jürgen fauth’s muckworld

“The ambulance guys, they say, what the fuck happened here? I say, he come to reaping what he been sowing, that’s what. They say, fucker been sowing some kinda heavy shit.”

Over the course of its three bizarro hours, INLAND EMPIRE draws a lot of attention to its mode of presentation and status as physical artifact. The film opens with a shot of a movie projector cranking up and throwing a beam of flickering light into the darkness. The camera turns, and the screen becomes our screen. This is only the first of dozens of times Lynch reminds us what exactly it is we’re looking at. The magic is that it works anyway.

Because of the constant references to film as a medium, I was worried that seeing the film on DVD (available on August 14) would diminish the experience more than it usually does. But like the river you famously can’t step into twice, INLAND EMPIRE is a shape-shifter of a movie that reconstitutes itself differently every time, and my own TV screen turned out to be a fascinating place to see it.

First of all, what happens to the film’s surface is nothing less than a revelation. Lynch shot INLAND EMPIRE on cheap digital video, and it is much more at home on the small screen. The infernal glare and lousy resolution of the blown-up film are gone; the images regain something of the sensual quality that inform every frame of Mulholland Dr. At least by traditional standards, INLAND EMPIRE on DVD looks better than ever.

And while it’s true that the film opens with a projector, it only takes a few more shots before we’re in a hotel room with a woman who spends the entire movie watching TV: talking rabbits, static, Laura Dern, herself, whatever’s on. Since it continuously references both modes of presentation, INLAND EMPIRE can be said to be about Lynch’s move from film to digital, about getting lost in a media-saturated world built from competing narratives. The medium must certainly be part of the message, and the film’s interlocking stories are all framed by various acts of looking: at screens, through burn holes, through the windows of a movie set.

In this context, questions about which part is “real” and which is “just a movie” become pointless. Take the scene where Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) rehearses her role. Like Naomi Watts’ audition in Mulholland Dr., the miracle is not that an actor can summon emotion out of thin air, it’s that we feel it, too — even though it has just been revealed as a trick. All of the film’s narrative levels have the potential to affect us, and that’s why we should be afraid of the Phantom (Krzysztof Majchrzak), the shadowy Polish carnie who hypnotizes circus audiences and can simply vanish.

David Lynch distributed INLAND EMPIRE himself, and the number of people who had a chance to see it in theaters was limited. With the DVD, some of the film’s subconscious pull has been traded for bonus features and the opportunity to pour over individual scenes and fast-forward through others. (Let the obsessive analysis begin!)

“More things that happened” is Lynch’s title for 75 minutes of deleted scenes edited into a single piece, a kind of extended appendix. The new scenes offer hints and clues but also confuse matters further: Sue loses her job, the Phantom sells a watch, Laura Dern masturbates while she’s on the phone, Nastassja Kinski makes a confession, and a couple of prostitutes crash a remote controlled UFO. In other words, catnip for the converted.

The DVD also provides a gallery of still images, three trailers, and the short film “Ballerina.” A fascinating half-hour long documentary shows Lynch at work, and in another short, the filmmaker reveals his recipe for quinoa while telling a story about buying colored sugar water in Turkey. Finally, there are forty minutes of Lynch speaking about the making of Rabbits, working in Lodz, the beauty of digital editing, and where “the babies are hiding.”

INLAND EMPIRE pushes up against the outer edge of what film can do, and it drives home just how timid, unadventurous and homogenized most movies really are. It operates in an endlessly fertile space of open-ended possibility. Harry Dean Stanton’s Freddie sums it up as well as anybody:

There’s a vast network, right? An ocean of possibilities. I like dogs. I used to raise rabbits. I’ve always loved animals. Their nature, how they think. I have seen dogs reason their way out of problems, watched them think through the trickiest situations. Do you have a couple of bucks I could borrow? I’ve got this damn landlord.

