Inland Empire

Walking away from a dense, three-hour-long treatise on the nature of fear and memory, haunted by the superimpositions of faces and the sludgy yet powerful force of good, old-fashioned, close-up Sony digital video, my ears still ringing, eyes re-focusing, bladder beckoning for reprieve, I wondered if I'd ever go back. "See David Lynch's Inland Empire 9 times and get the 10th free!" read the sign outside the IFC Theater in Manhattan. By the time I'd managed to wait out the restroom line (Lynch fans to the T, every one of them. I saw a Pabst Blue Ribbon shirt and 75 pairs of horn-rimmed glasses), I still hadn't decided whether I'd do it again any time soon. Certainly not nine more times. Upon further meditation and reflection, though, I've decided I want more.



David Lynch's casting work is excellent, and I was particularly appalled/entranced by Grace Zabriskie's New Neighbor. The tracking lines in the the blown-up video image around her Medusa-like visage are mesmerizing and despite a flatness (and altogether lack of visual integrity) that video cannot avoid, there's enough presence exuded by this great cast that seems to embed them in the frame, creating, at it's most brilliant moments, what is so beautifully original about DV cinema. It's a meld of performance, sound, and visual art in a way that the lines blur. Without the distance of an expensive 35mm camera, we're so attuned to the physicality of the performances, the performers are actually people doing these things rather than distant Hollywood stars, and we can feel ourselves as people reacting to the actors as people.



His themes are more broad and veiled than most of his other films. Always an avenue of accessibility to his work is the indentification of the world of Lynchian thematics. In this case, Laura Dern is skillfully able to reprise some of the femininity and delicate innocence of Wild At Heart, so much so that her confessional upstairs, tales of violence and rape, seem doubly horrifying, almost cathartic. Likewise, her Polish husband's reversal is similarly disgusting. Inland Empire, though, makes dwindling shades of its themes like darkening levels of muddy DV grain. Maybe that's why this thing seems to warrant multiple viewings, we're left with barely enough to chew on.



There are so many reasons to be fascinated, though, and so many parts that are awesome. Hangin' out with the street people in the closing act, Black Tambourine, David Lynch composing songs and where was Angelo Badalamenti?, the strobe light dance sequence, the Polish folk mafia. I read that Canal was limiting festival and theater releases because the legions of Lynch superfans and their inevitable praise would justify his refusal to cut it down to a marketable screen time.



Here's an amazing quote by David Lynch that they played before the film: "People asked if I'd ever make a studio film. That's like asking if I'd ever poke a giant knife into my chest. ...It might happen."