20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY APRIL 3-9, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com Light the Tower The historic lighthouse at Point Sur is without its main feature, despite volunteer efforts to return the powerful lens. By Katie Rodriguez In the 2019 film The Lighthouse, two 19th-century lighthouse keepers—played by Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson—live a damp, difficult and isolated life manning a lighthouse alongside a tempestuous sea. Reminiscent of the feeling of sitting on a rocky boat, it’s an incredibly disorienting film, one full of ominous scenes that bend reality, taking the viewer on a roller coaster between dream-like states and drunken superstition. The story revolves around a lens, specifically a Fresnel lens, with which one of the lighthouse keepers becomes so infatuated that he—always in an intoxicated stupor—stumbles up into the tower to bathe himself in the light as it beams and rotates into the darkness surrounding him. Lighthouses have always held a mysterious lore about them, which the film captures to artistic extremes (and on 35mm black-and-while film, no less). They are places often in harsh coastal conditions, where ocean climates and stormy seas meet the land and generate thick blankets of fog that hug the shore and blind ships. They were important structures, typically in the windiest places. Their light was intended to communicate and effectively prevent shipwrecks from happening, not an uncommon occurrence at the time. On a tour of one of these historic places in Big Sur, two docents, John Hansen and Steve Stiles, guide 14 guests up a 361-foot-tall rock known as Point Sur, which, in 1866, was put aside for a future lighthouse. The feature is composed of volcanic rocks—a type of basalt—they point out, as they inch up the path, telling stories of shipwrecks and life in Big Sur in the 19th century. Construction began in 1887, and two years later, the buildings were finished. The light in the tower was officially lit on Aug. 1, 1889. Eighty-three years later, the lighthouse keepers left, and the magic of the tower’s very own Fresnel lens was removed, eventually making its way into storage where it remains to this day. “It was a hard life,” Point Sur Lighthouse in all its glory, on a clear and unusually windless day in January. Currently, an aero beacon light resides in the tower instead of the original Fresnel lens. Steve Stiles, a docent with the Central Coast Lighthouse Keepers, leads a group of visitors on a tour into the lighthouse tower, pointing up at where the Fresnel lens would typically be. KATIE RODRIGUEZ KATIE RODRIGUEZ
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