the concept of a cursed bird
I assumed I would enjoy Robert Eggers’ sophomore film The Lighthouse. And guess what? I was right! I continue to delight in weird movies about increasingly deranged white people.
In this movie I was like “what is UP with this seagull?” and then Robert Pattinson beat it to death with his bare hands. So clearly, that made two of us. Admittedly it was a little overdramatic, but I’m sure we have all wanted to give seagulls a taste of their own medicine. They are, according to GQ, the worst bird on earth.
As a person who has been harassed by the magpie that lives outside their bedroom window, I found Pattinson’s feud with this bird very relatable. However, The Lighthouse is about more than just one really haunting seagull. It is also about watching Willem Dafoe channel the same energy he did in the Spider-Man movies but if he was an old-timey sailor. It also serves as a fascinating experiment, namely one that says “we have taken two actors capable of giving a 110% deranged performance for two hours and made a movie of it.” I think objectively this is Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe at their most unhinged, which is saying a lot, but also is Rob really behaving more unhinged here than in this one scene in Twilight?
I’m unsure!
Back to the bird. I hate to out myself as someone who knows how to read, but I couldn’t help but think that Samuel Taylor Coleridge would have loved this film. Admittedly it would have been extremely on the nose for Robert Pattinson to wear the bloodied seagull round his neck Ancient Mariner style, but even so. Murdering a bird at sea and getting cursed because of it is still a fun shoutout to the 19th century Romantic movement.
More stuff about this film that I thought was fun and relatable: when Willem and Rob just yell “what?!” at each other for a really long time until they themselves sound like seagulls; when Willem told Rob that maybe he was hallucinating the entire events of the movie and Rob was like “ugh, sure”; when they run out of alcohol and just straight up starting mixing turpentine and honey. Stuff I found less fun but still respect Robert Eggers for: answering the question of how a human being would sleep with a mermaid with one single extremely graphic shot.
I’m mostly joking, but I did feel oddly seen by the movie The Lighthouse. It’s been said before, but the whole thing is eerily prescient. Remember when we all thought lockdown would be like a month and then the entirety of 2020 was spent indoors going slowly mad?
The magpie that lives outside my window that has been very loud and present for a few weeks and until I watched this movie it was a mild nuisance and now I’m genuinely concerned about my own mental state. Is it the isolation? Is it an eldritch being? Who knows!
Other cursed birds:
The cassowary - the world's scariest bird. I am genuinely, unironically terrified of these things because I read an article in a Reader’s Digest when I was a child about a couple who were harassed and nearly murdered by one when they were on their honeymoon and now I fear death by cassowary lurks round every corner
Big Bird, kind of, but in a fun way.
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