cavalier about it he's just like i'll put on some coffee for us don't mind me yeah
35:19
you know you're gonna be trapped with this person for like at least a month so i think that would almost be worse like
35:25
it would be so much better to be surprised by a crazy person rather than know
35:31
the whole time you're with a crazy person yeah that makes sense
35:36
well i mean is it better to know there's a bomb that's gonna blow you up in a couple of hours or to not know and just
35:43
die there's a bomb that's going to blow us up in a couple hours i was thinking of that old hitchcock
35:49
thing he was talking about the uh creation of suspense where you show a bomb under a table with
35:54
two men talking to each other hitchcock mentions that the two men don't know about the bomb but the
36:00
audience does and so the attention is created for the audience but not for the characters
36:07
i mean you could have spared him all of this if you just saved your crazy for a while
36:13
it could have given him a couple of weeks or where he just thinks everything's cool before it's too late
36:20
but then again what all could happen in a lighthouse job i mean i guess it's not like you expect like a lot of
36:26
things to go wrong there's not a lot of things that even happen all they're doing is keeping a light lit
36:34
at night winslow sees the foe naked up in the light so yeah this is the second time you see them up there but this
36:40
might be the first time you see some naked the or maybe shirtless it's it's not clear so like the lighthouse has a lot of
36:46
funny moments in it i mean it's like it's a suspenseful movie it's definitely a horror movie but there's a that little
36:54
bit where you see that silhouette of naked willem dafoe just projected back against
37:03
the building winslow came from and it's like that's just that's great
37:08
yeah i mean you gotta you gotta change up the tone a little bit otherwise it just becomes unbearable yeah
37:14
and they do that or at least they attempt to do that i think successfully by just upping the absurdity of both characters
37:21
occasionally yeah oddly enough it's not even implausible because
37:27
people get weird especially when they're super isolated and are bored out of their minds oh yeah definitely
37:34
so the next morning wake accuses williamslow of not scrubbing the floor and he points somewhat off camera you
37:41
don't see for sure what it is he's pointing at so maybe he did or maybe he didn't
37:47
winslow says he already scrubbed it twice i don't know who to believe actually
37:52
yeah i'm not sure either i know i guess my first impression at the time was that uh wake was just being
37:59
unreasonable i think he was just doing it to ruffle his feathers
38:04
and gaslight winslow a little bit if i might be so bold has to use that phrase
38:11
yeah oh i know you did it i was just playing with your boy he does go out of his way to push
38:17
winslow's buttons so i i feel like that is like part of that
38:22
yeah and then we come to the great scene where wake dangles winslow over the side of
38:29
the lighthouse from the very top of it to i think they're whitewashing the building
38:34
yeah i you could not get me to do that
38:41
i was thinking something similar it it's like being a window washer on a skyscraper
38:47
yeah just no no yeah winslow's sitting on a plank of wood that's held on all four corners by
38:54
tied rope it looks like yeah and you know winslow correctly points out that nobody's going
39:00
to see this i mean it doesn't even matter blake says uh oh you're getting high
39:05
marks in me book boy just keep going and then he just starts wiggling him
39:10
around i don't know what's happening i'm starting to wonder if white actually does try to kill him
39:17
or if he's just messing with him or maybe he's screwing up but he's too proud to admit it because he's old and
39:24
so he's starting to lose his grip on winslow but doesn't want to say so
39:30
it could be any of those things because you don't see any of it you're just from winslow's perspective so it
39:35
just starts shaking like crazy and he's like oh what are you doing old man yeah guys just like
39:40
no don't worry about it stop moving around he's like trying to blame him for it and then he just drops
39:46
and i'm not sure how far of a drop it is but it's real far yeah
39:52
i uh yeah it's not super far but it's like far enough where it's like yeah that would that's not great
39:58
oh he doesn't mean he's temporarily he's like knocked out for a minute yeah although yeah i guess he like doesn't
40:05
seem like he suffers from like too much like long-term pain from it but like i feel
40:10
like that would mess you up pretty bad no i mean he just gets briefly knocked out he wakes up and that one-eyed
40:16
seagull is there picking out his leg yeah i don't know what i don't know i'm starting to think this seagull had it
40:22
coming yeah i was going to say it at a certain point it's kind of yeah i was like not to like
40:28
victim blame about this but like bird kind of had it coming just you know like like at a certain
40:35
point just leave leave them alone yeah somewhere in this point in the movie is
40:41
when they mention there's two weeks remaining so half of their time has now expired
40:46
it went by just like that it sure did winslow finally introduces himself as
40:54
ephraim winslow so they were hanging around with each other for two weeks
40:59
didn't even bother to tell each other their names like i said man dudes can just hang out
41:06
i guess defoe asks what brought a man such as him to such a lonely job
41:11
he says what kind of a man he says pretty as a picture and he's like ah that's kind of sweet i
41:17
guess i he i mean i was going to like save this for
41:24
a little later on he definitely seems to have like there's something going on there
41:31
there's a lot of things going on yeah there's it's it's not nothing
41:38
winslow says that he was a timber man up in canada and defoe says they work one man harder
41:44
than two horses up there and then uh our past asks if defoe ever
41:50
married and defoe just sort of looks off wistfully and says 13 christmases at sea little ones at
41:57
home she never forgave it and that's the first and last you ever hear of anyone associating with defoe's
42:05
character yeah i think like i think he like brings it up maybe like
42:11
i guess there's like an anecdote later on where he talks about people he like
42:17
encountered but yeah he yeah it seems like he lived a pretty solitary life
42:23
i mean other than his former assistant he doesn't seem to really associate with
42:28
anyone i assume he took the lighthouse job because he's so unbearable that nobody can stand him for much longer
42:35
than that just four week intervals max he's not that bad
42:42
he wonders aloud whether winslow is a felon on the run winslow denies it
42:48
it is unclear whether or not that is true just as everything else in this movie is
42:54
unclear whether it is true oh yeah they mentioned that they they're earning uh 630 to maybe a thousand
43:00
dollars a year attending lighthouses that sounds like a lot of money for you know 18 whatevers yeah i'm not
43:07
sure what the conversion rate on that is i was trying to think of what kind of a job it would have to be now to be this
43:14
level of isolated and remunerated i guess i i was thinking
43:20
maybe if you had a job up in like antarctic well no down in antarctica or
43:25
up in the north pole because otherwise everything else is so interconnected you could still just be
43:31
playing crap on on you know on the internet while you're at some dreadful lighthouse job yeah i mean like
43:38
well they're also like those like long haul like crabbing boats and whatnot you know
43:45
oh yeah deadliest catch guys yeah you kind of do have to have a story like
43:50
this take place before cell phones honestly cell phones are the biggest
43:58
killer of horror movies of maybe anything in cinema yeah
44:04
time passes work is done they show a lot of winslow doing a lot of the same jobs
44:10
shoveling coal wheel barreling the coal cleaning out the cistern
44:16
fixing the shingles it looks for a minute like defoe has a hidden shrine that he closes up turns out it's
44:22
actually a writing desk that you know folds into itself i think those are cool apparently that's
44:27
kind of a nautical thing because they're trying to save space in a captain's cabin so they have things that kind of
44:33
fall into themselves that makes sense kind of like a campaign chest or something like that
44:40
winslow cannot sleep at night so he gets up and investigates the lighthouse up at the light he can hear defoe
44:47
moaning with pleasure and goo is dripping down a tentacle slathers up about from up
44:54
above and a strange creature warbles i'm not sure
44:59
how much of that is true if any of it it might be a dream or he might be seeing something
45:04
happening or maybe he's misinterpreting something so it seems like a hallucination but
45:09
it's partly true i don't know i prefer to think that it's true
45:17
all of it the well like tentacles and the goo yeah definitely yeah absolutely
45:24
i thought the creature warble sounded a little bit like the jurassic park velociraptors not when they're doing the attack howl
45:30
but you know when they're doing the lower one that they were doing a lot more of when they were chasing the kids in the
45:35
kitchen uh i don't know that one if you could maybe uh do an impression of it
45:42
no yeah i can't even think of how you no i
45:49
am damn it
45:54
okay well if you play back that scene from the lighthouse when the foe is
46:00
doing something with a sea creature yeah that's what i'm talking about look let's
46:05
just call it what it is having an encounter with some kind of a horrible hentai monster
46:12
probably yeah wait chad okay so winslow finds
46:20
he literally finds the water i'm going to change the subject man um
46:26
yeah yeah let's move along where was all right so winslow finds the
