Reviews / 03 October 2006
Inland Empire
USA / Poland / France / 2006
An actress and a new role. Marriage and infidelity. An unpaid bill. TV and the movies. A sitcom about rabbits. An old tale and its variation; an old film and its remake. Prostitutes. A star is born, re-born, half-born. Today, two days from now, yesterday. Brutal fucking murder. The Locomotion. “This is the kind of shit I’m talking about.”
The initial viewing of a new David Lynch film poses some obvious problems. Faced with a torrent of non sequiturs, frame tales, and multiple planes of reality and consciousness, the viewer strives in vain to assemble the disparate fragments into a singular, coherent whole, one that the Lynch-savvy viewer knows will only become apparent after much hindsight and many future viewings, if at all.
This is particularly, audaciously true in the case of Inland Empire, a film that, like Eraserhead, Lynch shot piecemeal over the span of a few years. He started production on the film as early as 2001, shooting the “Rabbits” sitcom right after (and with some cast members of) Mulholland Drive, and completed it in Poland as late as January of this year. Largely bankrolling the production of the film himself, Lynch purportedly would wait for inspiration to write and shoot scenes that he would later shoehorn into the whole. In this way, the task of the spectator becomes similar to that of the filmmaker, assembling peculiar, seemingly unrelated elements into coherence over a long duration.
Inland Empire leads us down pathways, through doorways, along currents, impulses, grooves, and trains of thought, and we are left to scramble for and create our own meaning, to wonder at the significance of letters scratched on walls or written on the protagonist’s hand, to piece together tentative chronologies, to parse real-life from the movies, and, above all, to strive for the proper reaction — horror or hilarity. In the screening I attended, peals of laughter accompanied an expletive-peppered monologue in which one of Laura Dern’s characters relates a tale about gouging out the eye and clawing the genitals of a potential rapist. But this laughter was as much a result of helplessness as it was of giddy bewilderment. It was the laughter of mild derision on the one hand, and of discomfort on the other, uncertain about where the artifice ends and the real “brutal fucking murder” begins. The audience’s reaction is therefore somewhat like that of the laugh-track in Lynch’s already-mythical family sitcom, bursting intermittently and inappropriately from off-camera while rabbit-headed characters speak in mixed-up dialogue, reference undisclosed secrets, and iron clothing monotonously.
In Inland Empire, more than ever, Lynch wishes to establish a connection between a world that is astonishingly familiar and deceptively immediate and one that is utterly, horribly alien. And, more than ever, these two worlds are interchangeable, like prostitutes and starlets, actors and their roles. This is to say also that Lynch wishes to implicate us in his film, not only as observers, but as participants. As in any film, we receive signs and images that purportedly fit together, but here Lynch gives us the sole responsibility of assembling them into a pattern of meaning. In Inland Empire, the spectator is also interchangeable with the characters and the actors playing them.
The most aggressive means of drawing in the viewer that Lynch has at his disposal is ironically the most immediately repellent. Lynch’s use of digital video in the film has already been the source of much head-scratching in early reviews and festival reports; many have wondered, rather petulantly, why the director of such crystalline, defined celluloid images as those in Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive — vibrant, striking images of deep red curtains and lipstick, clear blue fluorescence, and impenetrable blackness — should opt in his new film for the gritty, fuzzy, and amorphous quality of DV. Indeed, Lynch has not simply jettisoned celluloid, he has completely negated it, choosing to shoot on a Sony PD-150, a relatively lower grade digital format, that when projected, jolts the image into life with thousands of tiny, wriggling pixels. Scenes shot in near-darkness, of which there are many, are swimming with surface interference as though Lynch is not so much interested in what he is shooting as intent on conveying the thick smog of the Inland Empire or the very skin of the video itself. What appears onscreen is thus consistently ugly and endlessly fascinating, lending texture and noise to every object in the frame and applying great, unflattering splotches of rouge and green pallor to every face in close-up.
What Lynch demands of his viewers is therefore not only a narratological muscularity, but also a visual acuity of Brakhagian proportions. As a cinematic stylist, he has always been interested in testing the viewer’s vision, through violent focusing and re-focusing, jerky camera movement, and stroboscopic lighting, as well as its hearing, with indecipherable and even inaudible dialogue, shocking waves of electronic noise, and unidentified, disembodied voices and sounds. All of these figure in Inland Empire, but they are extended and completed by the full, nasty force of the DV that Lynch brings to bear on his film. Few directors have attempted to probe, even transgress the boundaries of technology and visuality as Lynch does here, and even those who have — like Sokurov in last year’s The Sun — have seldom done so in such an aggressive and systematic manner. As with the scattered splinters of plot and mood, the film almost demands that one assemble the individual pixels onscreen, squirming like snow on a television or ants on a severed ear, into a clear, bright image.
Late in the film, one of Laura Dern’s characters likens her situation to that of a spectator in a movie theater, watching things happening on the screen in front of her without being able to change or participate in them. She eventually finds herself there, watching herself onscreen as things happen around her, and we are of course right there with her. And if we don’t exactly gain agency in the film, Lynch accords us a space of great mental, sensual, and critical creativity, replaying and circulating images clues and streams of thought. Like the characters in the film, or the actors performing it, we relive these moments over and over again until we get them straight.
Leo Goldsmith / © 2006 notcoming.com
Comments / 11 total / Submit Comment
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Hi Leo – Great review! I can’t wait to see this one. I think Lynch is one of the few directors who I really WANT to just be totally self-indulgent. And it sounds like Inland Empire fits the bill here. You have any idea when it’s actually going to be released?
