I went to sleep thinking about Inland Empire and now I’ve awakened with Inland Empire still swirling around in my head. I think this is what David Lynch wants from his audience, and it’s hard to argue that his audience isn’t looking for the same thing. Otherwise, why would they continue to watch his movies?
Lynch exploits the voyeur side of the viewer like no other film director, save possibly Hitchcock, and he dares you to keep watching. With Inland Empire, he has created his most difficult and challenging feature yet. The three-hour incomprehensible nightmare is a frustrating and bleak step into Lynch’s world, certain to polarize audiences who manage to sit through it.
No matter what anyone says, the “plot” of Inland Empire is going to have some major question marks regardless of how much you dissect what you’ve seen. There’s certainly a narrative to be found which, although extremely fractured, provides a basic outline of what’s on the screen. Laura Dern plays an actress just cast in somewhat of a comeback role opposite Justin Theroux’s character, an actor with a reputation for bedding his female co-stars. Jeremy Irons is the director of the Southern melodrama-type film, which we learn was first filmed with Polish actors but never finished due to the deaths of its stars. It’s the rest of Inland Empire, meaning the great majority, that borders on incoherence.
Some of the scenes, like the frequent clips in Polish, can be explained, while the significance of others, such as those involving the humanlike rabbits voiced by Mulholland Drive cast members, is much more difficult to find. Truthfully, no matter how much I think about it, those rabbits who appear as if they’re on a soundstage for a sitcom do not seem to fit anywhere with the rest of the movie. That’s okay, however, as viewers have realized that Lynch’s films can sometimes be puzzles with some pieces from other puzzles stuck in there and with other pieces missing altogether. David Lynch certainly doesn’t play by the rules of conventional filmmaking and that’s precisely the reason he has so many admirers. He’s built up a deserved reputation that allows him to make something like Inland Empire without too much of a backlash from those seeking linear narratives and coherent stories.
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Article comments
1 - handyguy
I am envious that you got to see the film with the added 'performance' by Lynch. If this was the screening at Lincoln Center on Saturday, it was sold out before I even heard about it. Even when his movies are a mixed bag of the good, the bad and the incomprehensible [as nearly all are], he is a national treasure.
2 - Christopher Soden
1. I am thrilled as I didn't realize that Lynch had released a new film.
2. I heard in a conversation recently that Mullholland Drive began as a television project that was scrapped. I've got to say I've always had greater appreciation for his films than TWIN PEAKS.
3. I never thought I'd live to see a time when audiences could embrace the associative intuitive logic of a director like David Lynch. It gives me hope for the human race.
4. I think a lot of folks don't realize that many "traditional" films (predicated on linear narrative) have the sort of disturbing subtext that Lynch simply brings to the surface.
5. The first time I watched MULLHOLLAND DRIVE, I'd rented the tape and by the time they got to the heavily made up beehive singing Roy Orbison's CRYING, in Spanish, to a weeping audience, I had to shut it off. It was so profoundly upsetting that I couldn't take anymore. And I couldn't tell you why.
6. I never cut off before the end of a film.
7. David Lynch seems to have discovered a way to fuse the hallucinatory, revelatory, ridiculous, profane, intense and transcendent to a single....what? Tableau? Image? Take? Scene?
8. Consider the bruised brunette, Isabella Rosellini showing up naked in the living room of Hope Lange. Consider Gloria Grahame showing up naked at the home of teresa Wright, say. Or Jean Simmons.
9. Remember "The Cowboy" in Mullholland Drive and how preposterous he seemed? And yet he scared the hell out of me.
10. My friend David and I once made a list of recurring themes and images in David Lynch films:
a. Accidental car collisions that turn into infernos.
b. The grotesque spectacle of grief.
c. The blurred lines between waking and repose.
d. The blurred distinctions between the identities of say, 2 people of the same gender.
e. Roy Orbison songs.
f. Depavity as slapstick.
g. Sorcery.
h. The collision of naivete and despair.
i. Smoking./Matches.
j. amnesia or the loss of identity
k. dance those blues away
l. your subconscious attempting to contact you
11. Some directors' mistakes are far more compelling than other directors' successes.
12. "Here's to your fuck, Frank."
Cheers,
Christopher
3 - steven
If you want to know where David gets his ideas, then check out his new book, Catching the Big Fish. It's an eye-opener and the first time he reveals what the source of his creatvity is. You can get it at Amazon.