INLAND EMPIRE. David Lynch, 2006. *****

• My original review from the New York Film Festival
• My second take
• Inland Empire and Transcendental Meditation
• The Sunset Boulevard Connection
• Collected Inland Empire Reviews and Resources
• Catching the Big Fish
• Dune
• Eraserhead
• Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
• Rabbits
• Mulholland Dr.
• The Official Site
• And finally, the mutant Caribbean YouTube remake known as Outlandish Republic:

“Inland Empire makes perfect sense,” I wrote the last time, thinking I had the existential mysteries of Lynch’s film if not solved then at least sufficiently unpacked and domesticated. Happy to have found a sturdy story arc, I assumed I understood the film. Not so. We saw it again on Christmas, in a misguided attempt at hipster holiday cheer, and boy did it mess with me. The third time around, Inland Empire flummoxed and confused me, and I was overwhelmed worse than the first time. It also gave me a raging headache. Surely, this must be the year’s best film! Ow.

At the IFC Center, a short clip now precedes the movie, in which Justin Theroux reads a note from David Lynch: a quote from the Upanishads to the effect that all the world is a dream, and then he wishes us “a good experience.” And indeed, the film felt completely different every time I’ve seen it. My original review tried to approach it in terms of David Lynch’s oeuvre; the second time around, I looked for structure and began collecting clues that may or may not form a coherent story. This time, I saw shots, hints, cross-references, and entire scenes that somehow hadn’t registered before, and it made me reconsider Inland Empire as subjective experience.

Perhaps it’s too literal-minded, and maybe there are already a few dissertations about this, but especially in the light of Catching the Big Fish and my own limited experimentation, it seems useful to compare the experience of watching Inland Empire to the practice of Transcendental Meditation, of which Lynch is a adamant proponent. For anybody with any familiarity with TM, the parallels are right there on the surface: there is a lot of sitting and “diving within” in Inland Empire (see how that syllable just repeated three times?) and, more specifically, I see a similar technique at work.

The “transcending” in “transcendental meditation” refers to a particular kind of mental yoga that shuttles the mind back and forth between a completely relaxed state of pure consciousness and a more analytical day-to-day awareness. In TM, transcending is achieved through the repetition of a mantra. Inland Empire achieves a comparable effect through the back-and-forth between apparently disconnected shots–what Manohla and Marcy call the art-installation aspect of the movie. For long stretches of time, Inland Empire is just stuff on a screen, and you drift off toward a weird state between waking and dreaming, just letting it wash over you. The transcending pull back to a more conscious state of mind is achieved by the millions of clues Lynch litters all over the landscape, from “high on blue tomorrows,” “vier-sieben” to “it has something to do with the telling of time” and “the man in the green shirt.” (I began cataloging some of these in a previous entry, and hopefully somebody will soon set up a proper place for it online, much like the excellent site for Mulholland Drive–a wiki perhaps?)

But “figuring it out” is only half the point. The real purpose of the clues is to keep your mind engaged, suggest that there is a graspable story here (and indeed Inland Empire has a solid three act structure.) At the same time, the film continuously frustrates all attempts at “solving” it. The viewer constantly goes back and forth between “Eureka!” and “WTF?” This back and forth is very similar to transcending, an activity that takes the meditator to a unique place between waking and dreaming, a twilight region were identities, memory and imagination merge, and strange images arise from within. (Lynch describes it as a room with red curtains and black-and-white tile floor.)

Transcending is supposed to release deep-seated stress in the form of damage done to the nervous system in the past. In this between-state, old emotions are dredged up from the icky bottom of the subconscious. In the movie, these things include guilt over adultery, shame at selling one’s body or soul, grief over the loss of a child–perhaps even Polish carnies who can hypnotize people into murder by screwdriver. A transcending meditator who is unstressing will often weep, much like the woman watching mysterious images flutter by in a hotel room “in the Baltic region.” When the dive within is completed and another layer of past damage has been healed, there is a feeling of bliss and newfound peace, perhaps even a sense of a blessed light as if facing the beam of a movie projector, and one might sit, with a smile, just like Laura Dern on the other side of the room in the film’s last shot: “Sweet.”

Inland Empire. David Lynch, 2006. *****

• Inland Empire Reviews and Resources

[tags]inland empire, transcendental meditation, david lynch, justin theroux, christmas, ifc, nyc, laura dern, sweet, film, 5 stars, adultery, screwdrivers, upanishads, consciousness[/tags]

You notice a lot seeing Inland Empire a second time. First of all, you realize you’ve been getting tired of capitalizing the title like that. Then, it sinks in that David Lynch is right: Inland Empire makes perfect sense–and it’s about a woman in trouble.

