Case Study #17: The Case of the Valued Disparity

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Seeing how his 2019 World War I masterpiece 1917 was a mind-bogglingly complex film for Sam Mendes to make – as well as a broad and immersive experience for us the audience to take in – it came as no surprise to me to learn that his follow-up, 2022’s Empire of Light, would be a narrow story about the relationships of a few characters in a cozy, quotidian spot: a half-dilapidated old movie palace on the south coast of England in 1981. Who wouldn’t begrudge this director – who had already helmed two Bond films this century – a bite-sized, character study palette cleanser between big, notable works? Yet, just as 1917 was paradoxically also simple and linear (e.g., seeming to be all one take and take place in real time)[1], when I finally saw Empire of Light, I was floored to realize this tenth film of his is both Mendes’s most complex cinematic effort to date and an admirable example of how neatly layers of paired, interlocked pieces can fit inside a tight, at times deceptively bland exterior.

In that sense, Empire of Light is a lot like the intricate mechanism inside the film projector’s housing unit that Norman, the Empire Cinema’s projectionist, teaches the new employee Stephen about.

Norman also points out to Stephen that a trick in our brains tells us to ignore the darkness in between the frames when they are projected in front of us at the rate of 24 per second. Emphasizing what can be extrapolated from this optical illusion, Mendes had his art department etch a germane quote from the Shakespeare play Love’s Labour’s Lost on the wall of the movie theater lobby where most of the action was filmed: “Find Where Light In Darkness Lies.” In a September 2022 profile on the trade news site Deadline, he explained, “That’s the thing that links all the different threads of the movie.” The article goes on to cite the same themes of the movie – “love, race, and the cinema,” as well as mental illness – discussed in all the reviews when it came out.[2] But I interpret the lined-up lenses of the Shakespeare and Mendes quotes differently, especially when we frame them within an emphasized fragment of the wisdom Norman passes onto Stephen: our brains tell us to ignore the darkness.

For me, the primary theme in Empire of Light is exactly that problem: the challenge we face of equally grasping both the light and the darkness in any given situation for us to sufficiently illuminate a Humane way forward for ourselves. For this to be obvious, balance and imbalance would need to be abundantly juxtaposed, and Empire of Light does just that. Mirrored opposites proliferate from one end of the film to the other, to such an extent that the message clearly becomes less about any one narrative theme than the sheer fact of the connection between each pair. What’s in common in aggregate is the importance of the relationship between parts – not just that, though, but also the fact that the dynamics of these relationships are so common and fundamental to our everyday framing that we rarely notice how often one end of a pairing gets inordinately more thorough and highlighted attention than the other, which in contrast can be hard to discern in the dark.

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This imbalanced phenomenon can be hard to notice also because on the surface a mirror image paradigm implies clear symmetry. However, when we drill down, we see that of course what is on one side and what is on another in a reflective pairing are very different at a conceptual level, with a greater value attributed to one – and taken for granted – than the other.

This is most easily seen in the scenes in Empire of Light where a mirror is literally employed, most notably where we see the protagonist Hilary – the deputy manager of the movie theater – look at herself several times in her apartment’s bathroom mirror as she opens the medicine cupboard to either take her lithium pills to keep her mental illness at bay or else debate doing so and then leave them in their bottle. The point isn’t where she is at in her journey of handling her affliction. The point is so obvious that like in all these cases we’re liable to pass over it in search of unnecessary complexity: the real human head is both similar to and conceptually completely different from its mirrored reflection.

This contrast is something to keep in mind as I run down the many other pairings I noticed in Empire of Light.  They range from mirrored settings, relationships, actions, phrasings, themes, and the repetition of key words. These include, but are not limited to:

·       Big rooms of empty of furnishings: (A ballroom full of people, where Hilary takes dance lessons amongst many others) & (The rundown, unused restaurant above the theater where just Hilary and Stephen go)

·       Supervisor/employee relationships: (Donald, the manager, and Hilary) & (Hilary and Stephen)

·       Poem readings: (Hilary recites part of Lord Alfred Tennyson’s “In Memorium [Ring Out, Wild Bells]” to Stephen on the roof just before New Year’s Eve fireworks go off) & (Hilary reads W.H. Auden’s “Death’s Echo” in front of a crowd when she storms the stage of the gala Chariots of Fire opening) & (Off-screen at the end, Hilary reads Philip Larkin’s “The Trees” as we see Stephen looking at the open book she has given him while riding on the train)