46:31
water is bad again it tastes bad so he goes out to the cistern and finds a dying seagull inside
46:40
it's not even dead it's dying so when he opens up the thing it it looks at him
46:45
it looks at him what are you gonna do about this i how do you get in there why is he
46:52
dying yeah all of it is so troubling to me it's like a seagull forced its way
46:58
inside somehow or maybe maybe it was it was sitting on the edge
47:04
and then you know maybe the lid was up and uh and then a breeze blew it over
47:09
that's the only thing i could imagine making that work yeah i mean the only other option
47:15
is either semi-mystical or uh intentional sabotage
47:21
yeah spiked by birds that hate him yeah so yeah the water's ruined
47:28
and then another seagull comes down and mocks them just crows right in his face and uh it's the one-eyed seagull again
47:34
yeah so he uh he seizes the bird and just savagely
47:40
beats it to death right there on the cistern goes to town
47:45
on that bird holy [ __ ] and you have to watch the whole thing oh
47:52
yeah he is just like well past first three strikes like sorry like that
48:00
thing's dead and he is he does not stop yeah i mean it gives you the first
48:05
indication well the first clearest indication that there's something uh maybe wrong with this guy
48:11
it's also just really hard to watch just because it just keeps going it's very rare to see this kind of
48:18
animal brutality in movies nowadays but peter that's what makes it such a uh
48:23
classic comedic moment and you know honestly maybe the first
48:28
hit or two yeah perhaps for a moment i was just like that's kind of funny but then it just keeps going and just like
48:34
oh god this is this is all wrong see i don't know i feel like i feel like
48:41
the first few was like wow that's pretty brutal then it's like okay all right it's pretty funny
48:48
that's interesting we've got almost exact opposite reactions yeah there's a flock of seagulls up above him
48:55
and they all cry out as if it was a great injustice and then the weather vane shifts
49:01
the warm westerly wind has subsided and a nasty nor'easter is coming on
49:08
it is the day before winslow leaves and he's almost done it's almost over
49:14
one day away from retirement yeah they share lobster for dinner
49:20
and defoe insists that they drink on it and they go into heavy drinking really fast
49:25
i mean like really fast i i was shocked at how much they were able to clear in a real short amount of time
49:33
i think they did a bottle and you know just a couple of drinks uh yeah just like bam bam
49:40
they sing a bunch of silly old songs i only have one lyric i wrote down
49:47
here comes jack with a nine month pay
49:52
which is 100 a silly sailor song because you know that right after they're done with their sailing mission they get like a year's
49:59
pay and they're about to just go fritter it away on the stupidest stuff i i mean wouldn't you
50:06
money well yeah i feel like you're booze and women gambling i'm having trouble connecting
50:13
to youtube oh god hold on
50:18
a computer is talking to me do you have an alexa sorry occasionally uh
50:28
well i guess now we all know that alexa is in his room or apartment where wait where the hell are
50:35
you no that's room there's an apartment right yeah
50:40
alexa order jacob some gifts uh i already turned it off
50:46
yeah worth a shot okay uh
50:52
too bad yeah they say they sing songs they're super duper drunk
50:57
winslow bitterly asks why he was never allowed to man the light his manual said it was something that
51:03
they were both supposed to take turns doing they start to argue about it but then they do that thing like they both
51:09
remember that their he's right about to leave so they kind of like point at each other and laugh like
51:15
you know you scamp we're not gonna address this anymore but yeah well i'm on good terms
51:23
oh and this this is the moment this is the moment when the foe finally introduces himself he's thomas wade oh
51:28
yeah call me tom so yeah this is exactly two weeks not
51:33
two weeks four weeks so okay wait a minute wait a minute so two weeks in ephraim winslow introduces himself
51:41
two weeks more pass then tom wake introduces himself
51:47
like i said just two days that's just nuts just two guys just two guys two guys
51:55
i was about to say this next part's confusing but you know every part is confusing this but you know they go on drinking
52:01
and then winslow wakes up hungover sprawled on the floor wake lies snoring nearby
52:09
winslow goes to empty out their chamber pots okay the wind on the high cliff side
52:14
peter before we get too far away uh from that did you ever
52:20
uh in all of your watching of this movie just take a moment to uh
52:25
pause the movie real quick when it pans down to the two chamber pots
52:30
uh no why oh because i i did just out of curiosity
52:36
terrible terrible curiosity and uh they have taken
52:43
some monster dumps and you can see it yeah and you can see
52:49
them just floating in there it is awful and they are like
52:54
filled to the brim i wonder if they were saving it up which is even worse really
53:00
i think i yeah i'm not sure two days worth of poo in here
53:07
hey good lord yeah i could tell that robert pattinson is
53:12
miserable doing this scene but his character is miserable too so i feel like it probably informs the performance
53:19
in a good way so he he walks out in this horrible weather in the in the bad wind and just
53:26
throws out the pots and the wind just blows it all right back into his face
53:33
and honestly yeah it's a wonderful moment i just love his scream afterwards a frustration of disgust
53:40
of self-loathing oh yeah that's awesome it's pretty bad
53:47
it's so much worse when you know what's in there so again this is
53:53
i i think it was their last day but now winslow is just going around doing stuff you know he's emptying out the chamber
53:59
pots he brings wet coal to the generator they showed him putting a cover on the coal before i think it's so that it
54:07
stays pristine so you can actually burn it properly but as the movie progresses it just gets wetter and wetter by the
54:13
rain where he doesn't even bother to cover it up
54:23
[Music]
54:39
now jacob i thought that i might favor you with a bit of uh
54:44
a bit of coleridge the rhyme of the ancient mariner um is this something you'll be singing to
54:50
us no it's more of a spoken verse kind of a thing i think the death of a seagull is
54:56
supposed to be sort of like the killing of the albatross in the story so i'm just going to read that line from
55:02
when he did it the man shoots an albatross that's following following the ship with the crossbow it
55:10
seems and this is what is written and i had done a hellish thing and it
55:15
would work him whoa for all of aired i had killed the bird that made the breeze to blow
55:22
ah wretch said they the bird to slay that made the breeze to blow
55:29
and that's that it actually goes on for another
55:35
30 pages or something but we're not going to go into that
55:41
yeah we'll see we'll save that for our other podcast stay tuned for the patreon podcast
55:50
it's actually really hard to find a concise bit of the rhyme of the ancient mariner i'm just gonna say that i was i was happy i found one verse that really
55:57
just sums it up you know where he's just sort of like oh i shot the albatross and boy does that suck
56:05
because it changes the wind it curses the crew they all die only he lives and he and he's allowed to
56:11
live the main character so that he can tell a sad story to other people
56:16
that is the rhyme of the ancient mariner it's like the ring you have to keep passing it on
56:23
oh it's like it's a little bit messed up they should they should really juice play well actually
56:29
yeah well it's not exactly it's not exactly the ring it has to be the same guy so i wonder if he has to keep
56:34
telling it or he'll die i'm not sure yeah
56:39
it sets up that old precedent that uh killing birds just leads to hardship you
56:45
know it just leads to hard feelings with the forces of nature i mean i feel like in general just like
56:51
don't maliciously uh kill animals
56:56
just seems like a bad time yeah first off let's just recap the whole thing two men on the lighthouse they've
57:02
been there for four weeks they don't like each other they drank themselves into a stupor to celebrate the last day
57:08
and then the younger man who's about to leave just gets up and starts going about his
57:13
job as if he's staying there so i don't know if he forgot maybe he's so hungover
57:19
he doesn't realize or maybe this is in the future or maybe it's all a lie i don't know or
57:27
maybe the boat came and and willem dafoe's character you know thomas wake just told them to leave
57:33
without it yeah i kind of i did kind of wonder if something i don't know
57:39
yeah oh i forgot this is also the first or no i guess it's technically the second time
57:45
winslow sees the mermaid he's returning back from shoveling the coal
57:50
and he sees a body out on the rocks and he runs out there
57:56
and it turns out it's a naked woman covered in seaweed pale as a corpse
58:02
it looks like a russian supermodel maybe hello white russian but i mean i go
58:09
okay no i get it because she's like washed up ashore dead that's thanks makes sense
58:16
no it was her name give me a second i i i can dig it up
58:22
her name is valeria karamon and it's got two eyes in valeria so i i
58:29
don't know maybe she's something middle eastern or not middle eastern uh east european maybe or slavic i have no
58:35
idea uh yeah anyway he's real enamored with her
58:42
and it just pans down over her her sallow dead looking body and then it
58:48
just comes down to a fish bottom there's no legs and uh the woman
58:54
or mermaid or whatever wakes up and just scream laughs in his face
58:59
and he just runs away like i definitely got more of a laugh than a scream out of that like
