Saturday Night Live's season 45 finale featured Kate McKinnon channeling her formidable crazy-old-man chops into a parody of The Lighthouse, supplementing the show's other, more relatable social distancing sketches with a healthy dose of quarantine craziness. Beginning with the Tom Hanks/Chris Martin episode on April 11th, SNL shifted to an entirely remote setup in order to comply with social distancing recommendations. This naturally put a unique restriction on the performers and writers, as they had to produce all of the material within the confines of their own homes. As one might expect, the first wave of sketches went after a number of obvious (but undeniably effective) targets, including Zoom calls, Twitch streamers, and, of course, Trump. But it seems that it only takes a few weeks to move from the popular consciousness into bizarre, black-and-white, arthouse horror films.
The Lighthouse, which came out in late 2019, stars Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe as two wickies tending to the titular structure with only each other for company. As their isolation becomes more pronounced, the events grow increasingly strange and detached from reality. Short of Animal Crossing, there may be no other property that so precisely anticipated quarantine culture.
McKinnon, as the completely invented but oh-so-appropriately-named Phineas Gale, provides viewers with some "lighthouse keeper's isolation tips." While all of these suggestions are perfectly reasonable as written ("keep a journal," "make groceries last," etc.), the brief sketch rides on undermining them through Gale's clear descent into insanity. Much like the spot-on aesthetic of the parody (relative to what is possible in quarantine), this character arc/joke pays respect to the original film, in which extreme banality and repetitiveness prove to be simply too much for the characters to take.
This is the first proper movie parody Saturday Night Live has done since moving to a remote format, and its effectiveness owes a lot to the nature of The Lighthouse. The film really only features two characters, so cutting it down to a monologue isn't too much of a stretch logistically. Plus, having just one location with comparatively basic set dressing makes the lodgings easy to ape. And, not to underplay the film's technical achievements (Jarin Blaschke was nominated for an Oscar for his cinematography, after all), but simply putting the sketch in black-and-white goes a long way to emulating its distinct feel.
As with most aspects of life, the current situation has changed what is possible for the folks behind Saturday Night Live to accomplish, so their dedication to closing out the season should be applauded. But it has become clear from these past few weeks that, removed from their pseudo-live-theater approach, SNL's style begins to resemble a more mainstream version of videos being produced by independent internet creators. Moving forward, when the show returns post-pandemic, it will be interesting to see if these past few weeks have any lasting impact on how they attempt to differentiate themselves from comedy being produced on other platforms. If this sketch is any indication, there might be some excitingly esoteric reaches ahead in terms of subject matter.