·       Repetition of end words in two of these three poems: (“Death’s Echo”: “Dance, Dance, Dance till you drop”) & (“The Trees”: “Begin afresh, afresh, afresh”)

·       Mocking strangers: (Working in the lobby, Stephen imitates an old customer’s walk to make his coworker Janice laugh) & (When a group of neo-Nazis accost him in an underpass, one of them imitates him to make the others laugh)

·       People outside the theater eager to get in: (A crowd of moviegoers left unattended because Hilary and Stephen were having sex on the top floor) & (A crowd of racist skinheads pushing at and then breaking in the doors)

·       Smoking in the theater: (Norman tells his coworkers in the break room that he’s asked management to not allow smoking in the auditorium, because it interferes with the projection of the film and gets on the screen) & (Soon after, he is shown smoking in the projection booth)

·       Peeking out at something: (Sent into a closet in her apartment by Hilary, Stephen watches through a crack in the doors as the police and social services break open her front door to take her back to the hospital’s mental ward) & (Soon after, we see Norman teaching Stephen how to project and both are shown peeking through the small windows in the booth at the movie and audience)

·       People breaking down doors: (The police and social services break down Hilary’s door to get her help for her mental health issues) & (The racist skinheads break down the theater’s doors to get in and terrorize the staff and harm Stephen)

·       Being hospitalized: (Prior to the film and then again midway through it, Hilary is hospitalized for mental health issues) & (Later in the film, Stephen is hospitalized after being beaten by racists)

·       Healing another: (Stephen heals a top floor pigeon’s broken wing by putting his cut-up sock around it as a sling) & (The social worker and those at the mental institution and her doctor and her friendly coworkers help Hilary heal) & (Hospital workers heal Stephen after his friendly coworkers tend to him, as does the love he receives from his mother, his girlfriend Ruby, and Hilary before and after all that)

·       Life: (We see Hilary watching the end of the film Being There, as Peter Sellers’s character walks across the surface of a lake and we hear in a voiceover: “Life… is a state of mind”) & (In the next scene, Stephen and his mother and Ruby are having dinner and when he goes to the bathroom, his girlfriend says to his mother that he seems different since returning home from the hospital and his mother says, “He’s experienced a little bit of… Life.” Notably, the next scene begins with a shot of Stephen walking away from the camera wearing a hat not unlike Peter Sellers’s look at the end of that film) & (The end of the Bob Dylan song “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” playing over the scene where Hilary is in a manic episode in her apartment, looking out the window at Stephen standing on the sidewalk below, with the last line: “But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life and life only”)

·       Hilary and Delia, Stephen’s mother and a nurse at the hospital where he is being treated, talking: (First, far apart in the hospital lobby) & (Then, close up, with the latter taking the former’s hand)

·       Watching a movie among strangers: (Stephen encourages Hilary to actually watch a movie, saying she should sit in the dark among a bunch of people who don’t know her) & (Soon after, Norman is shown peeking out at the film he is projecting and the camera pans along his personal break room walls covered with clippings of movie stars, the strangers who surround him while he watches)

·       Going away: (Stephen tells Hilary about how his father, a bus driver, just went away when he was a child and he never heard from him again) & (Hilary encourages Stephen to go away – to pursue his specific dream of becoming an architect – and at the end of the film he does) & (Norman tells Hilary about the fact that he has a 22 year-old son in London whom he hasn’t seen since he was eight, because he went away, but no longer remembers why)

·       People watching a film: (We see audiences – and Hilary, alone – watching movies at the Empire Cinema) & (We ourselves are in a theater – at least, I was – watching this film Empire of Light)

Including that last one was no sly, meta cheat, because reaching off the screen into our real lives is what the best films do. Sometimes that level of connection between what is real and what is created includes an additional pairing, beginning from the other direction: the artist’s own life. In the fall of 2022, we got several films depicting elements from great directors’ childhoods: Armageddon Time, in which James Gray fictionalized the period of time when his parents sent him to a prestigious but prejudiced private school in New York City, while he secretly kept up a friendship with a Black boy he knew from the public school he had attended; The Fabelmans, in which Steven Spielberg fictionalized the double-helix in his past that saw his burgeoning interest in filmmaking intertwine with the disintegration of his parents’ marriage; and this film here, Empire of Light, in which Sam Mendes – as the sole screenwriter for the first time in his filmmaking career – fictionalized the mental health struggles he saw his mother go through as a boy. To be clear, in the film, Hilary works at a movie theater, which his mother never did – although Mendes himself did briefly – plus the film character has no children.[3] However, that just points back to the essential lesson this film imparts: there will not be a one-to-one correspondence between mirror image pairings (or triplets, as in a few of the examples above); on the contrary, similarities and differences are both a given in the project of increasing our awareness of how things relate to each other.