59:04
she thinks this is hilarious yeah i don't know i i was thinking that she is a mermaid but i for some reason i
59:12
conflated her with a mermaid and a siren i just thought maybe the only way she could talk would be
59:17
horrible high-pitched you know screams basically like just like flipper
59:24
yeah kind of i mean it might explain why it would lure people to their deaths on the rocks
59:29
as a siren i mean it could be the same creature i guess it doesn't have to be but i was just thinking you know when
59:35
you're underwater you yeah you make this you make the flipper noises also wait a minute does anyone even know
59:40
what a flipper is anymore uh no the people who get it will that's a special treat for them
59:46
you know it's a black and white show from what was it the 60s i think well it was about adults
59:56
yeah this is important people 1964. also that actress is moldovan ah
1:00:03
moldova from moldova wait a minute not moldovia
1:00:09
no moldova okay wait where the hell is that uh it's in eastern europe near romania and
1:00:17
bordering ukraine oh okay i thought for a second it was one of the three sisters i'm now i'm a little
1:00:24
embarrassed like oh yeah i'm sure it's right next to lithuania or estonia
1:00:29
all right well anyway back to flipper okay the main subject of this podcast back to flavor
1:00:35
exactly yeah that was about a trained dolphin that they made a show about
1:00:41
i don't remember how they involved the dolphin in the business of humans because they're in two different mediums you know one's in water one's on land
1:00:47
but mostly they would just talk to flipper and then they would throw them fish and i'm sure the dolphin liked doing the show because he liked fish
1:00:53
yeah i only remember a little bit they mean they'd usually like have fish stuff or
1:00:59
like see stuff happen like you know someone like found some like buried treasure at sea or two like
1:01:08
people were like holding some some guy hostage on a boat or there was like
1:01:13
i don't know why i remember this one but there was one with like a manta they had to like track it down oh yeah
1:01:21
oh okay yeah it's sort of like in superman stuff where
1:01:26
women especially lois lane are always falling off of buildings just so that he can catch them
1:01:32
so i i would assume for a dolphin thing a dolphin show that all the most important things would happen in the
1:01:38
ocean because he's in the ocean yeah yeah i assume aquaman is similar
1:01:45
okay somebody is like i'm okay no no we're not we're not getting any no let's move on we're not doing more flippers
1:01:52
stop stop stop i'm just thinking maybe we should we should maybe we should side track the whole thing no it doesn't talk
1:01:58
only about no no stop me move on and stop me all right all right all right
1:02:04
winslow and wake finally do wait for the boat to take him away and it does not come you know they're just kind of
1:02:09
standing out by the water so i don't know maybe he was doing some duties before he left so that means he was
1:02:16
throwing the chamber pots shoveling the coal and then hallucinating about a mermaid
1:02:22
and then the boat doesn't come so i mean that was a pretty busy day for him if that's the case yeah well i mean how
1:02:29
long can it really take to like take out the chamber pots yeah i guess it's more memorable than it
1:02:35
is time consuming yeah while shoveling the coal into the i'm
1:02:41
not sure what it is a like a steam engine or something defoe barges in and says the rations are
1:02:47
low because the storm has ruined them i don't know how a storm could ruin
1:02:53
rations maybe it flooded a room maybe they left a window open and it just blew rain all over everything yeah that's
1:03:00
that was my thinking it's not explained i mean there are a lot of ways water can
1:03:05
ruin your rations yeah or maybe willem dafoe just threw them all into the ocean because he's
1:03:12
crazy yeah that's also a possibility
1:03:17
here's where it starts getting very strange i mean it was strange before but now it's real strange because uh winslow says he's only been
1:03:24
there one day since the drunken stupor how could it be so low and wake says it has been weeks
1:03:30
literal weeks since then i don't know if wake is making it up or
1:03:36
if winslow is crazy or both i guess you could still be crazy and
1:03:42
have someone lying to you it could just be all of the above yeah you know there is a
1:03:48
bit of a hopeful spot for them because they do have turns out some extra supplies buried uh out near the
1:03:54
lighthouse yeah they do
1:04:02
yeah we gotta we gotta dig up the emergency stuff and just like all right what is it you know they dig it up and
1:04:08
it's just cases of gin yeah just just gin bottles galore
1:04:13
i did think that was a little weird i i looked it up and i guess jin was super popular at the approximate time this
1:04:20
movie was just said so it's a period yeah period uh
1:04:26
appropriate uh alcohol for uh for the setting you know that was a big thing
1:04:32
they used to use that term gin joints for just cheap booze establishments and they thought that they were ruining
1:04:38
society yeah because the gin was so inexpensive to make that it was just everybody was drinking it it was it was
1:04:45
like the four loko of its time you know yeah speaking of which i went to the
1:04:50
university that did the four loko thing that became world famous it was the same year that i went there
1:04:57
too oh did you do it no i wish i had
1:05:03
just to contribute but no i no i i was a good boy but um it was near ellensburg
1:05:09
in a place called roslin and a bunch of freshman kids went to some
1:05:14
kind of a party it's exactly the kind of party where jason would show up and murder everyone
1:05:21
they were just drinking heavily and screwing and fighting and whatever
1:05:26
they were all mostly new to drinking and then they did four locos you know
1:05:31
which gives you a ton of caffeine all at once because it's an energy drink but it also gives you a lot of cheap grade
1:05:38
alcohol all at once so you are really inebriated but you don't really feel it
1:05:43
so they drank way too much and they started falling down and somebody called either because it
1:05:49
was a nuisance or because someone was concerned when the police showed up it was like a bomb had gone off there was
1:05:54
just bodies everywhere people passed out and they also thought there was an unconsensual act going on it turns out
1:06:02
it was consensual essentially nothing really happened besides the fact that a bunch of people had passed out and then everyone
1:06:08
overreacted but this became a global issue uh where they they outlawed for a loco in a lot
1:06:14
of places or they i think they eventually made them take i forget which one did they take out did they take out
1:06:19
the alcohol or did they take out the caffeine um i think they took out the caffeine
1:06:27
yeah i feel like it has more impact as a crappy alcohol even if it doesn't have
1:06:32
the jolt anymore yeah so i mean i don't know that it was ever justified
1:06:39
in the way that people reacted to it i just think that some i don't know occasionally people kind of just want a scapegoat for stupid childish behavior
1:06:47
you know i mean it's not like you can be prevented from drinking you know something like i don't know
1:06:53
vodka and a red bull or whatever i guess they just don't want it all in one thing
1:06:58
didn't someone uh die from four logo
1:07:04
all right i thought that i remember but i i i wouldn't be surprised okay yeah not to like sprint like false
1:07:12
information because i think it feels like the kind of thing that someone would make up it also feels like for loku probably
1:07:18
could kill you yeah you know i just realized that at
1:07:24
least part of my college experience really was like the bad movies like from the 80s like the bad sex comedies
1:07:34
yeah i didn't well i know i didn't do it no you know that's the worst part is that
1:07:40
you know i was getting almost perfect grades at the time because i was bored out of my mind and it was an easy
1:07:45
university no i didn't not to brag i like i actually think it was an insult it was
1:07:50
an easy university but uh but no things would happen around me and then i
1:07:57
would just be sort of like huh like my roommate was telling me about a game that some of them had with for loco
1:08:04
where they they called it uh i think they called it johnny for loco hands where they would tape four lokos to your
1:08:11
hands yes and you wouldn't be able to take them off until you had finished both of them
1:08:19
oh man so i don't know maybe it was a problem i know i don't know maybe yeah maybe i was too
1:08:24
hard on the people who wanted to get rid of it dude if it wasn't for a loco it'd be something else
1:08:31
yeah and i'm sure it definitely is something else now yeah
1:08:37
okay so anyway that was a tangent from gin which they're drinking in this movie
1:08:43
yeah so wake tells winslow
1:08:48
that scurvy ended his career on the sea scurvy i forget it has various bad effects but i think one of them is that
1:08:54
it weakens your bones or at least makes it harder for you to move around and winslow says hey wait a minute i
1:08:59
thought you told me a different story about breaking your leg and then being holed up with a bunch of catholic nuns i
1:09:05
believe that was sometime earlier one of that might have been when they were drinking together on his last day
1:09:10
together wake says he must have misheard so once again i don't know if
1:09:16
winslow did miss here or maybe if wake is lying and just making up stories
1:09:23
every time he tells it is he like the the joker from dark knight where it's just every time he
1:09:28
talks about his scars it's a different thing i don't know yeah i i'm going to say no
1:09:34
to that because i really hate comparing uh the lighthouse to uh
