The quarantine just started and someone's already turned The Lighthouse into a SpongeBob episode
This coronavirus shit is going to last a while. At times like these, knowing we all have to just hunker down and find new ways to occupy our free time, it’s important to ration out the creation and distribution of incredibly dumb stuff. For example, if you, like YouTube’s Pepe Rico Piqué, find yourself thinking, “The Lighthouse would actually make for a pretty good SpongeBob SquarePants episode,” consider whether that concept might be better saved until, say, next week instead of unleashing a vision of a salty Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe descending into whimsically soundtracked madness this early into our own quarantines.
And yet, “The Lighthouse, But It’s Edited Like A SpongeBob Episode” already exists and, just like catching a glimpse of the mysterious nightly rituals being conducted at your place of work, it’s impossible to ignore once it’s been discovered. As it says on the tin, the video (which, we should note, uses scenes from throughout The Lighthouse, including its ending) turns Eggers’ story of maritime isolation into a breezy trip down to the colorful village of Bikini Bottom. Pattinson’s Ephraim Winslow struggles at his work, tormented by asshole seagulls and covered in filth, while Dafoe’s Thomas Wake toasts him to “four weeks” of woozy steel guitar, accordions, and the otherworldly sound of foghorn blasts signaling the forbidden secrets—and psyche-destroying Krabby Patties—of their lonely home.
The video works very well, drawing out a lot of the inherently funny aspects of the movie’s pitch-black examination of how masculinity and exploitative work practices turn into a brain-scrambling pressure cooker when condensed by long months of isolation. But it has also arrived too early. We need at least a few more days of our own stir-crazy madness to set in before we can properly appreciate this sort of idea. As Thomas Wake himself would surely advise, don’t spill your quarantine beans all at once.
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