Empty Man Derrida

The News

By Ray Pride

March 23, 2021

Inside The Empty Man: “For one thing, on a simple base level: The high school has to be named something, you might as well name it something thematically relevant. The other is the idea of hollowing out the objective standards of what’s understood to be true is what the project of deconstruction, if not encourages, at least allows for. The narrative was intended to atomize along with the psyche of the main character. The movie and the character are reflecting each other as it goes, and that becomes a feedback loop where no one knows what’s really true anymore. I know what I think is true in the story—nobody’s really hit on it—but I think that’s fine. The idea was to present people with some possibilities and let them chew over it and hopefully they enjoy chewing over it enough that they want to go see it again. With Jacques Derrida, it was just a case of, he’s the primary French deconstructionist with the most hold on what that means. There are a lot of other people I could have used there that wouldn’t necessarily triggered the same bells. That’s really what it was about, just trying to give people fodder for how to think about the movie. Part of what you’re trying to do is train an audience to think about it in a way that they might not normally think you’d have when you sat down in the seat. By showing something like that, it’s saying, ‘Okay, think about it in this other way…'”

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