INLAND EMPIRE Burlesque

“I was watching everything go around me as I was standing in the middle. Watching it like in a dark theater before they bring the lights up.” - Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) 

INLAND EMPIRE (Dir. David Lynch, 2006)

I was surprised when I got the latest David Lynch film (released on DVD August 25th) from Netflix to see on the envelope that it was 172 minutes. Now, I've had a 'love/WTF?' relationship with the films of Lynch for a long time so I was a bit ambivalent about spending nearly 3 hours with Lynch's particular brand of operatic weirdness. It turned out to be more than that of course, because I re-watched many parts in a futile attempt to really understand what exactly was going on. As many critics have said really understanding it is not the point. It's supposed to wash over you or something like that. So let's let it wash: 

Writing about a David Lynch film can be one of the most intimidating tasks a critic can have. No straight plot description or analysis can be made and working out character motives or the real from the imaginary will leave one’s mind tangled up in Jungian knots. But I’ll roll up my sleeves and at least put on the table what I could decipher. One narrative thread emerges early on out of the chaotic kaleidoscope of dream like imagery. It involves Lynch regular Laura Dern as an actress who accepts a part in what she and fellow actor Justin Theroux are told is a remake of a never completed Polish film named 47, never completed because the two leads were murdered. 

After that premise is established the film disintegrates, or melts rather, into an endless seemingly random series of dream-like sequences. In arguably the most abstract film-within-a-film in history the actors and the film itself become one another and the entire thing turns inside out and back again. Oh, and throw in a living room set with people with large rabbit heads with a laugh track, and then another room with ‘60s décor in which nine casually dressed women (models/prostitutes?) who after some simplistic girls-talk, break out into a spontaneous, but still well choreographed, dance, and lip synch number to “The Loco-Motion.” Oh yeah, there are also scenes interspersed from what looks like a orange-hued Foreign film. Whew! That’s the best I can do!

Dern (who co-produced) does probably her best work here, and that’s saying a lot for a project that mostly appears to require her to run around re-interpreting Munch’s painting The Scream in every actorly variation there is again and again. Grotesque Fellini-esque extreme close-ups dominate, non-sensical soundbites seep in from every corner of the screen (“it had something to do with the telling of time,” somebody says at one point - uh, thanks) and while it was filmed on digital video the film nicely lives up to Lynch’s previous aesthetics.

One can not casually watch INLAND EMPIRE - that would be like casually visiting somebody in prison. So when the question comes down to whether I liked or disliked it, well trying to figure that out feels like deciding whether to give “thumbs-up or thumps-down” * to a Rorshach test. I can only say I found parts of it intensely absorbing, and I cared about what was happening even if I didn't always *get* what was happening. Still it was a bit much and perhaps should have been edited down a tad. Of course though, that would probably be like cropping sections out of a Jackson Pollack painting. 

* “Thumbs up-thumbs down” is a registered trademark of Disney-ABC Domestic Television. 

More later...