The reason Inland Empire works so goddamn well, I think, is the structure. It’s like Trey said at Coventry: I just wanted to see how weird I could get and still have people dance to it. On the Koyaanisqatsi commentary track, Philip Glass talks about leaving space between the images and the music–the key, he says, is to leave a room for the audience, for their ideas and imagination (his example were the maneuvering jumbo jets with the etherial voices.) Somehow, Inland Empire leaves tremendous spaces without ever quite snapping the tenuous lines of connection that hold the entire thing together. It’s a strange film, but you can definitely dance to it.

A woman in trouble. The tagline suggests an entire narrative, and it’s there. Inland Empire is structurally sound; once again, you can map a hero’s journey onto the film–with hookers doing the locomotion and talking bunnies, but still a hero’s journey. Scene by scene, it’s extraordinarily compelling and loaded with clues, cross-references, and payoffs to reward and further confuse the viewer. In Catching the Big Fish, Lynch likens ideas to fish, and he says he likes to dive deep: “Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.” Because of its many disparate parts, and its length, Inland Empire is difficult to contain in words, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible to grasp it. And indeed, it’s huge and abstract, and very beautiful. It’s also very, very funny.

Some things to watch out for the next time you see Inland Empire: What do whores do? Who is the Phantom, and what kind of an “opening” is he looking for? “It has something to do with the telling of time”–so is it 9:45, or after midnight? Who lost their son? What does the tatoo on Nikki’s right hand mean? Who has a way with animals? What are the rabbits waiting for? Who’s a freaaaaak? “Take a good look and tell me if you’ve known me before.” Is there a bus to Pomona? You’re in a movie theater, in the dark, before they bring up the lights. Keep up with your angle vis-a-vis the screen. Is there murder in On High in Blue Tomorrows? And what is the significance of the bright light?

Inland Empire. David Lynch, 2006. *****

• On seeing Inland Empire for the third time
• Official Site with theatrical schedule
• David Lynch’s forthcoming book, Catching the Big Fish
• Manohla Dargis’ Review
• My review on Worldfilm
• Andrew O’Hehir interviews David Lynch
• Inland Empire on RT: 52%

[tags]film, 5 stars, laura dern, david lynch, inland empire, surreal, rabbits, ifc center, koyaanisqatsi, philip glass, trey anastasio, hero’s journey[/tags]

How do you review someone else’s bad dream? With a sprained ankle swollen to the size of a coconut, I found myself joining the other insomniacs and hardcore cinephiles at an ungodly hour to see David Lynch’s first movie in five years. His latest plumbing of the unconscious is three hours long and his first shot on crappy digital video, but not the first to play like “a wicked dream that seizes the heart,” nor is it the first featuring Laura Dern, shifting identities, and creepy characters doing truly creepy things. William H Macy announces: “Hollywood, California, where stars make dreams and dreams make stars!” After Justin Theroux, Jeremy Irons, Harry Dean Stanton deliver some hesitant exposition about a movie with a history of murder, a suburban BBQ party is overrun by Eastern European carnies, a Kafkaesque interrogator listens to Dern’s curse-word peppered confession, a gaggle of hookers dances the locomotion, and blood is vomited up on the Walk of Fame.

Inland Empire is so Lynchian that it often appears to veer into self-parody, but somehow this works for the film: like the bizarre sitcom where everybody wears a rabbit mask, the laugh track at the Walter Reade was disconcertingly out of whack. Three hours later, while the rest of America gathered for church, we were watching prostitutes lip synch Nina Simone’s “Sinner Man” while a pet monkey frolicked and a man in a red wool cap sawed a log. Remember: there are consequences to one’s actions.

Inland Empire. David Lynch, 2006. ****

• My review at worldfilm

[tags]david lynch, pet monkey, prostitutes, laura dern, 4 stars, film, surreal, bad dreams, murder, poland, harry dean stanton, justin theroux, jeremy irons, hollywood, nina simone, sprained ankle, nyff[/tags]