Bridges + Murmurations
“It’s too big. We can’t indict the cosmos.”
Usually, I know what I want to talk about when I list a title for the Next Month. In this case, I was going to talk about exposition in the cosmic horror and mystery film The Empty Man, and how/whether it explains its particular brand of cosmic horror without dulling its scares or spoiling the surprises. But in the couple of weeks in which I let my notes sit, I worked on other projects and went to my job and saw an autumn leaf while my subconscious kept chewing on this film. (This is how I write everything.) This week I discovered I’d been thinking about exposition and explanation from a different angle, and it took a little longer to put it into words.
The Empty Man is a 2020 horror film written and directed by David Prior, adapted from a graphic novel with the same name by Cullen Bunn. (The film’s marketing paints it as a teen/urban legend murder thing; it seems the movie fell into a crack between 20th Century Fox and Disney just in time for the 2020 box office season.) The movie follows private eye James Lasombra as he looks into the disappearance of a young woman. He questions his reality as he finds himself enmeshed in the apocalyptic schemes of a cult. As you might guess of a movie set in a town with a high school named for Jacques Derrida, The Empty Man’s horror stems from uncertainties of truth, belief, and understanding. While it’s a bit of an unpolished gem, it’s appropriate spooky season viewing for those of us in the United States, where, since 2016, our presidential election cycle serves us increased sociopolitical anxiety and misinformation alongside our pumpkin spice lattes every four years, like some sort of extra-cursed Halloween leap year.
I watched the first ten minutes of The Empty Man a few years ago during a covid-hazed surfeit of time and deficit of attention. I had no memory of this until I watched it again the other week. The first part of the movie is a prologue, an all-show-no-tell cosmic horror short in its own right. Few theories exchanged, no explanations provided.
This is very different from the rest of the film, which is absolutely drowning in speculation and possible explanations for the horrors that follow—many of them from the young woman James Lasombra is trying to find. It’s cosmic horror, not from a dearth of answers, but from an overabundance. Spoilers ahead.
The Empty Man begins with four American friends backpacking through the mountains of Bhutan on the cusp of a snowstorm. One, Paul, falls into a crevasse beneath a bridge and discovers a weird skeleton that evokes the same questions as that first shot of the space jockey in Alien—what is it and what killed it? Paul takes a bone flute that produces an eerie sort-of vibrato, a rapid pulse like an auditory strobe light. After being rescued by his friends, he loses consciousness.
With the blizzard upon them, the four hole up in an abandoned home. Over the next few days they decompose, trying to find help, shouting at each other about the unconscious man’s history with mental illness, hallucinating a not-Ringwraith. Eventually Paul whispers something into his partner’s ear, and she murders the others on the bridge while Paul watches. What happened here?
The answer is a long time coming. The movie pivots to the Americans’ hometown outside St. Louis, Missouri. Ex-cop James Lasombra leads a troubled life, grieving his wife and son while carrying on some sort of supportive entanglement with a neighbor and her teenage daughter Amanda.
Amanda is an efficient character. In the first conversation, she gives us the gist of James’ tragic past and delivers the crux of the movie’s horror when she tells him three things, even if their specific meaning to James only becomes clear much later:
1) “…nothing can hurt you, because nothing is real.” When James pushes back, she asks him, “How could you know?”
2) “What we think about with focus, and intention, and repetition, we manifest”
3) “But what if there’s a secret truth? What if our thoughts actually begin somewhere else? And they travel through us like signal traveling down a wire?”
These three ideas seem to play oddly with each other, like a slightly sinister riff on The Secret. But hey, she’s a teenager, and what does a slightly mystical/misguided teenager with a Stranger Things haircut do in this kind of movie? She disappears, leaving a message that connects her disappearance to a local urban legend The Empty Man.
James’ investigation into Amanda’s disappearance has a few different phases, each serving up a plausible horror movie explanation, only for James to dig deeper and find the next. The urban legend phase is a bit of a red herring, but it invites the audience to ask questions about the Empty Man’s true nature.
James starts to see the Empty Man. Eventually, the search for Amanda leads him to the Pontifex Institute. They quickly reveal themselves to be a cult (one that I refuse to believe produces zero search results, even if that’s thematically on-brand).
Wikipedia tells me that, along with referring specifically to the Pope, ‘pontifex’ can generally mean a ‘bridge-builder’ between humanity and a deity. While some bridges are destinations unto themselves, bridges are for the most part transitional constructions that exist to connect two locations, defined as much by the void surrounding them as the narrow path of substance. As far as infrastructure goes, it can’t get much more cosmic than bridges—two books I read this summer in search of cosmic mysteries featured bridges in some major way.
Bridges (along with reflections/shadows/doubles and auditory/avian murmurations) are key imagery in The Empty Man. Most deaths happen on or near bridges, and they are one key analogy for the Pontifex Institute’s teachings about humans as conduits for older, cosmic energies.
