“The Lighthouse” Is a Film About Men Arguing In Moldy, Beautiful Sweaters
Earlier this month, The Lighthouse—Robert Eggers’s phallic psychodrama about two lighthouse keepers, played by Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, going absolutely insane and masturbating to mermaids and/or lamps while stranded in a weatherbeaten-house on a rock off the coast of Maine—was released. And not since the shawl-collar Westerley cardigan (available at Pendleton for $239!) made famous by The Dude in The Big Lebowski has knitwear been such a locus of pain, beauty, charisma, and existential unease.
All of costume designer Linda Miur’s looks in The Lighthouse are deliriously period-accurate. The oilskins, including the raincoats and overalls, are rubbery and seductively antiquated. (According to Miur, Pattinson was a huge fan of the stuff oilskins before they were broken in, telling her, “‘This is so chic. I'd wear this on the street. Very Yamamoto!’”) The wool overcoats have big brass buttons (baby!). In one scene, Pattinson—as the novice wickie with a dark past—paints the side of the titular lighthouse while wearing a pair of overalls printed with the logo for the “United States Light House Service,” which looks precisely like the kind of obsolete standard-issue garment that sends tourists and vintage heads delving into the racks at Dumbo’s Front General Store.
But the knits are something else. Dafoe, as Thomas Wake, wears a sweater with a ribbed bib, while Pattinson, as Ephraim Winslow , wears a slightly more low-key knit with a ribbed collar and ribbed drop-shoulders. As the men remain stranded past their four-week allotted time into who knows how long, you can practically smell the mold seeping into the wool and radiating anguish (and maybe even psychosis??? Can a knit do that?).
That the film is in black and white makes the details really stand out, and Miur explained that you can no longer get these kinds of sweaters—“actual sweaters from that period truly exemplify utility knitting at its best,” she said, adding that contemporary sweaters “wouldn’t be as detailed.” On the Great Scale of Cinematic Knits, the Lighthouse knits—silent, like all sweaters—are as crucial to the plot development as the sweaters in When Harry Met Sally (which indicate the leads are getting richer as they age), but not exactly at The Devil Wears Prada cerulean sweater level (which helps Andie Sachs realize that when she’s roasted at work, she’s really roasting herself).
Miur added that in Ireland, where these types of sweaters originated as the legendary Aran knit, women would use stitches to create distinctive knits for their men, so that if a body was found at sea, it could be identified by the sweater. (This gives the Novelty Knit Movement a whole new urgency.) When I die, bury me in a distinctive, salty sea dog knit! \
Originally Appeared on GQ
