MUBI

Everyone takes notice when David Lynch releases a film, and this is no exception.

What’s probably so great is that the scope is so vast and unpredictable. For the massive 180 minutes duration, the whole world stops and takes notice. It’s such an extraodinary film because the narrative is so jumbled and seemingly all over the place, but it’s not. It’s actually a very organized and mature piece.

The beauty of Lynch’s film is that they hardly ever make that much sense, with the exception of Blue Velvet. Every time you sit down to watch a David Lynch, you aren’t expecting to understand every plot line or every aspect of the film, but that doesn’t matter as much as you probably would expect it to.

The beauty lies in the acting, the writing and Lynch’s innovative and crazy camera techniques. And it’s all here in this 2006 entry. Laura Dern’s performance is perhaps the most astounding part of the picture. She probably should have got a ton of awards for it, but she didn’t. Lynch’s writing is also unique and the camera techniques are just fucking fantastic. I’m going to need to watch this over (probably not soon) to fully understand it, but at this first watch I know I like it. Insane.

To this day, no film has affected me to the degree Inland Empire has. It took me hours to shake off my initial reaction—a seamless mixture of confusion, intense fascination, and even fear. As of this moment it sits on my DVD shelf, but I haven’t actually watched it in full since my initial viewing. You have to dedicate yourself to this film, and it’s certainly not something you watch with casual acquaintances (though, if your buddies are Lynch buffs, go right head).

On the whole I agree with what is being said before me. The film felt spot-on for me only sporadically - and Eraserhead is my #1 favorite film. Though the film does achieve, in discreet moments, a sort of complex philosophical catharsis that has reduced me (lifted me?) to tears on several occasions. Such moments for me are: Laura Dern watching herself watch herself in the theatre and the hug with Dern and the girl watching the TV the whole time while the TV captures the TV captures the TV, which creates an endless loop, a universe of its own -- something I often muse about when I catch myself between two facing mirrors.

But on the whole, it’s too student film for me. Too grainy. I much prefer the beautiful celluloid elegance on Mulholland Dr. Some parts like the meeting with “the psychiatrist” at the top of the staircase work well in a grainy print, others, like the scenes in the opulent house, do not.

A very interesting film about reality, subconscious, but yes, I agree with the opinion that Lynch didn’t hit gold here: it becomes muddied and goofy with all the ridiculous things he puts in it (i.e.: “you need to wear the watch and burn a hole in the cloth with a cigarette, then LOOK THROUGH THE HOLE…….”).

I mean, come on, enough is enough, even for a Lynch fan like me.

It’s somewhat difficult to really criticize a film that is such a claustrophobic vision. Inland Empire is pure Lynch, and thanks to his creative encouragement from Studio Canal, and his avant-garde canonization, the man can basically do whatever he pleases.

Plots in Lynch films are just as relevant as plots in the films of Antonioni, Ozu, and Tati. Although, Inland Empire takes liberties with storytelling that are a little bloated even for such an experimental film. It’s more of a tone that is conveyed well. After he establishes the more obvious conflict of adultery, Lynch is then able to boldly explore his main character’s psychological neurosis and fear of death. “A girl is in trouble”, and probably because she understands that her actions have grave consequences. As film readings of Lynch tend to be either too simple, or far too ridiculous, I’m just going to avoid that altogether. I understood the film’s basic premise, and I could write about ten pages, right now, on what I thought Lynch was getting at here, but It would probably sound as insufferable as someone telling someone else about a dream they had the other night. Anyway.

I can’t say that I’m pleased with his rather stalwart decision to only shoot using digital video from now on. Mulholland Drive shares a few things in common with Inland Empire, but the former is far more aesthetically pleasing, as it always has been when Lynch is working with film. DV really is such a nauseating and inappropriate medium for Lynch to shoot with. I mean this in the sense that no one with a background in painting should use DV. Maybe someone like Tavernier, with his Bunuelesque wandering shots, it would work well with it, but with Lynch it just makes his visual tendencies seem more generic. Granted, he played around with it a bit throughout the film, but it’s the type of experimentation, that, even for him, should be relegated to something like his website work, or short films.

Otherwise, it’s full of top-notch, Lynchian deadpan acting. And it’s great to see him working with Laura Dern again, who was pretty much phenomenal, especially in the scene where she is “dying” in front of the building with the homeless people. His decision to shoot on location in Poland is perfect. It’s such an appropriate architectural environment for Lynch. You can really see just how carefully he chose most of the locations here.

Overall, Inland Empire is a flawed film, in many ways. It takes risk that are occasionally unsuccessful. It’s almost alienating in its visionary obstinacy. And it seems as though Lynch is probably going to continue to work in this way; with complete disregard for any audience whatsoever. It bothers me when certain filmmakers do this, but with directors such as Jarmusch, the Coen Brothers, and Lynch, I would say that they’ve pretty much earned their privilege to make uncompromising films.

A madenning film, but only because Lynch submitted to shitty DV and abandoned the medium that best captured his genius vision: Film. The films looks shitty, but I’m still getting around the labyrinthine fantasma of it’s construction, still haven’t finished watching it. image quality aside, this is the progression of an artist no longer bound by mere restrictions and free to indulge the possibilities video can make. Shitty image quality aside, what Lynch’s new found progression finds is freedom from narrative constraints and commercial preoccupations. A visionary work of madness.

