But, even if it didn’t look that great (there was still some great cinematography, even with the constraints) suffice to say it sounded amazing. Lynch is much celebrated as a director, which sometimes overshadows his comparable skill as a sound designer. The sound is the reason why it’s always worth seeing a new Lynch film in the cinema, even if he’d shot it on a mobile phone.
So, while INLAND EMPIRE is a stunning piece of work, I can’t say I’m too impressed with the move to digital, and the creative freedom it has given him. My favourite of the four films he’s made in the last 15 years was The Straight Story, which was the Lynch style applied to a Disney film, and is the most restrained film he’s ever made. Both Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive don’t really stand up as well by comparison.
But with his new found creative and financial freedom, Lynch may not ever need to make a studio picture ever again, he’ll never need to try his hand at a romantic comedy to make ends meet, or to be hired to helm a summer blockbuster, which for a director like Lynch would be a much more radical and interesting project. Instead he can quietly carry on making ever more abstract and inscrutable films solely for his diehard audience, churning them out until there’s no one watching any more, much like Godard did. Which in some ways would be a shame.
There was another film I saw recently, Michel Gondry’s latest, The Science Of Sleep, which has much in common with INLAND EMPIRE. Both are surrealist, non-linear, open-process, and purposely blur the line between accepted reality and fantasy. But The Science of Sleep somehow managed to do all this in a way that was also charming and funny, while INLAND EMPIRE just used fear and disorientation cranked up to 11.
Lynch has recently said that since discovering the freedom of DV, he can’t go back to celluloid. Which means we can probably expect him to disappear even further up his own art-hole in the next few years. Gondry, on the other hand, is on his third feature and every new film he makes is bursting with creativity and originality. I have to say that, even as a long-time Lynch obsessive, I am now much more excited to see the big budget sci-fi epic that Gondry will inevitably get offered any day now, than the next few years of David Lynch home videos.
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