Movie Night With Urbaniak: Inland Empire
The only things I knew about David Lynch’s Inland Empire, before sitting down to watch it with
, was that it is a David Lynch movie, it was shot on video, it is three hours long, it has been called quite boring, and it did not enjoy a traditional studio release (in fact, it had not played anywhere near me during its patchy run last year). All of those things pointed toward a movie that could be easily dismissed as the work of an artist with not enough control imposed upon him, who has run amok with his creative energy and gotten lost in his own little aesthetic curlicues.
So it pleases me greatly to say that not only is Inland Empire a very good movie, it is also something of a breakthrough for Lynch, who succeeds in making an essentially plotless three-hour psychodrama riveting cinema.
Something about Inland Empire kept reminding me of Pinter, the oddball scenes full of oblique dialogue about mundane topics, suddenly turning fierce and weird when you least expect it. And the more I thought about it the more apt the comparison became. Pinter was looking to move theater beyond “a show” that has some kind of “meaning,” where the audience could all pat themselves on the back afterward for “getting” whatever “message” the show was trying to impart. He wanted his plays to be a kind of provocation, a deeply unsettling event that didn’t have a “meaning” beyond the absurd, terrifying actions presented on stage.
I think Lynch has accomplished something similar with Inland Empire. More so than any of his earlier movies, which eventually “make sense” after enough viewings, he seems to have finally thrown off the shackles of “meaning” and “plot” to present something like experience itself, outside of “meaning,” and have it not only work on its own aesthetic level but over a period of three hours.
While the movie was running, I kept a running tally of ideas that seemed important at the time, in the hopes of, by the end, “figuring out” what the movie was “about” and thus appearing to be a smarty-pants.
(My list reads, in part: Record, Poles, Polish whore, Rabbits TV show, Blurry video, New neighbor, Wealth, Actress, Mulholland Drive-like moviemaking, Story of little boy, If it were tomorrow, Cursed remake, Purgatory of ex-girlfriends, etc.)
But the longer the list got, the less I feltI understood, and yet I was never less than entertained and always intrigued and sometimes horrified. And I finally thought, well, maybe that’s the point, that ultimately there is no “meaning,” no final “point” to the thing, ie “Laura Dern plays Nikki Grace, an actress who gets a part in a big movie and it messes up her mind so much that she doesn’t know who she is anymore.” I mean, that statement certainly covers most of the “action” of the movie, but it doesn’t really explain anything. Nikki (if the movie is, indeed, about Nikki) goes from being an actress to being the character she’s playing in the movie she’s making, to being a lower-class woman married to a Polish man, to being a prostitute who (I think) turns out to also be the character in the movie she’s making, but the way that all this information unfolds is so poetic, mysterious and alarming that it defies not only summation but rational explanation. Why do people keep talking about how they’re “good with animals?” Why is the movie’s producer so broke that he needs to ask crew members for handouts? Who are the people dressed as rabbits and how did they get their own TV show? Who is the Polish whore crying on the bed?
Inland Empire, it seems to me, if it is “about” anything, is about identity, and how extreme emotional circumstances allow/force us to alter our identity. So the actress getting into her role may find herself becoming the character, and the character may echo back to an earlier version of that character, and that earlier version of the character may find herself in the shoes of the “real person” the character is based on, and a distressed woman watching the finished movie on TV may find herself identifying so strongly with the character the actress is playing in the movie that she may imagine herself the actress playing the role. And even this paragraph only “explains” about fifteen percent of what we actually see unfold in Inland Empire.
To put it another way, you could say that Inland Empire is a David Lynch movie for people who thought Mulholland Drive was a little too pat. It’s not that it’s impossible, necessarily, to explain what it’s about, but Lynch shifts perspectives so often and peels back so many layers of perception and possible meanings that I think, in the end, it’s folly to try to nail the damned thing down. When the movie started, I was bracing myself for a three-hour bore, and by the end of it I thought I could probably see this movie a dozen times and not get to the bottom of it.
Nikki, and Laura Dern’s performance of the character, also reminded me of Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, who was “unstuck in time” and who spent his whole life in a state of anxiety, not knowing from moment to moment what part of his life he was going to be expected to perform. Dern moves through the movie with a similar level of apprehension, not knowing if, the next time she goes through a door, if she’s going to be herself, the character she’s playing, one of the other characters, or a Polish prostitute, or what, until by the end of the movie she really isn’t sure who she is any more.
