This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic.com. I was reviewing The Lighthouse, the Robert Eggers film. These extremely short pieces are something I do occasionally, and used to do a lot more. The point of them, aside from simply being an enjoyable or insightful self contained piece that happens to be short, is to explore the possibility of criticism as a tool to help the reader see more. I leave out so much of my thoughts about the film here that it could hardly be considered a review, but I offer what I see as the most personal or unique insight, an insight that probably very few viewers might have had independently. Reading insights like these from other writers has greatly improved my ability to find them myself—it's like the exercising of a muscle. Some people have this notion that criticism as an artform is parasitic, but that needn't be so. Criticism of one particular work can be transformative: by its capacity to help the reader see the particular work in a novel way, and by its capacity to help the reader see by that same novelty in things other than that particular work. That is to say, the broader life of experience art and life beyond.
Dafoe's skin and bone structure together are the leads in The Lighthouse. The exaggerated geography of Thomas Wake's haggard face casts unnatural and frightening shadows where there shouldn't be any, making Thomas look like a gurning demon, and finally as the face is dragged into the sunlight the shadows are dissolved, instead the expressive geography of the demon face is replaced by the literal geography of soil. The skin and bone carries on spitting and in the instant before it is covered up completely it looks like a real human face, after all.