I messed up the title of this thread, I meant it to be Inland Empire in David Lynch, and instead I made it David Lynch in Inland Empire… Sorry. This wasn’t intended to be a redundant discussion.
I have no idea how to respond, Biberkopf, other than you have a good thesis.
I can only respond to “And is Lynch making the same movie over and over again, each time getting deeper and deeper into the implications of his theme and being more and more stylistically experimental?”
I don’t think he is making the same thing over again, but definitely exploring similar themes. And he is getting more experimental? Yes, he’s descending into total chaos. His stuff is still great, but his works seem to be making less and less sense, are becoming murkier and more difficult to parse meaning from as the ratio of signal-to-noise gets smaller and smaller.
Vellaem, thanks for reading my wordy post, first of all. I think you’re right, he’s not making the same film again and again. I’m not sure if I see him working with total chaos, though. I don’t see him trampling on our emotional identifications with the characters. There are always people in his films who are sympathetic, and people who are not. Lynch points very clearly to how feelings play out. Tears denote sadness. Anger is anger. Jealousy is jealousy. Etcetera. What becomes confusing is that often these emotions seem to occur at inappropriate moments; but they are nonetheless real. If we follow each character moment to moment, he or she more or less stays within a certain range of pitch or tone. So there are like these landmarks for finding one’s way through the woods, so to speak. I don’t know, I’m just trying to figure it out for myself I guess.
OK, Bob Stutsman, very funny. Now what did you do with Justin Biberkopf?
Justin, what you say sounds interesting, pretty cool—but how is the “inland empire” working as a woman’s internal space (and do you mean the womb)? In what way would it be an empire?
Just a couple questions:Does Rosselini triumph in Blue Velvet? Or is her performance what she’s been forced into by masculinist/infantile fantasies by Frank? Isn’t Laura Dern’s character more triumphant in that her dream of the bird comes true? Though Lynch ironizes it by having the bird be so fake looking? And Rita is forced into a performance by way of Betty/Diane in the narrative she creates. And Laura Palmer is forced into acting as well. I’m wondering if the issue is about desire (and Mulholland Drive then indicates that this need not be only hetero-masculinist desire) and it being something that destroys rational means of containment: like narrative structure or bourgeois values.
Inland is complex in large part of because it is so self-consciously about cinema and narrative conventions. Gender roles are certainly part of a kind of social performance, ones that are grafted onto people from various social orders. Nicky’s wound at the end isn’t actually real—so she goes from that performance into the song performance at the end, one whose artifice is decidedly explicit—unlike the previous scene which seems “real.” So I guess I’m asking what you make, given your thesis, the way that Lynch foregrounds acting and narrative in terms of your reading of gender?
In medias res, man. In medias fuckin’ res. Every single shot in this movie, every single set-up, every single line of text, for long periods, we’re thrown into the middle of something we can tell we don’t fully understand. The movie is a MONUMENT of unease. Incredible. Unlike anything I’d seen before…SO uncomfortable!
The movie’s aesthetic is also a natural outgrowth of the surveillance footage in LOST HIGHWAY!
With INLAND EMPIRE, Lynch harnessed light-weight video technology to finally make a cinema verite documentary about his MIND!
Richard,
you raise very good and thoughtful points. By triumph, I meant probably something less grand, something more like finding their identities or becoming who they become… which is still over-determined in large part by men. Onstage, Rossellini nonetheless seems much more assured than she does in her own living space, for obvious reasons. Rita, the real Rita, the one who is a movie star and gets engaged to her director, seems to use her stardom to get what she wants.
I like what you say about desire breaking through or destroying bourgeois social and narrative conventions. This goes back at least as far as Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or, so it has a long history within surrealist cinema. The anarchy of desire: and, by Lacan’s definition of hysteria, that self-dislocating identification with the Other which desire forces upon someone. Lovers often seem to become each other, or want to become each other, in Lynch, as in Mulholland, when the two women go out into the night as blonde twins. The repressed homoerotic element of Lost Highway requires that Bill Pullman “becomes” the hit man whom he hired to kill Dick Laurent (imo). By the way, the Bill Pullman character is also a feminized performer, in that when he is onstage his time is accounted for by his wife and her lovers and he is powerless to stop them.
