Inland Empire

2006 Directed by David Lynch

This is a film that I had waited on for awhile to see. Part of it was the low resolution digital quality to the film- or that it wasn’t really available on anything but DVD for quite awhile, but everything I read about it felt like an oddball movie that is only for completionists. It’s also 3 hours long, so being of the right mindset on a dreary January night felt like just the right moment to watch the film. After watching I needed to watch something else to have a bit of distance from it- Champagne and Bullets (1993) - which is overtly awful in every aspects- pulling on the realm of plot, but also being an absurd oddity in itself. The next day or so David Lynch died, which felt like a nod to the synchronous nature of reality. Watching the film it also seemed as if David had put out a film that said exactly all that he needed to say, a retrospective on the themes that had popped up throughout his filmography.

Laura Dern plays an actress who increasingly becomes aware of her reality becoming the reality of a cursed screenplay. Here the digital flickers of light blending into the forms of the figures adds to the atmosphere of the film. Nothing is crisp- but feels like some voyeur amateur film like there’s an aware position of both the audience and camera worker looking in on the goings on. The shadow play of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive seeping in with characters that pop in for intervals of ambiguous phrases and images that seep into the brain without attachment or concern for complete coherence.

Even in the clarity of trying to explain these disparate elements feels like a missing the point- that the film is meant to be an experience. It’s meant to curdle and pinch at the loud spectrums of the mind until you either shut it off and unplug or you allow it to seep in. This muddy journey doesn’t always feel enjoyable, nor does it need to be as you’re working in the realm of hopelessness, of the human spirit grinded behind false Hollywood mechanizations. A Hollywood that wouldn’t produce another one of his films. It becomes a meta awareness of the production itself, of how art is made- or the experience of time in our lives within the digital interface of modern living. The disconnected plot elements drift into each other, working into scenes that literally collide.

There are moments of unyielding depression. It’s a drone of a film that struggles with elements that don’t seem to jive together- delving into the underbelly of dark society and mirrored decay. It would require multiple watches to really untangle the floating nature and small byways of humanoid rabbits and snippets of his back catalogue. But just as David Lynch’s weather reports of the last few years of COVID were meditations on the state of the world, this also finalizes itself in the only way it could- with a dance and outpour of joy in community. That is to say, in the noxious state of being sometimes the best and only thing we can do is celebrate together, logjammin’ and all.

So while this film is bloated and haphazardly messy, it also is one that will sit with your gut. Because the film delves into repeated themes it’s one I’d watch after seeing all of Twin Peaks and his other work, but it did feel like a raw connection to his work. That’s something that David’s films will always be; a resonate conversation that happens each time you watch- because they’re undefined. As a whole the creative endeavors exist in a state that welcome the viewer to take something new from them each time. It’s that living conversation that I’ll continue to appreciate and love about his work, long after his death.

Thank you David Lynch—