The great binding nothingness of things
I don’t understand what happened in The Empty Man, but it freaked me out anyway.
(Contains some spoilers)
On my ever growing list of book ideas that I will likely never get to (unless a very large bag of money falls out of the sky) is writing about cinéma déroutant. It’s okay if you’ve never heard of cinéma déroutant, because I made it up. It roughly translates as “confusing” or “bewildering” film, and it’s a term I use for movies in which I’m not entirely sure what is happening in them, but I enjoy them anyway. Much of David Lynch’s filmography, particularly Eraserhead and Lost Highway, I would classify as cinéma déroutant, along with the Wachowskis’ Cloud Atlas. I can say unequivocally that all of them are well-made, eminently watchable movies, but if you were to ask me to explain their plots, I’d likely respond with an embarrassed shrug. I really don’t know, man, just watch it.
David Prior’s The Empty Man also qualifies as cinéma déroutant, although I don’t know that I would say I “enjoyed” it. It’s relentlessly bleak, and at no point ever really seems interested in whether or not the audience fully catches on to what’s happening. We’re just led into the darkness, and if we find our way out, great. If not, well, as one character tells the protagonist, “we will all be one again” eventually anyway. But it is incredibly watchable, especially once you realize that what you thought the movie was about isn’t actually about that at all.
If nothing else, you have to appreciate the audacity of releasing a nearly two and a half hour long cosmic horror movie, with a twenty minute cold open that doesn’t connect to the rest of it until the last few minutes. It initially seems like it’ll be a variation on Candyman (or a lesser version of the same genre, like The Bye Bye Man), in which a malevolent force is summoned by name to wreak havoc and death. And it is that, but not really. Or rather, that’s only a small part of it. That aspect of the movie ultimately turns out to be so small that it very nearly qualifies as a red herring.
The Empty Man’s pacing is slow and deliberate, in a way that seems designed to test how willing the viewer is to see things through (it”s no surprise that it earned a dismal D+ Cinemascore). We’re given scant information about the protagonist, James Lasombra (James Badge Dale), and it feels as if he was simply waiting around for the events of the film to occur. He’s a private detective who was once an undercover cop. It’s suggested that he was forced to quit the police force, but it’s never explained why. His wife and son died in a car accident at some unspecified time in the recent past, but he seems at least as haunted by the events leading up to it as the accident itself. He has no other family to speak of, and his only friends are his neighbor, Nora (Marin Ireland), and Nora’s teenage daughter, Amanda (Sasha Frolova), a certified weirdo who talks to him about repetition and manifestation, a sort of advanced, vaguely sinister version of The Secret.
James doesn’t know what she’s talking about any more than the audience does, and even by the end of the movie I’m not entirely sure he knows what’s going on. Instead, it’s more like he just gives in, because there is no “understanding,” there is only acceptance. There’s not much else you can do when you’re told that you don’t actually exist, that you’re a manifestation of a cult’s energy and will, created to be the new vessel for a supernatural being called the Empty Man, because the previous vessel is dying from the strain of it. It’s unclear (at least to me) whether James accepts his fate because he realizes he has no choice, or because he has no life to return to. None of it ever existed, no wife, no son, no former job as an undercover cop. When he tries to call Nora, she doesn’t know who he is, because there is no James Lasombra. It’s right there in his name: la sombra is Spanish for “the shadow.”
How any of this works, and how a cult can simply think a person into existence, is never explained, which is good, because The Empty Man is the kind of movie that lives or dies upon how much the viewer is willing to shrug and say “Okay, sure.” That’s not a bad thing, mind you. Too many movies carefully spell out everything for an audience they don’t trust to go along for the ride with them. Hundreds of YouTube channels exist solely to “explain” the endings of movies, even those that couldn’t be clearer, like Jordan Peele’s Us, which simply utilizes a flashback to fill everything in.
Though surely such videos exist for The Empty Man, they’re not necessary, because it’s a movie that’s powered on nightmare logic. Even when Stephen Root, as the leader of the Pontifex Institute, the cult that worships the Empty Man, explains to James the philosophy of the cult, it just sounds like incoherent, bongwater soaked babble, similar to the messages Agent Dale Cooper received in his dreams in Twin Peaks. Is it supposed to make sense, and I’m simply too dense to grasp it? Maybe, but not understanding makes it a more unnerving experience.
In not knowing how the Pontifex Institute’s “manifestation” works, it allows the viewer to focus on the existential horror of discovering that your entire life is a construct, someone’s creation, manufactured as a means to an end that has nothing to do with you. There are few things that cause me to lose sleep like the idea that you can’t trust your own memories. It’s not even an idea, it’s been proven: according to Psychology Today, a 2016 study showed that, no matter how vivid a memory we may have about certain events in our lives, time and recounting those memories reshape them in our minds, adding new aspects that never happened, and subtracting those that did. It’s not the same thing as lying or embellishing, because we don’t even realize our brains are doing it – as far as we know every version of the memory is the correct one.
The accident that kills James’ family plays over and over in his mind, which is puzzling, because he wasn’t there when it happened. This is all by design, because it’s an artificial memory, created to torment him, as was the memory of the indiscretion he committed shortly before the accident, so that his grief is compounded by guilt and regret. The perfect conduit for The Empty Man is created from pain, and James is a walking open wound. He was literally made to suffer.
So, no, since watching The Empty Man a few days ago I haven’t given a lot of thought to the logistics of it, because I’m willing to accept that there aren’t any. What I think about is how often my sleep is interrupted by troubling dreams, recurring dreams that feel very specific and vivid, that depict things I don’t feel comfortable discussing in the waking world, that I wonder if maybe aren’t dreams so much as buried memories. I don’t know if they’re real or not. They feel real. If they are real, I don’t want to be confronted with them when I’m awake. They can stay buried, the deeper, the better.
But the idea that they’re not representative of anything “real” is somehow more unsettling. They’re just there, rattling around in my head, serving no other purpose but to leave me shaken and tired, scared and disoriented, wondering if perhaps I’m losing my mind. It feels a little bit like something is playing a game with me, that it needs me to be weary and sad, for some unknown purpose. Not to benefit me in the long run, I’m just a tool for some other purpose.
I don’t know that I actually believe any of this. But who can say for sure.