Not every cosmic mystery/horror needs a cult, but in this movie, in which the horror stems from the manipulation and misinformation that thrives in a cultlike environment, a cult is essential. The Pontifex Institute is into a few things:
1) The Empty Man, explained at this point as a meditation on the loss of meaning through repetition
2) the noosphere, made into horror by the note that it’s not just human consciousness and that all nightmares are real
3) the singularity, by way of nothingness
4) tulpas, beings created from thought (the Bhutan connection)
The friction between these ideas is what leads the interested towards the ‘secret truth.’ James is suspiciously allowed somewhat free rein, and as he explores the building and the underlying tunnels, he is just bombarded with cult sayings and rhetoric, to the point that it’s hard to keep it all straight and question how well it all fits together, how it actually might make sense of the larger world to its followers, how it provides them with the answers they’ve been looking for. But that’s how a lot of cults look like to someone on the outside.
One part I’ve been fiddling with like a Rubik’s cube since I watched the movie is the scene when a key speaker at the Pontifex Institute tells James that words and ideas spoken over and over again lose their meaning—semantic overload ascended to tenet. What does it mean for a representative of this cult, who presents and shares the cult’s beliefs, to say this? Meeting him where he’s at, I’m sure he would say that it means nothing.
From this point, it becomes clear that James’ entire investigation is a big reverse escape room set up by the cult, though to what end is still unclear. The search for Amanda reveals that the cult has been keeping tabs on James, or people somewhat like him, for quite a while. The details of his own tragic past are revealed as well—he was conducting an affair with Nora, Amanda’s mom, and was with her when his wife and son had a car accident on a bridge. Eventually, he makes his way to the hospital controlled by the cult (everyone knows you’ve got to go to the creepy cult hospital if you want in on the cosmic horror apocalypse). There, pursued in his search for the truth, he discovers Paul from the prologue, who has been the cult’s conduit, and—at last—Amanda.
Last month, I talked about how the best cosmic mysteries include both palimpsests (an excess of forgotten or buried truths in which the investigator must find information useful to the present mystery) and lacunas (a gap in which no truth can be found). What’s going on with the overwhelming amount of information-presented-as-truth in The Empty Man, though, is something a little different.
Let’s say all mysteries sit on a spectrum of trust and doubt. At one end are the ‘fair play’ puzzles in which you’re encouraged to reach the solution even before the detective does. At the other end are mysteries in which you can’t trust the story to tell you what even ‘happened’, and a friction-ey sort of pleasure arises from this uncertainty (or in arguing that your version of events is correct, and here’s why). The Empty Man hangs out at this end.
Cosmic mysteries are always going to be at least a little uncertain, since the investigator must at least consider that some aspect of their search leads to something beyond the mundane. That’s how we get unreliable narrators, wrestling with lacunas or palimpsests within themselves, or Lynchian detectives, whose methods are suspect to the audience and/or their fellow characters. Cosmic mysteries sometimes indulge in the big reveal/explainer session at the end; sometimes you’re left to chew on a cosmic analogy, that pencil-stabbed-through-folded-paper substitute for true understanding (which I say in the fondest of terms).
When mystery is combined with horror, heightened stakes and threats push characters into seeking the relief of understanding. This opens the door for a favorite character type of mine: the unreliable explainer. (I’m sure there’s a better name out there.)
The unreliable explainer is a character who gains and maintains power over the investigator by selectively withholding and handing out information—or lies delivered with the authority of truth, you’ll never know—in order to manipulate the investigator into doing whatever it is they want. Often, the unreliable explainer will also put great effort into making their target feel hunted, persecuted, singular, special. They will also sometimes be someone the investigator trusts, or at least, uncannily resemble a trusted individual.
In The Empty Man, Amanda is the unreliable explainer. She appears at just the right moment, when, in a more straightforward mystery, the detective might explain what’s happened.
Amanda has apparently been a key figure of the Pontifex Institute for some time. She tells James that he isn’t a real person, but a tulpa created three days ago, with a tragic backstory so that his grief will drive him toward his purpose. He will become the Empty Man, through which a cosmic Other will manifest on Earth and bring all humanity into the singularity (by making everyone kill each other and themselves). James, broken down by the cult’s influence and his own grief to a point of extremely distressed vulnerability, denies his own existence, accepts this as truth and becomes the bridge between The Other and humanity.
Was Amanda telling the truth? Is James a person, or not? Regardless, James accepted her absolutely horrible truth in the place of his own, and in doing so, apparently damned the world.
Unreliable explainers are great antagonists for cosmic investigators. In some cases, like this one, they’re the figure who introduces the possibility of the cosmic to the investigator and to the audience. But they do so on their own terms, reducing the scale of possibility, and introducing doubt when the audience (if not the investigator) comes to suspect their motives. Belief in the cosmic gets all tangled up in believing the unreliable explainer. Depending on whether the investigator shares the audience’s doubt, the unreliable explainer can serve as a useful counterweight, or, as the character Amanda shows, a way to cut the audience loose and set certainty adrift. And like in real life, the investigator is in trouble when they mistake someone who sees them as a means to an end, for someone who cares about their future.
NEXT MONTH
Thank you, everyone, for your continued curiosity in this weird genre experiment. If you haven’t already, please subscribe, and if someone you know also loves strange mysteries, please let them know they’re very welcome here at the Cosmic Mystery Club.
Next month, we’re visiting Twin Peaks to talk about cosmic investigative methods and what it means for a detective to do whatever it takes to solve a case. See you then.