This is the kind of film that you won’t know what it’s about when someone asks you, but it’s also the kind that’ll make you think while watching it and long after that. To me (because Lynch’s films are supposed to be intepreted differently by every member in the audience), this films introduces the theme of an actor caught in a conflict between reality and realism; the moment in which an actor can’t tell his own self from his character, but whatever this film is about, is actually up to you.

David Lynch has made many “masterpieces” in his career. From the critically heralded Elephant Man, to the cult classic Blue Velvet, his debut surrealist nightmare Eraserhead, and the most recent headtrips, Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr, Lynch has always found a way to get into our psyches, grab a hold, and not let go until years after your viewing, if at all. With his latest film, Inland Empire, we are given his least accessible plot yet. As far as comprehending anything that is happening before your eyes, once you think you have a grip, he totally tosses your ideas out the window. Coherence, linear progression, or even characters staying the characters that they are at first will not be found here. Instead, Lynch has crafted his most viscerally rich tale of imagination and dream, once again exposing the underbelly of society and the human condition. People cannot be trusted and all will betray those they love. If we are to believe what transpires here, and your guilt and/or paranoia for finding how those around you have let you down won’t kill you, your manifestations of fully choreographed dance sequences involving your prostitute friends most certainly will.

If you are reading this hoping for some semblance of a plot summary, I think Lynch’s tagline description is all you need: this is a tale about “a woman in trouble.” Well, let us make that women in trouble, unless we can find a way to think all the different entities played by Karolina Gruszka and Laura Dern are in fact one and the same. The story starts out very well, much how the last couple films Lynch has created have. There is a strange visitor, played brilliantly by Grace Zabriske with a flawless Balkinish accent, who calls on our actress lead (Dern) to discuss her new role. Along with premonitions and cryptic talk about 9:45 and after midnight, and today and tomorrow, she relays a couple old stories, one about a man and another of a woman going to market and the alley behind. Not only do these stories end up occurring in some form later on, but the times themselves as well as the aspect of time alone play a strong role in all scenes. It is when the tomorrow our visitor speaks of starts to play out that we are thrust into the story as it struggles through scene changes, character swapping, and even to a soap opera starring people in rabbit suits, complete with canned applause and laughter.

What at first seems to be straightforward, a mirroring of adulterous lives between our actress Nikki and actor Devon with their fictional counterparts Sue and Billy, becomes so much more. It begins to unravel to the point where the audience can’t tell which reality is the true one, or if both are false while the truth lies in a third reality between a different Sue and Billy met by his wife Doris’ eventually finding out and wielding of a screwdriver for retribution. However, once it seems to be continuing nicely, complete with a fourth mirroring of the Polish actors involved in the original version of the movie they are shooting, everything changes as aspects become switched around. The screwdriver leaves Doris’ hands and enters those of one of Dern’s many incarnations. Her husband, as Nikki, becomes the husband of many different female roles and we have a strange voyeur played by Gruszka watching everything transpire on television. Finally, Dern ends up discovering everything is being played out on a movie theater screen, her life being shown for all, although it is she who is the lone viewer.

Eventually, I started to see the many references to Lynch’s past films. Whether they be literal, Zabriske’s acceptance of a drink with similar yet opposite reaction as that of Angelo Badalamenti in Mulholland Dr; to common metaphor prop usage, the colored lamps, curtains, and prevalence of phones as communication between parallel realities; or even playing on the notions of certain interpretations that have been made of past films, Lost Highway being a complete dream by a man guilt stricken from killing his wife and a scene here where Dern’s character is dying and those watching start mentioning things that have been happening, as if explaining how the film has been a manifestation of what she heard as she died; the correlations are endless. It is almost like Lynch wanted his first foray into digital film to be one of rebirth, (I will say that while I was a bit annoyed from the soft focus and inferior look to filmstock, what he does with the medium is astonishing). Lynch is known for not explaining his films and never maintaining that there is one explanation to solve the puzzle. Maybe Inland Empire is his way of showing that the experience and visceral reaction is what he looks to accomplish. He wants to make his viewers think and find their own meaning from their own lives in what happens on the screen. In this way, Lynch seems to edit the film in a way to accommodate these interpretations and then, once one can be believed, he turns it around and asks another question. For every false answer comes three questions, and the labyrinth’s center just gets farther and farther away.

If I were to wager any kind of guess to the true meaning of this film, having just seen it with little time to flesh out each thread shown, it would be as follows. Inland Empire, to me, is a commentary on the state of Hollywood and the inferior films churning out from it. The general public goes and sees drivel and by allowing it to succeed, helps make certain more will be made. Answers don’t need to be spoonfed to the viewers, and actually they shouldn’t. I believe Lynch is calling out actors for facilitating this degradation in quality by calling them whores to the business. As Dern’s character falls from aristocratic success to poor housewife, with child from a different man, turning tricks on the street with her friends that she “remembers from somewhere,” we see the credibility drain as she becomes a whore for money. Harry Dean Stanton even asks multiple people for money, reminiscing about the time when he could sustain himself, while those around him just smile and give in. Dern continuously watches herself slowly fall apart as she cheats on her artistic interest with vanity. Her friends even say how if you have great cleavage, you are set for life because talent plays no role in success. It is only Gruszka’s lost girl watching television that sees the destruction occurring around her, crying at the horror of it all. Desperate to do something about it, she finally gets up and sees her husband and son come home to her. Hers is the only happiness, while all the other characters find themselves trapped inside the house of vanity, surrounded by the other whores, living their selfish lives without regard for the society they are doing a disservice to.