One thing that can be said about Lynchian acting is that it does tend to break down along gender lines: the males are terse and tight-lipped, while the women are hyper-real, often over-emotive. In Lost Highway Arquette doesn’t so much walk as ooze into a room; her every line seems dragged out from a bottomless pit of sensuality. Dern specializes in a kind of aggressive sensitivity, manifested in head-trembling stares and tears, while her mother, Diane Ladd, flashes and bites like a cross between a pit bull and a cobra. Okay. Female emotions, then, like female sexuality, are vivid and they are also a gateway. Whereas the males derive their emotions from the women. We don’t know why Rossellini brings out such powerful, violent, antisocial emotions in Frank Booth; but clearly she does. The women are not in control of their emotions, the men are not in control of their actions: kind of an old-fashioned template, which is what unites the mood of Lynch’s films often with noirs and melodramas from 40s Hollywood.
More specifically, Lynch links desire with the entertainment industry, I think, because of the hypnotic control that the two have when combined. Mulholland and Highway are both on some level about being in love with an empty image. In Mulholland "Rita"’s fans presumably have no idea that her marriage will be a sham as she sleeps with other girls. Desire is a trick, like a magician’s or a hooker’s. Inland Empire foregrounds the metaphor of prostitution — not so groundbreakingly as Godard did in Two or Three Things I Know About Her — but complicates the image-framework so that we don’t know whose image is being loved, whose image is empty. The scenes which turn out to be the film-within-the-film (again, this is not groundbreaking in itself) serve as a reminder that even though we think we may be watching the authentic “real”, we are only watching bits of subjective and manipulated “reality” (as Lacan again distinguished between the two concepts).
Finally, the rabbit family shows that the patriarchal paradigm does not even need a human face to be operational. The mother is constantly ironing while the men sit around; the studio audience giggles at everything the mother says, though she says nothing funny; yet she is also the bearer of light where none exists.
This is only a small, tenative step on my part in trying to further the discussion. Thanks for the push.
Justin, I dig where you’re going with this—and I love’s me some Lacan.
Let me cut and paste (which I hate but just so I can be specific to your specific thoughts):
>>Onstage, Rossellini nonetheless seems much more assured than she does in her own living space, for obvious reasons.
But does it matter that she is such a poor singer? Does that complicate things? Might it be that the assurance is part of the performance? In any event, it is something the viewer is aware of but no one at the club seems to be so.
>>Rita, the real Rita, the one who is a movie star and gets engaged to her director, seems to use her stardom to get what she wants.
I get what you’re saying but I’ve never been so sure that the second half is more real than the first. The hired killer, the jilted lovers, the backstage drama and Rita being so femme fatal, it seems that the second half draws on cinematic tropes as much as the first. And in the first half, the Rita character (and Diane) have some fuller psychological development. So thus we’re into Baudrillard’s realm of simulations and hyperreality. Maybe?
I’m glad you’re not taking this as disagreement—I’m just thinking along with you. I’m noticing people round here sometimes get a bit defensive rather than dialogical.
@ justin
interesting that you read rossellini as the cause for hopper’s violent and exaggerated actions in “blue velvet”, also implying that hopper isn’t in control of himself or his emotions. i think that hopper is in full control, as he purposefully uses drugs to help attain the state he wants to reach. he’s a sadist, not a victim. rosselini is the masochist. not saying that she deserves or wants the extreme treatment she gets from hopper. but i dont feel she’s the cause of it, or the one who brings it out in him. even though she definitely likes a certain level of sadism thrown her way.
on another note, the performative strain in lynch’s cinema is certainly a subject worthy of some scholarship. performance studies as one lens, maybe. performance in many avenues, whether cinematic, musical, sexual, or otherwise, seems to be a common thread in lynch’s films.
I understand, Richard. I’m glad it’s a dialogue.
I have to think a little more about your latest points, but what occurs to me is that what we (and Lynch) are touching on is the nature of any kind of reality once it has been filmed. How real is it? Technically, none of it is real. But specific things are chosen by a director, embodied by actors, and presented to us to give us certain thoughts and emotion — therefore, everything on some level is “really” happening. We’re affected by it the same way regardless.
So I think you suggest a very sophisticated way to read the second part of Mulholland Drive. I’ve always subscribed to the simpler idea that the first part is dream and the second part is real life, but there’s a tradition even longer than surrealism (going back to Calderon’s play Life’s a Dream, perhaps) in which people wake up from what they think are dreams to find that they are really just then entering the dream. This is played with in Linklater’s Waking Life. To the extent that movies are a “dream factory,” then yes, it almost doesn’t matter which one is “more” real than the other.