1:09:41
the joker in any way winslow oh yeah
1:09:47
this is when it really gets to this real serious and and awesome monologues and
1:09:52
speeches oh yeah i'm just acting like acting my favorite scenes coming up
1:09:59
yeah well first off there's that scene you can find the clip online where they just say what to each other like 70 times
1:10:08
what what what what what
1:10:13
i forget if it even leads anywhere i just feel like they're just confronting each other but neither can decide on what yeah so they just say what to one
1:10:21
another winslow insults wakes cooking
1:10:26
wake seems genuinely hurt by it yeah
1:10:31
he seems like really sad about it it made me feel bad yeah you liked my lobster didn't you
1:10:39
admit it admit you like the lobster in fact uh he's
1:10:45
so hurt by this that uh he gives the greatest monologue in this
1:10:50
entire movie not just in this movie it might be one of the greatest monologues in cinema
1:10:57
like it's just amazing oh it's so good yeah he just he just he just stands up
1:11:03
and just delivers the most damning great and terrible secrets from poseidon
1:11:09
himself yeah the speech is just the stuff of legends
1:11:14
it goes on for minutes he just calls down every bad thing upon winslow for insulting his cooking it's
1:11:20
just wonderful yeah also to be clear uh it's neptune
1:11:26
not poseidon is that neptune not poseidon yeah well no wait how do you know that
1:11:32
because how does he say it because i'm watching yeah he says park neptune
1:11:38
i could have sworn he said poseidon well in training i'm sorry everybody he was nuts
1:11:43
he's just calling upon everybody okay okay so
1:11:48
in the face of just such an awe inspiring curse winslow relents and admits he likes wakes cooking
1:11:56
i mean what else do you what else do you do after hearing a curse like that
1:12:03
yeah i mean i think he was probably just pushing his buttons anyway and they were and they're both smashed on gin
1:12:10
i think maybe he just didn't realize he was gonna call his bluff and call down a terrible curse upon his head they're
1:12:16
just not liking his lobster yeah all right in preparation for this episode i
1:12:24
read a vice article about living on nothing but alcohol for five days where one of their writers did that
1:12:31
so i i looked it up online and apparently you can live for maybe a month on alcohol which is interesting because i also
1:12:38
heard you can not starve to death for about a month so i wonder if
1:12:43
the dying in a month from drinking is more from just the ill effects it has on you
1:12:49
because i hear that when you're drinking nothing but alcohol it has a uh progressively worsening
1:12:55
effect on you you know on your liver on your kidneys to the point where you just can't process the alcohol anymore i mean
1:13:02
i
1:13:07
if you do it for several days in a row it does uh it's not great don't do it
1:13:13
yeah the guy in the vice article he made uh i don't know a meal list out of alcohol
1:13:18
although every kind of alcohol he drank it had various other ingredients to try to keep him alive you know so he would
1:13:23
have some with like eggnog in it oh that's cheating well the biggest one was he had this russian drink where
1:13:29
apparently you're supposed to chase it with a pickle so he was able to eat a pickle
1:13:34
but even still he said he had and just i think he gave up after three or four days because he was pooping
1:13:40
blood he said he had bad back pain and he thought it was because i don't know of sleeping bad or strain
1:13:46
or something but then he realized it was just his kidneys acting really inflamed you know and this is just a couple of
1:13:52
days yeah he hated being uncomfortably drunk all the time
1:13:58
and how time just stretched on forever it sort of gets you trapped in a perpetual nightmare
1:14:05
so i imagine all of that on the characters at this point because they might have a little bit of food left but
1:14:11
basically they're just drinking gin until they die of it yeah also
1:14:17
they appear to be trapped in a storm yeah so yeah to be clear dude anyone listen to this don't for like funsies
1:14:25
try and do a uh the lighthouse challenge that's just yeah
1:14:30
yeah don't bird box this guys like i was saying there's there have been studies where if you do it too if
1:14:37
you drink too much consecutively it does lasting and eventually permanent damage
1:14:42
to your internal organs it's not good it's not a good look so don't do that
1:14:49
and don't do johnny for local hands either don't do any of the things i talk about
1:14:54
i didn't do them i just heard about them all right it was legends of college and not the good kind the stupid kind
1:15:01
that that the failures you usually drop out did you know
1:15:07
okay so winslow tries to break back into the
1:15:13
lighthouse lamp room i think he's doing it with a dagger or a lock pick i'm not sure what but he
1:15:20
breaks it so uh that sucks and this is when i realized it wasn't the shrine that wakes character
1:15:27
was in earlier you know willem dafoe it's a cool cabinet desk it folds up and locks and i only know this now because
1:15:34
winslow breaks into it to look through his notes but he doesn't find what he's looking
1:15:39
for so then he goes to try to steal the keys from wake because wake is laying passed out
1:15:46
so he leans over him and and weak wake awakes which is hard to say
1:15:53
and then he farts and i was just thinking that that was a great chemical defense weapon
1:15:59
you know someone's sneaking up on it oh yeah and this whole time winslow had his hand in his pocket
1:16:05
so i assume he also is just idly considering murdering him
1:16:11
i think yeah it's not clear i mean he had a knife to his throat
1:16:17
i thought yeah it's pretty clear you wanted to uh or it was at least like giving serious stuff to kill him
1:16:24
yeah i don't remember where his yeah whether his other hand was i thought it was in his pocket but if it's not then you know he wasn't
1:16:30
even more clear i thought maybe he was just thinking about it no it was in his pocket but he had the knife to his
1:16:36
throat he was like giving it some thought
1:16:44
winslow curses wake as tolerable only when he works which i i thought that was a funny
1:16:51
insult for some reason yeah that's a good one like you're you're only bearable when
1:16:56
you're doing something else and you're too distracted to be yourself winslow lets too much water in the
1:17:02
wheelbarrow for the coal he then fantasizes or or maybe remembers
1:17:07
having sex with a mermaid as he um uh gets intimate with himself i mean
1:17:13
this is that scene so yeah i will say how'd you put it earlier jacking it
1:17:19
yeah beating off i will say as much as i like this movie
1:17:25
this movie did definitely ruin the fantasy of having sex with a uh mermaid
1:17:32
because i guess i just never considered that she'd get all fishy down there and what they would look like exactly
1:17:38
yeah not yeah and they and they show you and uh and it's just as gross as you might
1:17:45
imagine and interspersed in between shots of him
1:17:50
by himself holding the mermaid scrimshaw and him on top of a mermaid there's also
1:17:57
scenes of uh a man with his back turned in water with logs all around him yeah
1:18:03
he's got blonde hair and he yeah and he's just kneeling there and so it's there's this weird mix of
1:18:09
things so he um you know finishes with a loud pathetic moan which is great yeah
1:18:16
he's just crying and jacking off yeah
1:18:22
so i wonder a very very relatable part of this movie it's a very
1:18:27
it's a very complicated scene where you know a lot of things are happening internally it seems like uh some kind of
1:18:33
bizarre catharsis where he's just mingling up what maybe he's i don't know guilt with
1:18:40
with lust and loneliness and just desperation
1:18:46
winslow then i hate that i keep starting these these little snippets but just winslow does
1:18:52
this winslow does that but that's kind of the movie there's just a series of scenes we're presented with and we have to just make heads or tails of it yeah
1:18:59
so then there's a scene where winslow pulls up the lobster cage and finds a man's head in the cage used as lobster
1:19:05
bait don't oh i assume that was the former
1:19:11
assistant yeah i i don't know if it was for sure i'm not sure i i do kind of think it probably is but
1:19:18
also winslow stabs the uh idol and breaks it
1:19:24
yeah i i forgot when that happens i think right after he's done you know with himself he he throws it
1:19:30
and smashes it and then i think he stabs it with a dagger and then concerning the head
1:19:37
i don't yeah and then there's a separate head in a basket concerning the head though i i
1:19:44
i'm confused but i think it wouldn't work because the former assistant if it was that man's head
1:19:51
it would have had to have been the last time willem dafoe you know wake's character was on the lighthouse
1:19:57
but they showed a clip at the beginning of the movie with two other people leaving i mean the murder of an an assistant
1:20:05
would make more sense to me at least if if the foe was there by himself and they just were replacing the the guy
1:20:12
who left you know like oh he he ducked out he got away on the lifeboat some kind of lie
1:20:19
but since there was two people who were there so did they never use the lobster trap
1:20:24
or i mean or if there was a head in there wouldn't it and there was still a lot of flesh on it it seems as though it hadn't rotted
1:20:31
a lot you know and the lobsters are going in there to eat that flesh of whatever you put in there usually it's
1:20:37
poultry legs or whatever you have so it's often believed at least from
1:20:43
when i looked through some reviews and things people think that this is almost certainly a hallucination
1:20:48
i don't know i guess yeah it could just be some random person's
1:20:53
