How THE EMPTY MAN Tackles Trans Identity Through Existential Crisis
From classic series like Nightmare On Elm Street and Sleepaway Camp to modern offerings like Jennifer’s Body and Midsommar, queerness is everywhere in horror. Because queer-coded horror is never surface, it sometimes takes is an intelligent author to sniff it out. The Empty Man has recently had one of these unpackings.
Writer Nadine Smith has published a fascinating editorial on transness in the sleeper horror thinker The Empty Man on Them.
If you haven’t seen the film yet, you’re not alone. The marketing materials for The Empty Man were empty in and of themselves — promising yet another The Bye-Bye Man-style generic offering. But ask someone who has seen the film, and you’re likely to hear a very different story than what is revealed in the film’s trailer.
The Empty Man has a lot to say about the human experience. While the film is rarely forward-facing on issues like sex and gender, it does tackle these themes brazenly. There are moments of explicit reference to the trans experience as it relates to broader internal identity.
The Empty Man lands on gender and sex in its most obvious form when the main character finds himself investigating the shadowy Pontifex Institute (as led by the always excellent Stephen Root). Pontifex asks its followers to embrace their very Buddhistic teachings of emptiness and the abyss. The main character (and obvious everyman) James encounters subversive messaging at Pontifex, with flashes of words like:
Nothing is binary, everything is fluid
Science says the genders are discrete
A woman is just a likely to have a penis as a man is.
However, every beat of The Empty Man is interpretable as a reflection on human society as scripted archetypes. The film unpacks the roles assigned to us at birth. It questions what happens if we meander from these strict roles.
Author Nadine Smith says this on the subject of protagonist James:
In the end, it is about a character who realizes they are nothing more than a scripted archetype, and that the course of their entire life has been determined for them — a realization that will be painfully familiar for anyone who has unquestionably followed the gender role they were assigned at birth, regardless of how awkward or ill-fitting it felt.
Nadine continues, saying:
In my experience, realizing you’re trans is a bit like being in The Truman Show, thinking that who you are is natural, when in reality every expectation placed upon you, all the clothing you’re made to wear, the friends you make, and the methods of socialization to which you’re exposed are all defined by the expectations society associates with the gender on your birth certificate. That’s strikingly similar to what James goes through, when he realizes that he’s simply been the flesh puppet of a group of people who wrote his backstory and then willed him into existence.
Almost anything that threatens the strict certainty according to which he lives his life and presents himself makes him uncomfortable; the Pontifex Institute teaches that no categories or divisions truly exist, which is something that used to horrify me, too, when I was afraid to embrace the true fluidity of gender.
Nadine’s article about the hidden trans meaning behind The Empty Man got me thinking. Is the film really a reflection on cultural roles? Does The Empty Man reflect my struggle for agency as an individual? Subsequently, how does this engage with societal norms, especially to do with sex and gender?
Lastly, what did you think about The Empty Man? Let me know on Twitter via @joshkorngut. I’m always down to talk about all things horror! Dread Central is now on Google News!
Categorized:News