That’s why I think Lynch earns the really over-the-top final shot of the two women’s faces hovering in the sky over Hollywood. That’s something out of The Wizard of Oz, and in any other film I would say the director’s mind had turned to cheese, but that kind of apotheosis is what these women lived and died for. And that may be sad as human aspirations go, but we are so beyond judging them at that point, after going on this long and painful journey.
Yeah, Justin—sounds like you’re working up an article or something? Anyway,and just as a coda to what you just said Lynch talks about going to the cinema as entering into someone else’s dream. So, we might think of this—I dunno, maybe?—as filmic reality (a fictive space) that in Lynch’s case points out the fictive elements of any narrative we use to order experience. My own investment in Lynch is just what you describe, the marshalling of images that provoke emotional responses or affective states. The images are encoded with all the associations you mention in terms of gender ideology for sure but the destabilizing frames prompt a reckoning of why/how/what we respond to. But I tend to read Lynch by way of Freud’s “The Uncanny.”
So actually I really like Ben’s phrase posted above: “a monument of unease.” Yeah, I dig it. Okay I’ll shut up now!
I like what Ben said, too, also about the cinema verite documentary of Lynch’s own mind. Great stuff.
So much has been written about Lynch that I don’t feel I could really add anything to that. At least not at this point. He’s one of the few directors, though, who I make a point of catching up on everything he does. I’m always interested where he’s going
@Bobby, I probably didn’t express what I meant exactly about the Rossellini – Hopper connection. I said she “brings out” those emotions in him. I believe we are meant to see him as being obsessed with a piece of a bathrobe made of blue velvet (his mother’s perhaps, since he says “Baby wants to f—k”) and when he heard her singing Blue Velvet in the club, he became obsessed with her and then went about kidnapping her family to make her into a sex slave, etc. It’s a wildly paranoid idea. This is what I’m getting at — in Lynch, an attractive woman shows her face in the world and suddenly all the men want to harm her. It’s extreme. It’s evocative of something that feels not too far removed from reality, though. The precarious situation of the woman, and the blaming of the victim. So, no, she doesn’t directly do anything to cause it, except by being who she is, looking the way she looks, doing what she does. Which is not her fault.
Cool. Justin – thanks for pointing me to this thread! My response to Inland Empire was quite basic… it just seemed to me that every female character was being dominated by a male in some way, the whole film seemed to be about men abusing women! About how male abuse of women goes on in every level of society and in every domain, now and in the past and in different places and in different ways, from actual physical abuse to subtler psychological control… that’s why i thought it was feminist. To be truthful, i was so scared watching this film that I haven’t looked at it since first viewing! oops. Interesting to read about it on this thread.
It is scary, I agree. One of the scariest figures is female, though, the sybil-like neighbor who comes over and starts raving about murder, played by a perennial Lynch actress whose name escapes me. But yes, I felt bad for Laura Dern all through the film.
Inland Empire really just lost me almost completely. Did the ending mean that Nicky was just a creation of the girl trapped in her bedroom with the TV?
That crying girl is interesting. That’s another feminist aspect of the film, women finding no positive image of themselves in the media. So I read the girl as crying in self-awareness, crying in recognition of her own “abuse.” I’d have to think about it more. I think the only world of the film that Nicky does not enter is the world of the rabbit family, though there are moments where she seems to be trying to contact them and on the verge of entering their world.
Waaay too many forum topics on this guy. I’ll say it here, as I have in other threads: Lynch is overrated, overrated and overrated! His earlier works are masterpieces and his later works are bad regurgitations and half-ass attempts at his earlier works. He lost it after Wild at Heart and The Straight Story.
I have already posted my comments re Inland Empire on the Your Interpretation About This Film thread, but thought Justin and the other posters brought up several relevent discussions re Lynch’s treatment of his female protagonists in Inland Empire and other of his films. Any further discussion on this topic? I thought Dern’s portrayal in Inland Empire was very draining to watch and a strain on the imagination. Her pained and puzzled look throughout the film mirrored my own while watching the film. But there are many points brought up on this thead that need to be thought about relative to her characterization and whether Lynch is just expoiting his actresses rather than revealing their potential. I find, from the films of his I have seen, that his portrayal of females is very dark, could be considered exploitive, and could also be seen as negative. To me, he has many unresolved issues re women, and you can see it from Eraserhead right on through. Are women in his films whores, victims, cheats, liars, sexually more powerful than the males – or some combination of all? Any comments?
i dont think you can simplify the depiction of women in his films. look at “blue velvet” and “wild at heart”. you have women that run the gamut. i dont see it as exploitative. lynch gets what he wants out of his actresses, as all directors should.
not exploitative, no, but there is a grand theme of female sexuality bringing out predatory male behavior. Look at Lula and Bobby Peru. It’s not that Lynch has a problem with women, I suspect he’s actually more enlightened than most male directors, it’s that he’s hung up on rapists and abusers.