head i mean i suppose so but what's the point in that i don't know one would think at this
1:21:00
point that winslow would accuse wake of the murder but instead they are drinking together
1:21:06
singing it's a beautifully awkward scene then they do a nice slow dance yeah
1:21:14
where where wake just this gently whispers things into his ear
1:21:20
yeah i will say wonderful uh speaking of the dancing they also do a uh a wonderful arm and arm dance which you
1:21:28
know i feel like we like we and by we i mean dudes
1:21:34
we really lost something when we uh when we gave up on that cultural tradition of
1:21:40
just getting real drunk and just dancing
1:21:45
i don't know when that happens but it's a beautiful thing i feel like we're we're all the poorer for it
1:21:52
because like they're getting like they're like full body just
1:21:58
having to dance yeah just fancy freak i yeah
1:22:04
imagine being so uninhibited speaking of being uninhibited yeah this
1:22:11
is the point when they go in to i think they're both considering going in for a kiss
1:22:17
and they kind of think about it in a really awkward way and then they just kind of
1:22:23
back up and they and they put up their dukes like they both have to fight for their their masculinity you know now
1:22:29
that they mutually compromised it with one another i guess yeah
1:22:35
so they fight for a while and then they just kind of collapse and then winslow says his real name is
1:22:41
tom howard so i just wrote who is winslow
1:22:47
and then the i was going to say winslow again but no it's our paths or howard i suppose okay howard says that's
1:22:55
nobody i thought we agreed we're gonna say our pets i'd like say
1:23:01
all right all right all right i'll do my best all right this sounds like a friend of
1:23:07
mine you know it's my boy our pets no i'm sorry i think i like what you slip one by me earlier but
1:23:14
we're not doing that again all right so howard
1:23:21
admits he wanted to hit the blonde man from behind with a hook but insists he did not i think this is
1:23:28
the real from winslow he's talking about howard claims that winslow the real winslow
1:23:35
uh was crushed by logs which howard did not prevent from happening so i think it was an accident
1:23:42
that was preventable but he did not do so yeah so then the man just shouts to him
1:23:48
tom you dog
1:23:53
i mean it's an awkward business it's a semi-murder i suppose
1:23:59
so he stole from winslow's identity and just tried to start clean i suppose yeah i mean it's something he said at the
1:24:04
very beginning i totally forgot about oh we'll say this he's just like oh you know there's nothing wrong with a man
1:24:10
starting fresh yeah that being said he didn't he ethically
1:24:15
did kill him because i mean come on if you don't uh if you can't if you can save someone and
1:24:21
you don't you make that choice you know you kill him
1:24:28
yeah i'd say inaction is an action in of itself you know yeah
1:24:35
then there's a weird scene where where howard has a vision of wake naked
1:24:40
staring him down with lantern-like eyes he just says why just spill your beans
1:24:45
dummy that's a reference to a painting um
1:24:54
it looks like a painting yeah uh oh uh hypnosis by uh sasha schneider
1:25:01
cool which all of you can look up for yourselves absolutely
1:25:08
howard goes to leave in a boat i think it's the only boat they have and uh wake just attacks the boat with an axe
1:25:16
he just just shouts don't leave me which is pretty funny i mean they are in
1:25:22
the middle of a storm i think it might have been more plausible just to be like hey don't leave you might die
1:25:27
if you did that that's true but okay i will say this just to be clear peter if you were ever
1:25:34
uh if we were ever on an island and you were leaving with the last remaining boat i would
1:25:39
attempt to destroy the boat even if it meant both of us were getting stranded there and dying
1:25:46
just out of spite i don't i don't even know dario i don't think it's like spite
1:25:52
it's just i'm not dying alone here sorry
1:25:57
ah i would have taken you along i'll just say if you if you had like made the
1:26:03
attempt sorry i'm i'm
1:26:12
so howard accuses wake of the murder of his former assistant and wake just kind of brushes it off
1:26:18
without really addressing it which is interesting because it means that we as an audience aren't clear about how true
1:26:24
that is and then after he disregards the accusation he says that howard was the one to wave an
1:26:31
axe and smash the lifeboat he asked for our say i was about to say it he asked for
1:26:37
howard's knife saying he can't be trusted with it and snaps it under his shoe heel
1:26:44
and it's so weird that he totally turns the scene around instantly howard was accusing him of murder and
1:26:50
he's like it wasn't me acting crazy it was you now give me your knife
1:26:56
i don't think he just does he i mean the fact that the fact that he he went with it it's just ah
1:27:02
i think he's so slick i guess maybe that means that howard did that it
1:27:09
allows the possibility at least that maybe he's not lying maybe wake is telling the truth maybe howard did smash the life
1:27:17
boat and threaten him and we're just seeing it from an unreliable position
1:27:23
like an unreliable narrator that could be true yeah
1:27:28
wake wonders aloud how much time has passed clearly more time has passed we don't know how much
1:27:35
so he's just kind of thinking to himself while he sits around in a gin stooper you know he asks whether or not any of
1:27:40
this is real or if he's just some figment of howard's imagination
1:27:46
regardless they get drunk and a great storm rages outside crashing
1:27:51
a monstrous wave down on them damaging their quarters now that's the kind of wave that would
1:27:56
damage rations because after this point there's windows that are caved in and there's stuff floating around in water
1:28:04
if they had done this first it would have been more plausible but because they didn't do that it means that now we
1:28:09
don't really know what happened to the rations you know it could even be that the rations are there and
1:28:16
and wake is just a crazy person that just wants them to only drink gin yeah it hurts where are we
1:28:23
amidst the floating wreckage howard finds wake's managerial journal
1:28:30
he punches and destroys a glass clock with his bare fist after reading it
1:28:37
you ever read that angry which is pretty great hmm you know i think i did put a fist
1:28:43
through a wall once when i was a kid i think it was because my my brother was making too much noise in
1:28:49
the next room and i wanted him to shut up so i just kept kicking the wall until it was too no yeah it was my foot it
1:28:54
wasn't my fist yeah i just wanted to be taken seriously
1:29:02
is that too much to ask i mean look wake points out the wound
1:29:08
wait what i was just gonna say i mean look it's fine to be angry but man that wasn't your wall
1:29:14
i did fix it okay later with putty i did a terrible job it left a weird lump on the wall
1:29:20
which i think is there to this day awesome so um yeah wake points out the wound on
1:29:26
his hand you know on on howard's hand after he punches the clock yeah and he says he's had that wound since he heard it getting
1:29:33
off the boat at the very beginning i don't know if that's true he's just making stuff up now
1:29:39
so howard just blows up and calls him a liar says he's stinky and gross
1:29:46
and what did you say it smells like old jism
1:29:52
it's just oh god it's just a terrible stream of insults and your goddamn farts
1:29:58
yeah i was about to say i'm your goddamn fox yeah he does also say yeah he smells
1:30:04
like justin like rotten dick and curled curled curdled foreskin there you go that was
1:30:10
it oh boy i mean all of that's probably true but
1:30:16
that's still pretty harsh to say yeah but you can tell it's just a man at the
1:30:22
end of his rope he's just so sick of this guy and his nonsense and his bad smells yeah
1:30:30
in response wake just relieves him of his duties so winslow pulls out the journal
1:30:37
and points out that wake has said for weeks that he's been derelicting his duties he's been missing slovenly
1:30:44
violent drunk while on duty which may or may not be true you never
1:30:49
see any of it in the film uh i mean he does seem like he's been drinking on duty
1:30:57
at the very end we could yeah that could be true i don't know for sure
1:31:03
i know there is that one scene remember when he's up on the lighthouse and he says he's getting high marks in his book
1:31:08
if that scene is real then it would be odd that he would say that and then he would keep writing down all
1:31:13
this mean stuff in his journal yeah i don't know or maybe he was just saying
1:31:19
the high marks thing just to get him to go up on the lighthouse and do a job that he really didn't want to do himself
1:31:26
because it was a terrible job denies it all but begs for the
1:31:31
opportunity to see the lighthouse's light up close i love that he he doesn't care about anything anymore he's like i
1:31:37
don't even care if i get paid at this the whole point i'm here you know i've gone through so much crap
1:31:42
i've done so much work i just want to go look at the lamp and he's and wake refuses that's my
1:31:48
favorite thing he's just like no yeah a thousand times no
1:31:55
yeah like i said you really heard this is a movie that asks more questions and it
1:32:01
answers but it's just like it really makes you wonder what the hell is up there where he doesn't just like that
1:32:07
would so easily defuse the tension if he just yeah
1:32:13
go let him take a walk that's all it required
1:32:19
maybe he was afraid he would blow the lights out oh maybe so weak gets real mad calls him a dog
1:32:27
a filthy dog and they they fight again yeah
1:32:33
amidst the fight howard suddenly finds himself in the arms of the mermaid
1:32:39
oddly so he goes in for a kiss and then finds himself ensnared in the slimy grip
