Inland Empire

I'm not ready to write at length about this amazing phantasmagoria from my favorite living director, David Lynch. I've only seen it once and I intend to revisit it several times. I'll need to. That should tell you: 1) that I think it will repay revisits, and 2) that it is tricky to parse and is not going to be to everyone's taste. (While it is true that most Lynch movies aren't to everyone's taste, this one is particularly odd--which,along with its three-hour running time, is, I'm sure, why it was never released wide.)

For several films now--beginning with Lost Highway (although you find hints of "doubles" in Blue Velvet and earlier films)--Lynch has delighted in not just oveturnng one of the three unities (time, place, and action), but in seemingly obliterating all three. The same actors simultaneously play different characters in seemingly different stories and in seemingly different places. It's as if Lynch were depicting a world filled with parallel universes or, perhaps more to his point, a world in which dreams (which, of course, also obliterate the three unities) co-exist alongside "realities." Or sometimes simply replace realities.

What is interesting about Lynch movies--particularly his best movies--is how closely they mimic the logic of dreams. Though they may seem to make no or only partial sense while we're dreaming, they can when we awaken supply clues to their interpretation. This is another way of saying that, while the unites of place and time (and in Lynch, identity) are obliterated, the unity of action actually isn't. It just seems to be. With enough puzzling out, a plot can usually be pieced together from the dream-like motifs (and repetitions and transmogrifications of those motifs) that Lynch always supplies. His are not necessarily traditional plots with a beginnings, middles, and ends in which each part leads away from and toward another with high narrative probability; nor are narrative probabilities conventional in Lynch films, which work more to the rhythms of emotions (as dreams do) than to the syllogistic rhythms of logic, although his films are certainly not bereft of logic or of its great child, wit.

Hollywood may be the perfect setting for stories about dreamworlds, as dreams are its business. Mulholland Drive, Lynch's greatest film (and his most tragic), is about this very nexus. While Inland Empire is also a bit about Hollywood, its title gives you a kind of clue about how it extends out into the dark suburbs of that dream world. The Inland Empire is the name of an actual geographical spot in Southern California, comprising San Bernadino and Riverside counties. It isn't Hollywood; it is just east of L.A., neighboring it. Some of the film is set there; some in Hollwyood itself; and some, rather bizarrely, in Poland. But the Inland Empire--what a wonderfully evocative name!--is clearly also inside us.

It's funny how often Lynch revisits certain themes. He is obsessed with the reality of evil and the possiblity of transcending it; he sees the forces of both evil and transcendence as impulses within us and without. It would not surprise me to learn that he believes in demons and angels--they've certainly showed up in many of his films (memorably in Fire Walk With Me, the prequel to Twin Peaks)--and that, though he sees the world as a temptation to do our worst to ourselves and those we love, he believes we are capable of salvation. Many of his films are like old-fashoned morality plays, albeit told by a Surrealist poet with a Freudian bent.

Above all else, love--which, as we are told in this film, is strange--is the mainspring of his work. Love as a spectrum of emotions that, at one end compels us to evil, selfish sadomasochictic acts and, at the other, to brave, selfless, redemptive ones. His characters are often carried on a learning journey from one end of this spectrum to another, as in Blue Velvet and, I believe, this film.

Though I don't think Inland Empire is one of Lynch's greatest films; it is, IMO, easily one of the best films of this past year. And certainly like no other. I will have much more to say about this movie in later posts.

Be aware, if you plan to rent or buy the DVD of Inland Empire, that it was shot on what I think may have been ordinary DV video. Some of you are going to be a little appalled by the way it looks. I was not. After a bit of accomodation, the dark, blotchy, sometimes deliberately ill-focused way it looks comes to serve its story in the same way that the opulent darkness of Mulholland Dr. served it. It is also quite long at nearly three hours, though it doesn't play that long.

I will add this post to my Best Films thread.