Here, you wanted something from the glory days of Biberkopf. I don’t see much difference between then and today.
I enjoyed rediscovering this excellent discussion. I think I may have to watch Inland Empire again this weekend.
Justin: You and David Adams have really opened my eyes to the many layers of interpretation possible in this film – this will always be a classic thread – prime Biberkopf, for sure.
“Her pained and puzzled look throughout the film mirrored my own while watching the film.”
Bingo. Reaction shots that don’t necessarily tell us clearly how to feel….they direct us towards confusion and distress rather than the clarity of, say, Hitchcock’s.
I like emotionally impassive reaction shots sometimes. I think the stronger the emotion of a scene, the more the actors should play it down, and allow things to rest on Common Humanity.
To clarify: “Bingo” as in I think this is intentionally what Lynch is doing with reaction shots and all towards a brilliantly unsettling and disarming effect.
Justin Biberkopf
I thought it was time to have a thread on Inland Empire, specifically on what the film has to say about gender. It seems to me that women have always been central to Lynch’s artistic vision — the double-edged sword of female beauty that makes them attractive but also makes them targets. Some of his women are pure victims, such as Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet. Others are opaque destroyers without souls, like Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway. Many, such as Laura Palmer and the other girls in Twin Peaks and Laura Dern in Wild at Heart, are young women whose sexuality is burgeoning and creating a fateful vortex around itself. Victim and destroyer merge in the two women of Mulholland Drive. And so on.
But in Inland Empire he goes deeply inside the persona of a woman, Nicky Grace (Dern). She is, in some ways, a beauty queen, and also a target. To the extent that she portrays a wife who cheats on her husband, she is a corollary to Arquette in Lost Highway, but unlike Arquette, Nicky is given a soul and a rich inner life. We see that she feels profound shame about being seen, and used, as a sexual object. I think this comes up in the scene where she goes to bed with Devon/Billy as her husband watches, unseen, and she begins to yell, “Look at me.” She wants to be truly seen, not just superficially.
Also, the chorus of “slutty girls” (as I think of them, not meant to be insulting) serve the function of trying to coach Nicky to be more relaxed in her sexuality. She looks on in awe and mystification as they sit around flashing their breasts and being “brainlessly” sexual. They line-dance to “Do the Locomotion” (this reference seems jejeune by usual Lynch standards), underscoring its sexual double entendre. But Nicky resists: disguised as a bruised and battered woman, she tells a man who could be either a therapist or a private dick about how she has had to fend off rapists and woman-beaters her whole life. Finally, out on the street at night (which turns out to be a scene for the movie she is shooting), she has a moment where she assumes her sexuality: “I’m a whore,” she says to the other hookers, then she stands back and says, “Wanna see this move?” and starts teaching them how to snap their fingers rock and roll style. It’s precisely at this moment that the jealous wife runs up and stabs her to death with the screwdriver. Female sexuality equals paranoia, murder, and sex crime.
The very title itself, “Inland Empire,” seems to be a Freudian reference to internal female sexual organs; when the husband goes looking for Billy in one scene, he is told that he has gone to Inland Empire, which fuels his suspicions about the sexual affair Billy is having with his wife. Also, as Dern is dying from a stab wound to her abdomen, the homeless Asian girl makes strange mention of another woman who has a “hole torn into her intestine from her vagina.” The inner anatomical space of woman is a kind of empire, one with mysterious, porous, invaded borders.
Is it really that easy an equation to make between female sexuality and death? And is Lynch making the same movie over and over again, each time getting deeper and deeper into the implications of his theme and being more and more stylistically experimental? Finally, what’s up with the group dance lip sync to Nina Simone’s gospel-blues “Sinner Man” which closes the movie? Is this the triumph of women? It’s a little troubling if it is, since Lynch’s films have previously suggested that women can mainly triumph only when they assume the mantle of the performer — Rossellini as the “Blue Lady,” Rita in Mulholland Dr., Arquette as the savvy porn star, the singer whose voice lives on after she dies in Mulholland again. In other words, they can’t be natural human beings and still survive. They have to become created beings.
I’m mainly interested in the gender issues here, but any comments about Inland Empire are welcome.