A little while ago I saw a post on Facebook from an acquaintance linking to an AV Club article on how Empire Records is a bad movie. The author goes into detail about how the film is bad at being a representation of the 90s and even worse at being a movie about music and record shops. I don’t necessarily agree with the first point, but I do agree with the second. The thing is, despite taking place in a record shop, focusing on its employees, and having a central plot line about the store being sold to a big record store chain, Empire Records isn’t about any of that. Or at least I don’t think it is.
Before seeing the film, I was going to art school for an animation degree and working part time at a mall shoe store. Being young a dumb, I viewed making money now at the shoe store as more valuable than making money in the future as an animator and I eventually left school to work retail full time. I was surrounded by young dumb kids just as stupid as I was thinking this was the life, led by one of the coolest bosses I had experienced up to that point in my life. There was a core group of us that enjoyed working with each other, keeping the store running, and our boss wanted nothing more than to be our friends.
Empire Records released in 1995 and I have to admit, I paid it no mind when it did so. Like many of its fans, I first saw it on home video. I was immediately captured. It got me. It was showcasing my experiences through exaggerated caricatures of myself and my co-workers.
Empire Records isn’t a movie about music. It’s not a movie about selling records. And it doesn’t have anything to say about either. It’s a movie about friendship set against a crazy fucked up day in the life of some dumb retail brats and their boss.
Sure, it’s overly schmaltzy and it tries a bit too hard to be cool, in the process not being nearly as cool as it thinks it is. But this is why it works for me. I literally thought that I was too cool for school and I wasn’t really cool at all. And neither were any of my co-workers. We were dumb, impressionable kids that would have done anything for the boss we thought was so awesome. Nevermind that the relationship she had with us bordered on inappropriate or that her leadership and direction inspired us to not only make bad life choices but, sometimes, illegal ones. We loved her and would have stolen the money out of the safe and gambled it away in Atlantic City, if it meant saving her (and ultimately ourselves) from change. And you know what? I look back on that time period, see the mistakes I made and how they ultimately impacted my life, and despite all the bad shit that happened and bad choices I made, I’d still do it the same way.
Empire Records was our lives transported to our screens. The superficial fight those kids were having is the superficial fight so many of us have at work every day. The fact that it was in a record store was just window dressing. It could have been set in a shoe store, or a department store, or just about anywhere and had the same impact.
Does that make it a good movie? I don’t know. But I do know the film speaks to me on an emotional level. I find it fun and entertaining to watch today just as much as I did when I first saw it. And maybe none of that makes it good, but it does makes it worthwhile.
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