Now then: it’s not all peaches-n-cream. Whatever freedom Lynch seems to have found with his video camera has not resulted in a thing beautiful to behold. Which is a shame, because if nothing else, a David Lynch movie is always absolutely gorgeous. But the picture in Inland Empire is blurry and smeary, and Lynch’s shooting style has changed to the point of being almost unrecognizable. Where his scenework is usually graceful and enigmatic, here it is sometimes remarkably clumsy, even amateurish, as though he didn’t have the coverage he needed and had to steal shots from other scenes to compensate. Extreme, distorted close-ups of actors’ faces dominate, and some sections of the movie are so dark as to be essentially invisible. Those technical aspects aside, Inland Empire is a unique, powerful experience.
W.H. Macy appears, for one shot, as a TV announcer for a Hollywood talk show. I’m still puzzling over that one.
Urbaniak and I improvised the following:
LYNCH (loud, flat Midwestern twang). Bill! It’s David!
MACY (ibid). David! How the heck you doin’?
LYNCH. Great! Great! Hey listen, you know I’m doing this crazy Inland Empire thing —
MACY. Yeah, yeah Laura was telling me all about it! Sounds like a gas!
LYNCH. Well listen, I think I’ve got a part for ya!
MACY. You’re kidding! Me?
LYNCH. Yeah, whaddaya doin’ tomorrow?
MACY. Well actually, I’m traveling tomorrow for a shoot in Vanc —
LYNCH. I’m sorry Bill, I’ve got a bunch of static on this end! Can you come by Paramount around ten?
MACY. I — well —
LYNCH. It’s a great part, it’s the star part, it’s practically a second lead to Laura!
MACY. Really? Because I heard Justin —
LYNCH. Can’t hear ya, Bill! No, it’s a key role! You’re gonna steal the picture! You remember Dean in Blue Velvet? It’s like that!
MACY. Sure, he’s great in —
LYNCH. My girl here is telling me eight! Can you be at Paramount at eight instead of ten? We should be able to get you out of there by two!
MACY. Uh, sure David, sure! What — I’m sorry, do you have a script or something?
LYNCH. I’m sorry David, I’m heading into a tunnel! It’s gonna be great! Oh hey!
MACY. Uh huh?
LYNCH. You have a bow tie? Because the character wears a bow tie, and we don’t have the budget for it! Thanks a lot babe, love ya!
There’s a phone conversation with Jeremy Irons in Lynch (one) that’s not that far off.
Oh lord, it incorporates Rabbits? I think I see where the “boring” criticisms come from.
I haven’t seen any of Rabbits qua Rabbits, as it were, but their appearance only made Inland Empire a total of perhaps five percent more confusing, but not more boring.
I got to see the film last year with Lynch in attendance. Before the film started a woman sang vocal improvisations with lots of processed reverb while Lynch read a quote from the Upanishads. I hear he opened each showing with the same quote so presumably it has some significance.
“We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe.”
So wait — the movie is about spiders? I have to say, I didn’t see that coming.
Actual quote from the INLAND EMPIRE Q&A with Lynch:
Q&A’er: There are two things I’ve always wanted to ask you.
Lynch: Go ahead.
Q&A’er: Firstly, What the fuck?!?!
Much laughter (some of it nervous) from the audience. Audible groans from me and the guy standing behind me.
This guy then went on to ask Lynch why (?) there were so many thematic images and ideas that continued to resurface in his work. Now granted, I don’t think the guy meant any offense, but the way he phrased the question made it sound like he was accusing Lynch of repeating himself.
Lynch: Give me an example.
The Q&A’er then proceeded to give him several examples. Come to think of it, I could have thrown in a few myself. This was really the only moment where Lynch seemed caught off guard, but it was barely noticeable. He gave another one of his stock answers (“catching ideas” was a phrase he used a lot that evening) but the gist of it was that he didn’t know where some of these things came from and that any repetition was not conscious. All in all, it was a swell time and Lynch seemed to be having a good time in spite of answering questions he’s probably answered a thousand times before.
Given that Lynch actually gives an accurate, up-to-date weather report every day at his website, repetition does not seem to be a thing that troubles him.
I’ve still not dared watch this, but I should. I did enjoy Mulholland Falls when I finally watched it, but sometimes Lynch requires the mental equivalent of a stiff drink before watching. Except perhaps The Straight Story (which makes me cry everytime). Talk about one extreme to the other lol
Did you see Lynches attempts to get Laura Dern an Oscar nod? He apparently sat at a Hollywood street corner with a banner, and a live cow! Just sat there on a deck chair, under an umbrella, with a large cow on a string! Genius!
If you watch Mulholland Falls expecting Mulholland Dr. you will need an actual stiff drink in addition to your mental one.
*cough cough*
I wont make that mistake again! lol
Altough the both have the word Mulholland in them, and someone called Dern appears in them both.
Although only one of them has both Treat Williams and Daniel Baldwin in it 😉