THE NEAR KISS. In their dimly lit dining quarters, Ephraim and Thomas throw down liquor, swap biographies and goad each other. Through flirtations disguised as aggression, the men become better acquainted. Thomas calls Ephraim “pretty as a picture” and explains that he got divorced after being away from home so often. The cagey Ephraim says, without offering many specifics, that he’s been fleeing one job after the next, haunted by some sort of mysterious past. As time wears on, the weather becomes stormy and their moods turbulent. But all the while, stuck indoors with nothing but each other, they’re developing a kinship. When especially drunk one night, they dance a jig together and slow-dance in each other’s arms. Thomas sings a lullaby as Ephraim clings to his shirt, yearning for comfort. The men then peer at each other and glide in for a kiss, until pulling away and reacting with brief fisticuffs and more cuddling. Later, when Ephraim has had enough torment, he walks Thomas like a dog.
Pattinson: We had a teacher come, and we had a couple dancing lessons with her. But add on top of that the characters’ turbocharged drinking, and it turns into a different thing.
Eggers: You see men dancing together in an old-timey setting. It’s just something that happened. I mean, men dance together now in non-homosexual-inclined situations. But we knew that in this world, all they have is each other, and there are these peaks of highs and lows. So you have the fast dancing that I’ve seen documentaries of lumberjack camps doing — that step-dancing-adjacent kind of stuff. But when you get drunk enough, you’re going to be slow-dancing.
Dafoe: When they’re dancing, it’s not so much that they have anything to do with each other, but they’re both there and they’re both warm. It’s very clear. There’s that moment where they almost kiss, but then it’s like, “No, we can’t!” It’s a no-brainer because it’s a very melancholy sense of longing. They’re holding each other and they’re kind of sweet and they’re drunk. Boys get together when they’re drunk sometimes.
Eggers: Someone said to me that the fight they have after the botched kiss is more erotic than the dancing. I don’t know if I agree, but I like the idea.
Pattinson: It all made sense to me, the psychology where you can only show that kind of emotion when you’re completely wasted. But at the same time, in the early scenes, he’s so desperately wanting to please. And then when he rebels against Willem, he wants to be punished just to get attention. He comes across as a guy who’s probably had an incredibly hard life. He’s been working manual labor and been this itinerant wanderer for ages. He’s done some bad stuff and feels really guilty about it and basically wants some sort of comforting, but he doesn’t know how to ask for it or how to talk about it. It all comes out in this manic, overly physical stuff.
Eggers: A lot of sea ballads are from the perspective of the wife or the fiancée who’s been left by the sailor, so there’s many really incredible recordings of old men singing these songs about “Johnny left me.” It’s really quite powerful. But it’s also not like homosexuality didn’t exist in the past. You don’t need to wonder about these lumberjack shanty camps and stag lighthouse settings.
— Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe and director Robert Eggers decoding the ‘Near Kiss’ scene in “The Lighthouse”
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