1:32:45
of wake bedecked and barnacles like he's the god of the sea himself
1:32:51
yeah i guess this is a hallucination there's some psychology going on there yeah maybe or maybe he's revealing
1:32:58
himself as the god of the sea uh a trickster god yeah could be
1:33:05
i will say that is also very clear how much fun william defoe is having
1:33:11
filming that scene because he is just glad he's loving it yeah he's got a big old
1:33:17
smile on his face like he's really enjoying himself so in response howard punches
1:33:23
the vision away he beats wake into submission until he screams that he's you're killing me
1:33:30
you're killing me and then after that he just seems utterly
1:33:36
defeated he's laying there nearly dead and so howard gets him to bark
1:33:42
and roll over like a dog which he does he puts him on a leash and leads him outside like he's walking a
1:33:48
dog yeah and i was just thinking how did we get to this point in the movie yeah things went really off the rails
1:33:57
like how yeah how did we get to where one of the men would be leading the other just around on all fours like a
1:34:03
dog and making them bark how did we go from drinking gin
1:34:09
beating off and crying to this
1:34:14
howard leads him a short way over to i think it's the the pit that they dug to get the gin yeah
1:34:20
it would explain why there's a hole there so they he puts him in a hole and just starts to bury him alive
1:34:27
and just in desperation while he's laying there dying wake calls down a curse of prometheus on him i think yeah
1:34:35
it's a little hard to tell wake makes another he makes another fine
1:34:40
speech i'd say that's how we're just it's just throwing shovelfuls of dirt right in his face
1:34:46
man that must have been horrible to film oh yeah how many takes did they have to do where
1:34:53
willem dafoe is is making these awesome lines and they're just throwing dirt right in his face
1:35:02
you'd be punished i heard that the shoot for this was
1:35:07
quite harsh and i bet that this was probably the worst scene for for defoe by far
1:35:13
i mean you can say they also do just throw dirt right into his face it's not an exaggeration yeah i don't
1:35:19
mean like i don't mean like yeah no i mean yeah it looks like real
1:35:26
dirt or something close enough and i don't mean like they they hollywood threw it at him like little specks i
1:35:31
mean like they full on it looks like just real shovel full of just dirt just right in his face
1:35:38
it was a 38-day shoot in uh the miserable nova scotian weather
1:35:44
of canada wonderful so at least it's kind of location adjacent you know this is supposed to be
1:35:50
sort of in the new england area although to me it looks a little colder and frostier than that i actually
1:35:56
think it's appropriate for where they actually filmed it you know in uh in nova scotia
1:36:02
i guess it doesn't really matter where they are i mean other than the fact that they seem vaguely american-ish yeah but
1:36:08
i mean otherwise it doesn't make a lot of difference no i mean i feel like
1:36:13
it's hard to like find a place as wildly isolated looking as that
1:36:20
yeah i don't blame them for not just finding a leak location that's like accurate to the
1:36:26
setting like that's it's almost like a uniquely isolated looking area
1:36:33
yeah he just half buries him howard gets him i don't know about halfway
1:36:40
and then wake just seems to die or pass out yeah it's not really clear
1:36:45
which i don't know why he thought it was okay but it could just be that they're both so drunk that it's all just madness you
1:36:52
know like maybe he just started the task and then he just forgot or gave up you know he's like ah i'm done with this
1:36:58
yeah i'll bury you the rest of you later and so he searches his body for the keys
1:37:05
and heads his way up to the to the lighthouse but before he does he goes to just kind of hang out i'm not
1:37:11
sure where he's going like into the pantry or something yeah i'm not sure what he's getting he's just yeah he's just kind of pauses
1:37:17
there for a while which in a way to me that's even more insane that he he's just like ah you know i'm
1:37:23
gonna take a break from my murdering you know before i go check out the thing
1:37:29
he's taking a little time out yeah a little pb j break if they had it i guess
1:37:35
it's all just gin at this point yeah and so wake runs in with an axe i hate
1:37:40
clothes it says the light belongs to me the closest thing this movie has to jump scare like
1:37:46
legitimately surprised me the first time and i watched this movie yeah
1:37:51
i did not see that he just runs in and just he just runs in and just he just lays a blow into our see i keep almost saying
1:37:59
it yeah it's a howard's shoulder yeah come on it is a surprisingly remarkable and ineffective hit
1:38:06
yeah uh just like a little wound i mean i appreciate the effort but uh i mean i
1:38:12
feel like if you get a hit like you let him you know with an ex like come on
1:38:17
he's just like a kind of a little wound maybe because of how drunk he is he didn't feel it very much
1:38:24
i think that makes sense yeah i suppose so i mean i've never been hit with an axe fall drunk so i wouldn't
1:38:31
i wouldn't have any person looks weird you know if you add it to your bucket list yeah
1:38:37
so howard knocks wake down and just finished him finishes him with the axe
1:38:43
just a couple of blows off screen and uh that's the end of him i guess yeah
1:38:49
rip wake the old salty sea dog who may or may not have been taken out of service for
1:38:55
scurvy or maybe for breaking his leg uh we don't know and who may or may not be
1:39:00
trading maybe yeah maybe yes
1:39:06
howard just straight up drinks the lamp fuel kettle he just drinks out of that yeah
1:39:11
i don't know i thought it was kerosene but i was reading later that they were maybe making some booze out of turpentine and
1:39:18
honey so maybe i don't know maybe the second case was wasn't gin maybe it was turpentine i i don't know
1:39:24
that would be so much worse uh what yeah well which yeah it seems like they would have died sooner if that was the case
1:39:30
yeah because at this point he's pretty casual just like you know i'm just gonna drink this i don't even know what it is
1:39:37
so maybe they brewed alcohol to fuel the light that would almost make sense
1:39:44
i thought maybe that's why they were shoveling the coal but i can't prove that i don't know what processes they were doing there yeah i'm
1:39:50
not uh alcohol always it's possible
1:39:56
yeah yeah look i just freak with stuff i don't know how the sentence works
1:40:02
yeah i don't know where it's from so yeah howard finally reverently
1:40:09
makes his way up the long spiral stair of the lighthouse he slowly climbs into the lamp room
1:40:16
the lamp is beautiful it's ornate and faceted it looks like something that would have
1:40:21
come from the land of oz yeah and here it is it is beautiful
1:40:27
it's very nice in an age of grime
1:40:33
of filth of death and drinking there's this one beautiful glorious
1:40:40
thing it looks like a giant gem it's yeah it's wonderful or at least the focal lens is you know
1:40:47
the outer part you don't really get to see the inside no but howard does
1:40:52
he opens it up and just reaches inside and you don't know what he's reaching for
1:40:58
all you do is see him react and it's weird because when he reaches in it's normal light you know normal
1:41:05
brightness yeah maybe a little brighter than normal because he's in something bright but then he reaches in and it
1:41:10
gets brighter and i was i don't know for sure but i would assume that's his hand catching on
1:41:16
fire yeah but i'm not sure about that i mean i feel the if there are answers
1:41:23
to all this stuff it's got to be something more esoteric or mystic than that
1:41:30
i'm sure that's what they want i'm just trying to think of every every weird eventuality that might have
1:41:35
happened yeah but yeah it gets brighter and he starts to i think at first it looks almost more
1:41:42
like a pleasure yell or a laugh and then it turns into a scream
1:41:47
and it's really low and really distorted yeah you don't really see what happens but
1:41:54
he falls out of the lamp room and then just somehow falls all the way down the entire spiral stair
1:42:01
every single one yeah all the way down
1:42:07
and the scene fades out which is good because if they hadn't faded out you would have to explain what happened and
1:42:13
because you because they didn't now you don't know what's happening so
1:42:18
it's you could be anywhere you know and and indeed you are because when they fade back in
1:42:24
howard's bloody naked body still alive and breathing is being devoured by seagulls out on the shore
1:42:31
uh he could be i've heard some people say that they see logs out there i thought they looked
1:42:37
like rocks yeah but it could be it could be logs oh there is also that are around him an
1:42:43
interesting detail i noticed the birds also pooped on him
1:42:52
so well you know they're disrespectful that way yeah so either he's on the shore of the
1:42:59
island although i don't know why he's naked i mean did he take his own clothes off
1:43:05
i don't think he would have had time to have done that after he fatally hurt himself on the stairs right no
1:43:10
or i don't know or maybe he really hurt himself on the fall down the stairs stripped off his clothes in a drunken
1:43:16
stupor and then collapsed outside or only to be attacked by really hungry seagulls or maybe it was the dread
1:43:22
emperor himself it's the promethean curse
1:43:28
that willem dafoe's character laid down on him oh yeah i actually wrote that
1:43:34
he is tormented and devoured like prometheus the fire of the lighthouse was too much
1:43:40
jesus fear
1:43:45
the end the end jacob that's the movie
1:43:51
fade to black yeah i know there's been a lot of confusion as i've explained this i don't think