This is emphasized by the song choice Mendes and his music supervisor Randall Poster cue up to play over the scene where the authorities break down Hilary’s door to find her sitting at her table with her coat on and her suitcase packed, ready to go with both relief and resignation: Cat Stevens’s “Morning Has Broken.” The opening lines we hear – muted, reminding us of Hilary’s numb state of mind – are: “Morning has broken like the first morning/Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.” Stevens, with deceptive simplicity, is helping us understand how mirrored opposites relate to each other: (A current, concrete example of something) & (The progenitor of the whole category it falls under). Granted, that song brings tears to my eyes any time I hear it, but in this context the added poignancy seems to be that Hilary is herself outside such an analogous equation, if we work backwards from the fact that she is having trouble relating to others in healthy ways.

Yet by the time Empire of Light finishes and we’ve watched her have a beautiful, fulfilling character arc, it becomes clear that she is positioned at one end of such a pairing, but what’s at the other end only finally gets cast into relief by how opaque and unattended to it has remained compared to her. Those two are the apotheosis of everything I have been talking about here, and when I noticed them, everything else clicked into place.

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Before completing that picture, though, I want to back up to flesh out my thought process on this. As I left the screening of this film, already tallying in my head mirrored pairings to note down, I was reminded of all the practice I had done decades ago to prepare for the analogy part of the SAT test, learning the template to keep in my head of: If (This) is to (That), then (x) is to (What)? Thus, from earlier in this essay, we might line up:

·       If (Stephen mocking a movie theater customer’s walk) is to (A neo-Nazi mocking his own walk) …

·       … Then (Norman lamenting the audience members smoking) is to (His smoking himself while projecting a film) …

And so on, until we get to:

·       … Then (An individual whose mental illness makes them interact with others in maladaptive ways) is to (A group of people whose ignorant, prejudiced beliefs make them interact with the rest of society in maladaptive ways)

Well, yes, most of the examples I noted had the same individual flipped around into the inverse position and that doesn’t seem to be the case here. But it is if we consider that in Empire of Light, derangement itself is a main character.

Through the character of Hilary, a bright light is shone on not just how mental illness can manifest in an individual and how it can impact their life and the lives of those around them, but also how they and their community can tend to that challenge from many different angles until the individual is resettled amongst others in a healthy, comfortable, and appreciated way. The phenomenon of a group manifesting derangement though – in the form of roving packs of skinhead white supremacists – is given no such similar in-depth consideration in Empire of Light, and I think that is fantastic. The lesson then becomes not a cliched, didactic tandem unfurling of outlines of how society should deal with this problem and that problem, but rather an emphasis on the inherent disparity between the two. Thus, with this and all the film’s other examples, we reach the level of abstraction and are able to extrapolate this lesson to apply to all such mirrored pairings we might come across in life, noticing which ends of them get less attention and should be pulled up out of the dark.

In our binary, hierarchical thinking, there is a tendency to unwittingly favor or work on more certain ends of paired, similar-but-different problems. This dominance is literally spelled out in the title of the film I’ve been examining here: EMPIRE of Light. An empire, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is: “A major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority; the territory of such a political unit; something resembling a political empire; imperial sovereignty, rule, or dominion.”[4] When we allow the light to shine with such broad sovereignty exclusively across the tops of particular problems or perspectives – which flick before us demanding our immediate attention like a succession of frames in a reel of film – then as Norman the projectionist points out, our brains tell us to ignore the darkness. And what’s happening there in the darkness – playing out in mirror image fashion – impacts us all, whether we pay it attention or not.

[1] https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/1917-one-shot-cinematography/#:~:text=1917%20Cinematography,-How%20was%201917&text=Let's%20cut%20right%20to%20the,and%20his%20DP%20Roger%20Deakins.

[2] https://deadline.com/2022/09/sam-mendes-empire-of-light-interview-olivia-colman-micheal-ward-james-bond-director-1235117343/

[3] ibid

[4] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/empire