Inland Empire
(David Lynch, US/Poland/France)

By Dennis Lim

As you have no doubt heard by now, David Lynch loves digital video. He loves it with the boundless zeal of a new convert and the reckless wonder of a kid in a toy store. At 61, in self-exile from an industry that increasingly seems the focus of his obsessions, he also sees it as a lifeline, a chance for independence, a hedge against film’s increasingly obvious mortality. Lynch has declared that Inland Empire, his monstrous, wondrous, three-hour trawl through a Hollywood star’s broken psyche, marks the beginning of an unshakable commitment to DV, a medium he is wont to describe, somewhat controversially, as “beautiful.”

He’s referring on one level to methodology: the sheer liberation of being able to work, for the first time, flexibly and spontaneously. A smashed Russian doll of imperfectly nested narratives, Inland Empire was shot over three years, without a finished screenplay or (to begin with) a unifying vision—when an idea for a scene came to him, he would write it and shoot it. Clearly the film could not have been made any other way. Just as the structure of Mulholland Drive (2001)—with its decisive fault line and eureka epiphanies—reflects its evolution from open-ended TV pilot to stand-alone feature, Inland Empire is also shaped by the conditions of its creation. An experience of total immersion and continual slippage, it feels like the product of a sustained, unedited brainstorm. No waiting around for money or even for the big picture to emerge. What’s “beautiful” here is the relative absence of barriers between the director’s unconscious and what he puts onscreen.

But the question of aesthetics remains. The dingy video of Inland Empire is a world—and many millions of dollars—away from the screensaver night skies of Michael Mann’s Miami Vice. Forsaking HD technology, Lynch used the Sony PD-150, an outmoded mid-range prosumer camcorder that he started experimenting with five years ago while making short films for his website, davidlynch.com. 

Lynch’s lurid scenarios have generally been tempered by the seductive richness of his visuals. The video murk of Inland Empire takes some getting used to, not least because form fits content all too well: The bleeding, sludgy palette is entirely suited to the sickened, splintering headspace that the film inhabits. Lynch makes little attempt to disguise the harshness of the medium—its pixels, flickers, and shadows—and the unconditional embrace means his DV images are about as tactile as his celluloid ones. There are even one or two moments (on a snowy Polish street) that approach conventional beauty, and a few more—studies in extreme darkness and extreme light—that remind you of Lynch’s background as an abstract expressionist painter. As the film abandons narrative logic, the decision makes more and more sense. DV seems simultaneously less and more “real” than what our celluloid-conditioned eyes are used to: Video is to film as dreams, or nightmares, are to reality.
 
To a large extent, Inland Empire is simply a rapt contemplation of Laura Dern, whose performance here, a testament to her courage and intuition, is already the stuff of legend. She submits herself to a battery of disfiguring wide-angle close-ups, distorts her features into a mask of freaked despair, and is granted a few transcendent moments of beatific repose. (Her facial muscles deserve their own Oscar.) Dern’s first incarnation, Nikki Grace, is an actress who lives in a cavernous Hollywood mansion and lands a coveted role in a Southern melodrama titled On High in Blue Tomorrows opposite suave ladies’ man Devon (Justin Theroux). She soon learns that the film is a remake and that the original Polish production was aborted when both leads were murdered.

Nikki begins to merge with her character, Sue, and the script’s adulterous affair spills over into real life. But what’s real, and who’s dreaming whom? The boundary between the film and the film-within-the-film—indeed between all levels of reality—vanishes completely. Besides Nikki and Sue, Dern plays at least two other overlapping variations on the character: One lives in a shabby suburban house, sometimes with a harem of gum-chewing, finger-snapping young women. The other, a tough-talking Southern dame, is spilling her guts out in a dank room, telling floridly vulgar tales of sexual violence and terrible revenge. (These scenes were the first that Lynch shot— n a single 70-minute take, from a 14-page monologue.) Interspersed throughout are scenes from a Beckettian sitcom with a rabbit-headed cast. Certain phrases, often pertaining to identity confusion (“I’m not who you think I am,” “Look at me and tell me if you’ve known me before”), repeat in varying contexts and start to acquire talismanic power. (The key to transcendental meditation, which Lynch has practiced for over three decades now, is the repetition of a personal mantra.) Meanwhile, the film we are watching is beamed to a TV in a hotel room, and a mystery brunette watches along with us, silently weeping.

Mulholland Drive may be a more palatable film, but its reality is harsher: a dream overlaid on a nightmare. Inland Empire is almost all nightmare, and yet, through considerable exertions, it eventually blinks itself awake, or into a state of grace. (The final word: “Suh-weet.”)  Like Mulholland, it’s a tribute to actresses, not least the ones who get “lost in the marketplace,” as Grace Zabriskie’s spooky neighbor puts it, as she recounts an ominous folk tale about little girls who go out to play. “You know what whores do?” someone asks in the first scene. More than two hours later, Dern makes the connection during a late-night meltdown, staged for maximum effect on Hollywood Boulevard: “I’m a whore! I’m a FREAK!” (She’s then stabbed in the gut with a screwdriver and collapses, bleeding and coughing up blood, amid some highly bemused homeless folks.)

But Lynch isn’t exactly interested in social or feminist commentary. Inland Empire delves into the craft, psychology, and metaphysics of acting—it’s premised on the notion that acting is an out-of-body experience. The Lynchian universe is highly susceptible to cosmic disruption and it takes no more than a few witchy intonations from Zabriskie, coupled with a low bass rumble, to cause the space-time fabric to crease. But the real catalyzing event is the first time we see Nikki act, at a rehearsal with Devon and her director (Jeremy Irons). The scene is nonsense, and she’s sensational. (There’s an obvious echo of Naomi Watts’s jaw-dropping audition in Mulholland Drive.)

Nikki’s performance is so good—so real?—that it sets off a mysterious noise in the bowels of the soundstage, the unlit corners that here seem analogous to the deepest recesses of the unconscious. Later, in a chilling moment that recalls Robert Blake calling himself in Lost Highway(1997), Nikki wanders down an alley and circles back to that moment, watching herself in rehearsal and realizing that she was the interloper, hiding in the dark. The shock of recognition—often manifest as déjà vu—is a constant in Lynch’s films, and there may be no shock greater than that of self-recognition, whether it’s Blue Velvet’s (1986) Kyle MacLachlan peering through the slats and detecting a kindred sadism or the huddled heroines of Mulholland Drive in Club Silencio confronting the failure of a mutual illusion.

In more ways than one, davidlynch.com paved the way for Inland Empire. There are a few repurposed elements: Rabbits (2002) was an online serial and “Axxon N.,” a significant phrase here, was the proposed title for another one. The film also proceeds with the darting, impulsive momentum of a Web surf—one scene hyperlinked to another. Still, there’s a musty concreteness to this labyrinth, which Lynch envisions as a network of interconnected rooms and hallways, spanning Los Angeles to Lodz, Poland.

With his last two films, Lynch has seemed like the long-lost SoCal cousin of Jacques Rivette. Inland Empire, like so many Rivettes, views narrative as a space to be inhabited, a force with a capacity to haunt. But there has never quite been a film—not even a Lynch film—like Inland Empire. The work of art it most closely resembles is Scott Walker’s latest staredown of the void, The Drift. Like Walker’s heroic album, Inland Empire shatters the complacency of its audience and ventures to the far shores of dissonance and abstraction. What it finds there is exactly what Lynch promised: beauty.

—Dennis Lim

Inland Empire

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