AFTER THE BIRD: TRACING ARCHETYPAL SIN AND COSMIC REDEMPTION BETWEEN THE LIGHTHOUSE AND THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER

This study examines the intertextual relationships established between Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse (2019) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) through a multidisciplinary approach within the framework of narrative structure, mythopoetic representations, and ethical transgressions against nature. Both works revolve around a primal transgression symbolized by the killing of a bird, leading to isolation, madness, and spiritual reckoning. In this context, both narratives invite a rethinking of the human being’s fragile, uncanny, and transgressive position within the cosmos through archetypal images rooted in the cultural unconscious. The study discusses how the desire for light, knowledge, and truth, represented by mythological figures such as Prometheus and Proteus, rests upon a foundation of hubris, based on the structural parallels between the character Winslow and the mariner figure. Eggers’s black-and-white aesthetic, narrow framing, and claustrophobic spatial design are compared to the rhythmic and allegorical structure of the oral poetic narrative, offering a multilayered, aesthetically dense, and intuitive analysis of psychic disintegration. The film reveals a mythological and aesthetic dialogue with Romantic poetry, presenting a renewed opportunity to contemplate nature, crime, punishment, sin, and existence through the transforming forms of myth. Both narratives are considered powerful expressions of cosmic justice mirrored within individual consciousness through Gothic aesthetics, psychoanalytic imagery, metaphors, and mythological allegories.