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Hi, Tyler! Someone who attended Lynch’s press conference yesterday tells me that the film has not yet been picked up by a distributor. Unfortunate, but unsurprising. Nevertheless, I saw Mulholland Dr. in a multiplex, so Lynch’s name still carries some weight, even if that film, budgeted at about $15 million, only made about half its money back. I suspect it will still get a national release, but probably via a slightly smaller company. It is, after all, three hours of whimsical and unsettling non sequiturs — not really anybody’s cup of tea, let alone that of a major distributor.
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Great review, Cheers. Yeah I to Hope to view this some day. Sounds just like my cup of Coffee. Still find myself going back to Mullholland Drive and Lost Highway, and marvelling at what visual and phonetic feats can be produced when a director has the balls to produce film without clear or apparent narritive. Each one of Lynch’s films have left me with so many questions and memorable visuals that I really look forward to the next short or feature. Again Thanks for the review.
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Fantastic review! I have not seen the film yet, but this is obviously very well written. I wish reviews were more descriptive and less judgemental like this one. And kudos for not trashing the movie just because you couldn’t figure it out (unlike many others).
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Thank you for the compliments, and be sure to check out our own Ms. Jediny’s concurrent review, as well.
Following my comment about distribution of this film above, this article reports the possibility that the film will be released by Lynch himself. While my initial reaction is “good luck catching this in a multiplex,” it seems to me that Lynch’s more hare-brained (or rabbit-headed?) business models (cf. chapterless DVDs and über-finicky restorations, etc.) usually come to be embraced by the big guys once they prove profitable.
The question of whether this film will find a receptive audience anywhere remains very much open, however.
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Great review! Saw the film last night in Los Angeles at an AFI screening and Lynch along with Dern were there to comment. I found the movie baffling, frightening and insanely watchable. Like a good book or great art you will not stop thinking or talking about it. A comment from the audience was “Lynch, I think this is a very complex film with one of the simplest messages you have ever brought forth on film.” Lynch acknowledged by saying, “You may be on to something.” I felt that throughout the film the theme of infidelity remained true while everything warped around it. It was like riding a roller coaster, i’m sure more viewings would reveal more. Can’t wait to see it again!
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I loved this movie. I reckon he is trying to say that Hollywood Actresses are prone to whore themselves out to movies AND actors. I believe that Angelina Jolie was an inspiration for this film. She stole Laura Dern’s then boyfriend (Billy-Bob Thornton) and made him her husband…before she stole Jennifer Aniston’s hubby. A Hollywood actress-whore is not much different from a Hollywood Strip-whore…she just thinks she’s better. The creepy neighbour was the “public” knowing BEFORE hand that a certain actress will sleep with her co-star…and taking an interest in these famous people’s lives when perhaps it is none of our business. You don’t have to be Miss Cleo to see that. Lives get distrupted and there are consequences to pay when women whore themselves out and men are whoremongers. The room full of women signified all the other women whom thought that the man/actor “really cared” for them…when they are just one of many…hop aboard the train…the locomotion…it just gets longer and longer and these women are not really loved by the man…actress or street whore. This is the oldest story told and how many times did you hear the Laura Dern character and the polish girl say “you’ve seen me. You know me”…the oldest story in the book. The actors in the bunny outfits signified how the actors and actresses are the same…beautiful and hard to distinguish from one another…like an animal is hard to distinguish sometime from their look-a-likes or species. The laugh-track shows how we are to conform to the norm of their art…or lack of art in some of their work. I love David Lynch! He loves illuminated lamps (especially red ones!) and old-fashioned ringing phones!
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My favorite part in this movie is Laura’s (Nikki’s) death scene on Hollywood Blvd. Like the scene in Mulholland Drive where Naomi is acting with her much older co-star, her “performance” is so good that the audience is compelled to feel that it is real instead of just acting – then Lynch pulls away and shows you how it all just make believe. David Lynch is the only true filmmaker left in the sense that he not afraid of going underneath the surface of things and people – often revealing a far more realistic picture than we could ever dare to admit.
I’m still not certain about the rabbits but I did notice that while viewing this in the theater – there were certain moments that were uncomfortably amusing and the audience began laughing and sounded identical to the laugh track with the rabbits. Could it be that Lynch is so in touch with his cinematical genius and his audiences subconcious that he is not only mirroring things onscreen but in his audiences reactions too? Yikes – perhaps I’ve thought about this too much, but isn’t that the great thing about a true artist – they make you think!
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As to distribution, Lynch apparently bought back the USA rights and will self-distribute. Another brilliant stroke of studio independence. Great review, by the way.
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Watching this film was, for me, the visual equivalent of listening to the later music of Scott Walker: borderline-impenetrable, yet a result of pure vision as opposed to any degree of contrivance. I had to wonder, as well, if Laura Dern suggested that the actress in the “film” should have a romantic attachment with her co-star. Her serial “engagements” with her leading men has no equal, to the best of my knowledge.
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Great review, thanks ! I just wonder the Lynch crew are so extremely slow in striking up distribution deals. In sweden where I live it´s expected to come up late September 2007 which is ridiculous considering that he´s got quite a big cult following here and there´s many good pr points to use drumming up a premiere showing. Guess I´ll have to go somewhere where it´s showing (anywhere except LA ?) before that, or there will be a dvd realease before that. Same thing with Mulholland Drive which is stupid,
Credits
Directed by
David Lynch
Source
Asymetrical / Studio Canal Plus 35mm print
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