After finishing My post on Bioshock, I suddenly thought of making a post specifically about lighthouses. I know EXITING ISN’T IT? Now, it is going to be about lighthouses in media. I will be Exploring what role lighthouses serve in different kinds of media.
I found Lighthouses’ aesthetically pleasing and beautiful, but I was interested in what purpose they serve in media. I know they serve as a source of light for sailors, but what about thematically in stories?
I will be looking at three different works. The movie “The lighthouse” 2019, the book “ to the lighthouse” 1927, and the game “Bioshock Infinite” 2013. All these works contain a lighthouse relevant to the story or the themes.
The Beauty of a Lighthouse
An essay on lighthouses
A lighthouse holds immense beauty to me. It is a shining beacon that lights up the way for others. It not only directs sailors, but also gives them hope. When they see the light they know home is near.
It stands alone, in a storm, on a cliff, lighting the way in the dark. No matter the strength of the wave, or the storm the lighthouse stands, alone.
If there is no storm the lighthouse simply stands quietly, alone. It waits until it is needed, it waits in solitude, alone
“Lighthouses are endlessly suggestive signifiers of both human isolation and our ultimate connectedness to each other.”- Virginia Woolf.
I get the feeling alone and isolated are keywords here. A lighthouse is by its design and function placed far away from other people. A lighthouse placed in the middle of the city would be absolutely useless, however, the same lighthouse will save lives on the coast where it can do the thing it is made for.
Maybe it’s the simplicity of the lighthouse that I like, the purpose is clear and precise.
According to the French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre humans are born with total freedom and it is up to us to find purpose. A lighthouse already comes with a purpose and a beautiful and helpful one at that.
Okay, I just snuck in a bit of philosophy there, that is all well and good, but the time has come to explore what role lighthouses play in fiction.
Bioshock Infinite
FIRST! Let’s talk about the first Bioshock, in the first game along with Infinite the lighthouse serves as the key or the gateway to the world of Rapture and Colombia. In my post on Bioshock Infinite, I talk a bit about what makes the lighthouse sequence one of my favorites in gaming. Since I talk about it there, I will not be going into too much detail since I find it redundant to repeat myself.
Bioshock Infinite starts with you being transported by boat to this remote lighthouse. It is storming and you feel totally isolated since the man who inhabits the lighthouse is dead.
Bioshock uses the lighthouse as a gateway to another world. This works well since a lighthouse is placed far away from the “real” world, thus making it the perfect place to enter another one.
Bioshock places a great emphasis on lighthouses, consider the following quote from the game.
“There is always a lighthouse, there’s always a man, there’s always a city.”
Now, in-game this quote refers to the multiverse storyline of the game. The quote indicates that no matter how many worlds and how many timelines, there will always be a lighthouse, a man, and a city.
This is very important in understanding the themes of Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite.
The Bioshock franchise is all about choice or lack of choice, the illusion of choice.
At the end of the game, Elisabeth and Booker go through countless doors, Elisabeth indicates that the stars in the sky are all gates. One could say there is a correlation between the light from the stars and the light from the lighthouse.
They walk through time and space by entering different kinds of lighthouses. Elisabeth says all the doors lead to “everywhere”. Thus the lighthouse serves as a portal not just to Colombia, but to everywhere.
To the lighthouse
To the lighthouse is a novel written by Virginia Woolf in 1927. The novel falls under the cultural and societal movement of modernism.
To Summarize this book is ridiculously easy.
The story is about a family planning to go to a nearby lighthouse, and in the end, they go there.
WOW! The plot is complicated indeed.
Now, the whole point of the book is not so much about the plot or what little of it exists, but what the characters talk about. I said before that the book is a part of modernism.
Modernism has a lot of history and I am simply not able to go over it here, but what I will do is outlining two characteristics for Modernism in the book.
The first is stream of consciousness
In the book, one character will lose a necklace and then go on this long tangent talking about everything and nothing with psychological revelations. There are also very few examples of punctuation in the book, this further creates the feel of a stream of consciousness since the text goes on and on and on……. And on.
The second characteristic is distortion in time. In the book, there is a section called “time passes” where 10 years is fitted into about 20 pages. This is an absolutely fantastic element of the book. Remember this idea about time being distorted we will come back to it later.
In the book, the lighthouse represents the final goal. The Ramsays, who is the family the book revolves around, keep coming up with elaborate excuses not to go to the lighthouse, despite clearly showing an interest in visiting it. They spent so much time in the book talking, in fact, the whole book is just talking.
After the “time passes” segment where some of the characters are dead they finally go to the lighthouse. It is on the lighthouse that some of the characters finally find the answers they are looking for and they find the closure they seek. The lighthouse offers resolve and answers.
The lighthouse serves as a beacon to the characters, it is their ultimate goal and destination. They are guided by the light and have a desire to go see it, just like ships in the real world.
The Lighthouse
“The Lighthouse” is an arthouse film from 2019 starring Rober Paterson as Tom Howard, and William Defoe as Thomas Wake. They play lighthouse keepers set to look after and maintain a lighthouse for four weeks.
Unlike Bioshock where a lighthouse represents the gate and the beginning to something. and in “to the lighthouse” where the lighthouse represents the final goal of something, in this film the lighthouse and the island represent the 2 men’s whole existence. The 2 men are never not on the island. It contains them, and the story.
After Tom kills a sea bird despite being warned not to, since it is believed that seabirds contain the souls of sailors who died at sea, the weather starts to change. They both stand in a storm waiting for the boat to bring them back, but nothing comes. They are trapped alone in time and space. When they realize that no boat is coming, both of them go inside in shelter of the storm. In the very same scene, Thomas says that it’s been weeks since they missed the boat. There has been no indication that time has passed, it has all happened in the same scene.
The audience then starts to wonder, how long have they been on the island? The film is about Tom working, along with his frequent dreams. In the beginning, it is clear when he dreams and when he is not, but at the end of the film, we realize that we can’t be sure.
Is the film about 2 men going mad from isolation? Or is there some supernatural power at work here? The movie is essentially about this question and the viewer is free to interpret as they please, but an important part of the film is the idea of time being distorted.
Notice how time is being distorted just like in “going to the lighthouse”, and Bioshock Infinite. There seems to be this common theme connected to lighthouses. They seem to stand separate from time and space, alone.