1:43:57
i've done a great job honestly i don't feel worthy of even explaining it but i
1:44:02
just want to say now that i just find this to be an excellent awesome movie this is like
1:44:07
one of the better maybe one of the best horror movies i've seen possibly yeah yeah i mean
1:44:13
it's weird because it also like it feels even i mean i like the horror genre but it feels
1:44:20
like reductive almost in a way to uh call horror movie because yeah that's the worst thing when
1:44:26
you get a really good horror film people don't want to call it a horror film anymore because well i mean like there's
1:44:31
so many more more elements to it than the horror though well yeah yeah
1:44:37
i mean i'm not sure if yeah well i mean you don't even necessarily have to even categorize it that way you know it just
1:44:43
depends on how you wish to interpret the movie yeah speaking of which
1:44:49
let me just run through a few possible scenarios as they occurred to me i mean i think we've already discussed quite a few of
1:44:55
these but i actually made a list all right and just in case i missed any i'm going to go through these
1:45:01
hit me all right so scenario one i mentioned this at the
1:45:06
beginning tom howard never went to the lighthouse and the entire movie is a hallucination
1:45:13
of his mind as he lay dying in canada having been crushed by the logs rather than from winslow
1:45:21
um plausible but i don't like it is that yeah that's the that's and i
1:45:26
hate it yeah it's like uh maybe but that means that means basically the only
1:45:33
yeah i mean it means the only true thing that happened in the movie where you know a handful of those shame
1:45:38
flashbacks and then him being dead at the end yeah and like i mean
1:45:45
winslow even alludes to that possibility but i i don't like it yeah
1:45:51
it reminded me of an incidence that owl creek you know the ambrose ambrose beerus story where a man's about to be
1:45:58
hung and then the the rope snaps he goes home to his family and you know he's about to hug his wife and then it goes
1:46:04
right back to him on the rope and it you know he's being hung yeah also they didn't know if you ever heard of that story yeah i've read it and it was also
1:46:12
made into an episode of uh [Music] shoot
1:46:18
which one was it night gallery zone oh yeah okay
1:46:24
yeah so i i mean i'm not saying that's a satisfying ending it's i'm just saying there is some precedent for that sort of
1:46:29
ending to exist sure okay so scenario two
1:46:36
tom howard is an unreliable narrator everything wake says about him slacking off and being violent is true
1:46:43
howard only hallucinated the assistant's head in the lobster cage and uh possibly the thing that wakes
1:46:49
said about him wounding his hand at the beginning is also true so it's it's possible that he's dying of an infection
1:46:55
or hallucinating from an infection okay yeah
1:47:01
i mean i mean it's similar to one but it's a little less lame i mean more of it is true you know more of the movie is
1:47:07
true yeah i like that a little bit more but that's still like i don't know
1:47:13
not ideal i don't like the idea of tom wake's character being totally innocent because he's such a son of a [ __ ] in
1:47:19
the story yeah also that i'm sorry he's not getting off scot-free
1:47:26
yeah all right scenario three tom wake is insane from loneliness and boredom
1:47:33
everything he said about howard is untrue he killed his assistant and then claimed
1:47:40
the man had delusions that wake himself possessed okay i mean plausible yeah
1:47:47
that lines up with more of the story yeah i do think
1:47:52
of the theories i think that one's the most interesting to me
1:47:59
because it like it allows for the most of the movie to bathroom
1:48:04
yeah and it also allows for a certain amount of vulnerability i mean you can see that in
1:48:09
wake's character when he's when he's attacking the boat with the axe you know he just says don't leave me
1:48:14
yeah and like there's a patheticness to it
1:48:20
all right now here's scenario four the cistern is foul and poisonous they
1:48:26
are both insane and hallucinating from bacterial infection but does wake ever even drink water
1:48:33
i don't know i would assume i guess you got it right yeah i mean
1:48:39
i'm not so sure about that one i mean you would also use the water for food prep i mean you know making soup and stuff but i suppose you probably boil it
1:48:46
at that point yeah i guess i'm not quite as i was just taken aback by how foul they made the
1:48:52
cistern look it just seemed real gross so i was just thinking like i don't know maybe they're just both hallucinating
1:48:58
yeah which means that both or neither of any of the scenes everyone's story could or
1:49:05
could not be true sure yeah i feel like that almost okay it
1:49:11
almost leaves like too much up in the air you know yeah it's it's too hazy at that point
1:49:17
you just like i don't know what's happening well it would give no answers and no real conclusion
1:49:24
okay so here's scenario five tom wake is poseidon
1:49:29
or a demigod from the sea hell his only purpose is to trouble
1:49:35
yeah his only purpose is to trouble the lives of lost men like tom howard he summons mermaids and
1:49:43
angry gulls to lead howard to some inevitable death oh yeah and there was a scene in the
1:49:49
movie where tom howard claims that the mermaid scrimshaw was a charm
1:49:54
that wake was using against him and he broke the charm so he broke the curse
1:50:00
yeah i mean you see multiple mermaid shots you see siegel's acting weird
1:50:06
there is a weird mermaid that was put in his bed i mean either was an accident or on purpose
1:50:12
and then he claims howard claims it has an effect on him so i mean you know
1:50:17
possible i guess okay when i i said early on that i like the most literal possible interpretation of the movie
1:50:24
that's that's up there with like yeah sure why not make all the weird stuff true
1:50:31
yeah it's on two assumptions one wake is a god two wake is still a son of a [ __ ]
1:50:40
i mean the two go hand in hand so often yeah
1:50:46
okay so here's the last one six and neither man is insane but both are
1:50:52
bitter unlikable men that deliberately lie and misinterpret things about one another as a means to antagonize
1:50:59
they grow insane as they drink themselves to death i mean i think that's just true i mean
1:51:05
like regardless of regardless of which theory is true that
1:51:10
that part is true that's just what the movie is yeah i mean they are bitter unlikable men
1:51:17
they do antagonize one another they do drink themselves to death
1:51:22
six could be the most likely but it is almost a non-answer because if they're both lying it's the
1:51:28
same as them both being insane you don't know what's true anymore yeah i think it works on the assumption that
1:51:33
howard's perspective would be more true you know as it would be almost more of a
1:51:38
just a straight a fiction story you know rather than a horror or something
1:51:45
yeah speaking of which if this is a horror movie it's got a body count of one i guess maybe two well three max
1:51:53
okay yeah so i guess ephraim winslow sort of but that's more of a flashback yeah
1:51:58
and he also might not be dead i mean he's probably dead i mean uh was it how many people died in uh well
1:52:05
let me have to like spoil another movie how many people died in the witch
1:52:11
uh the dad the mom that might be it yeah i mean like yeah
1:52:18
you can have a horror movie that's good and has a uh yeah oh wait uh the son died too
1:52:25
and the baby oh the whole family's dead yeah well yeah i guess but i mean like point being that's
1:52:31
a pretty low body count yeah yeah except for black philip i mean
1:52:36
that's the important thing oh yeah he lives on actually you know i do that does bring up an interesting idea i do
1:52:42
feel like horror movies that have lower body counts i think trend
1:52:48
on average to being better you know or i guess really like actual good horror movies
1:52:55
tend to have lower body counts maybe is how i'd phrase that well it's a it's a question it's a question of um
1:53:02
emphasis about where the emphasis is on a film you know because if you're not wasting time with with kills
1:53:10
with gore with the effectiveness of a scene like that then you have more time to fixate on
1:53:17
subtlety and nuance that's not necessarily true and also this movie even though it's not got a lot of stuff
1:53:23
going on the stuff that happens is pretty brutal you know like when that seagull gets beaten to death on the cistern
1:53:29
that's pretty should we add that to the body that's pretty rough yeah that's seagull
1:53:36
i mean he does have a soul of a sailor what made his maker uh yeah
1:53:42
i think okay why not so yeah as we mentioned before
1:53:49
this is loosely based on the smalls lighthouse tragedy of 1801 so that's when it was
1:53:55
it was off the coast of pembrokeshire and grasshome in wales
1:54:00
and that's basically it i mean uh trying to think if there was something else based off of other than the edgar
1:54:06
allen poe thing but i think well i don't know see the weird thing is that they made the movie in 2016 but
1:54:12
apparently that movie is not accurate either to what happened so i guess everyone is just taking the real event
1:54:19
and just kind of extrapolating from there yeah whatever they want out of it i mean what
1:54:24
is it like do they have like five like dialogue off past movies
1:54:30
oh is that the one where everyone takes off their clothes she just freezes to death yeah yeah yeah i've seen i've seen a couple of
1:54:36
those yeah uh yet to see a good one yeah they're all terrible
1:54:43
wondering one day so the lighthouse the 2019 one
1:54:50
has 90 percent on rotten tomatoes that's like nearly universal praise
1:54:57
yeah and all the more impressive for horror movie yeah it got 83
1:55:02
on metacritic which is the highest i've ever seen yeah he was nominated for a whole bunch of
1:55:08
awards it won i think best supporting actor at the cannes film festival
1:55:14
he was nominated for an academy award for best achievement in cinematography which i think it probably should have
1:55:20
won although i forget who actually won no whatever whoever one didn't deserve
1:55:25
it yeah i mean it's a beautifully shot film and honestly i i just realized i didn't
1:55:31
spend any time talking about how beautiful the movie is it's a black and white movie it's a little box of a
1:55:37
filming structure but it's beautiful it's it's a it's a almost every shot is like a work of art yeah and it really
1:55:43
helps propel a movie where almost nothing happens yeah i mean it's just two guys
1:55:49
in a remote location not doing a lot you know just sniping at each other yeah i think that's like the movie would be way
1:55:56
harder to tolerate if every scene didn't look interesting
1:56:02
yeah i mean and if it was kind of a romantic location in a way yeah i mean like
1:56:08
honestly even something as mundane as like groping a mermaid is framed
1:56:15
perfectly yeah that's true i don't remember how much it cost or
1:56:21
maybe i couldn't find it but i found out it only made 10 million on its u.s debut
1:56:28
and then it made 18 million total worldwide so it made almost no money uh
1:56:35
dude that sucks i'm not sure how much it took to make the movie i'm going to guess a couple
1:56:40
million so i bet it turned a profit but this is more of a critical darling rather than a popular one yeah
1:56:48
i regret not having seen it in theaters myself i was going to but i just i didn't get around to it i
1:56:54
didn't realize that the world was going to descend into plague and you'd never be able to go back for a long time yeah
1:56:59
uh last movie i saw in theaters birds of prey oh
1:57:05
oh is that the the fantabulous yeah adventures of harley quinn yep
1:57:11
oh okay yeah i didn't see that actually i heard it wasn't that bad i you know i didn't hate
1:57:17
it but but but like it is very funny to me that's like the last movie that i saw
1:57:22
in theaters and uh probably still holding the last one for a while
1:57:29
now it's time for some plot keywords it's the imdb keywords game oh yeah also
1:57:34
not exactly a game it's more of a list wait okay this is this is like interesting slash
1:57:41
depressing so i guess uh according to wikipedia box office looks like domestic for uh
1:57:47
the lighthouse 18.3 million domestic box office for
1:57:54
the bye bye man 29.9 million
1:58:00
you know what the people yes see i've said it before that's the thing
1:58:05
you don't need to make a good horror movie to make money yeah well in fact like making bad horror
1:58:11
movies does seem to just make money i mean it's there for a purpose you know
1:58:16
it's it's like the spam of of canned goods you know or just like it doesn't have to be great
1:58:22
it just has to fulfill a purpose you're not wrong get the teenagers in the seats but
1:58:27
god damn it yeah here's the list of the imdb keywords for
1:58:36
the lighthouse there's 184 listed i'm just going to list the top 20 here okay
1:58:42
you know we'll see how well it sums up the filter can i predict one of the uh
1:58:47
keywords oh yeah uh fart please spurt on there
1:58:54
um fletcher let's see let me see i i feel i feel like it i could have sworn i saw
1:59:00
it in here no maybe not see this is just the top
1:59:05
20. there's 184 there's there's got to have been farts in here yeah so sorry you lose okay all right
1:59:12
okay so here we go top 20 top 20 not bigger lighthouse okay
1:59:18
mermaid sure hallucination yeah
1:59:25
i mean i guess uh lighthouse keeper yeah
1:59:31
yeah sex with a mermaid
1:59:37
yeah definitely this is just giving you the facts you need to know this i mean you know if
1:59:42
you're if you're curious about whether it happens just to lay it right out for you i mean i guess i'm also kind of curious
1:59:49
how many movies that applies to it can't be that many no we really can't
1:59:54
yeah especially when you think of the actual logistics of having sex with a mermaid it's going to limit how many films want
2:00:02
to do that yeah i mean if you really want to get into [Music]
2:00:08
you know the logistics of having sex with a mermaid it's just very inconvenient
2:00:15
all right so here's the next one uh storm
2:00:21
minimal cast yeah drunkenness
2:00:27
oh yeah i mean absolutely axe
2:00:33
that one shouldn't be that high up there i don't like that i don't know if this is in any in any
2:00:40
particular order or if it's just random it's gonna say farts are way more relevant i'm not sure
2:00:45
than axes underwater scene
2:00:50
i mean there's that one part where you should use the mermaid yeah coming up i guess yeah hello those last two
2:00:57
that's super relevant hallucinating see earlier i said hallucination and now
2:01:04
it's solution 18. sure what a waste of islam
2:01:09
madness yeah yeah
2:01:15
nightmare i mean probably yeah some of those
2:01:21
things might have been nightmares it's not clear what is or is not real i mean also just for a lot of the movie i mean
2:01:27
also just the scenario is a nightmare yeah also that yeah
2:01:33
uh 1890s i don't think that's true i mean it could be
2:01:39
a half credit why not i don't actually know sure i guess it's within the 100 year
2:01:45
rank yeah you know range rather circular staircase
2:01:52
yeah i mean yeah mermaid figurine
2:01:58
pretty important yeah tentacles that actually is solid yeah yeah
2:02:07
you need to know when that's in a movie how about this one work
2:02:14
yeah okay i will say going back i mean honestly like going back to tentacles
2:02:20
though if you're looking that up for like movies with tentacles in them i feel like you're inherently going to
2:02:27
be pretty disappointed by the white house because you're looking for something else well maybe so however the
2:02:34
tentacles in this are pretty good i mean for what little there are of them sure yeah
2:02:40
they are effective and gross yeah so yeah
2:02:45
work and then next one is secret yeah
2:02:50
that was number 19. so here's number 20 killing a seagull
2:03:00
excellent okay the list is redeemed yeah
2:03:05
as long as you you end on a high note yeah yeah that's all you need
2:03:11
we finally gotten to the point in our podcast where we rate the movie on a scale of one to ten what would you
2:03:18
give it uh gotta go with the ten out of ten man wow really i i mean
2:03:24
i like the movie a lot i don't know what you know what would you uh what would you do to improve it it's uh
2:03:31
i mean it and really it has everything yeah people going yes it has as much
2:03:39
uh yeah like sea madness uh tentacles
2:03:45
yeah implied uh dark gods and their uh works upon the world
2:03:52
people drinking ginger yeah that's true yeah yeah that's important
2:03:59
okay so yeah i absolutely love the lighthouse i would even call it a step
2:04:04
up from edgar's previous work the witch which is also excellent i mean we already talked about it yeah no i don't
2:04:10
agree with that the movie makes me the movie makes me appreciative to be alive at a time when dark stories are
2:04:18
done with such care and love i have no problem sticking this film up
2:04:23
with the finest horror movies maybe ever committed to film
2:04:29
this is a 10 out of 10 for me as well it's as near to perfect as a brian
2:04:34
washed tale of maritime sorrow and dread can ever be i uh that's also
2:04:40
i think that's the first uh for both of us given a 10 out of 10. yeah
2:04:46
and maybe the first for us to agree on something that's debatable i don't know i don't
2:04:52
i don't know about that oh i mean in the ratings
2:04:58
no no we've never agreed on anything it's crap
2:05:06
yeah and yes i do know you know this is just to the audience i i know full well
2:05:12
that it's just a story of two grizzled wretched men sniping and farting at one another until
2:05:18
they drink themselves to death any story can be beautiful if it's magnificently told
2:05:25
with enough love for the subject matter in a way it's it really sums up why i
2:05:31
love horror movies in the first place you know what i mean
2:05:36
i mean yeah catching my drift i am
2:05:41
yeah i think this movie it's all those movies where you can like show it to people and if they're
2:05:48
receptives they'll like understand how good like our movie can be
2:05:54
yeah i mean i will put an asterisk on this that it may not be a 10 out of 10 for
2:06:00
everyone no just because it's a miserable grimy story of two men just sniping and
2:06:06
farting at each other yeah and that is also a but you know before
2:06:11
it's hard yeah yeah yeah that's the thing it probably didn't sell well for just that reason
2:06:17
but for this kind of movie it is an absolute success i mean it is the best version of this movie
2:06:26
yeah so if you're if you're willing to put up with this premise this is the one to go to
2:06:34
all right and i think that just about wraps it up don't you uh yeah i think so
2:06:39
oh man it's been great i've it's you know it's a genuine pleasure
2:06:44
doing this movie i almost dread whatever it is we do next we're gonna have to decide amongst
2:06:50
ourselves what the next one will end up being oh okay hold on don't don't
2:06:56
and see what you're doing already i'm gonna put a stop to it nonetheless we should yeah the next one
2:07:03
which might be real bad yeah we're switching off and on
2:07:08
you gotta go after this so whatever you pick next it's on you
2:07:14
that's it on me to be clear all right then i've got i've got i got some ideas up my
2:07:20
sleeve all right okay well rather i have one idea
2:07:26
i i i can't wait to hear it all right
2:07:31
so until next time everybody i've been peter uh and i'm still jacob
2:07:39
and this has been gorman on gore see ya later
2:08:06
you're a dog a filthy dog a dog

English (auto-generated)