Inland Empire

“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.” – Hindu scripture

This is what the brilliantly elusive filmmaker David Lynch read to a sold-out audience at the Music Box Theatre last week, prior to a screening of his tenth feature film. With fingers that wiggle as if playing an invisible piano, and a face as contentedly serene as it is subtly mischievous, Lynch is as fascinating an enigma as any one of the characters in his films. His career has included everything from surrealistic nightmares—Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive—and dark suburban parables—Blue Velvet and “Twin Peaks,”—to deeply moving character studies—The Elephant Man and The Straight Story—and even a hallucinogenic romance—Wild at Heart. Yet throughout it all, Lynch has favored telling stories through emotions, not logic. The interpretive images and nonlinear plotlines of his films are meant to be followed intuitively, forcing audience members to leave their intellect at the theater door.

Such a mindset is imperative while viewing his most audacious and experimental masterwork to date, INLAND EMPIRE. Here’s a film that not only defies description, but also a star-rating. Reviewing it is like critiquing a work by Picasso; it’s inherently impossible, because the artwork isn’t striving to be anything other than what it is, which is unlike anything anyone’s seen before. The formless plot folds onto itself repeatedly, and often goes off onto wildly bizarre tangents. Its star, Laura Dern, takes on so many different personalities that the lines between each of her supposed characters blur. Time is irrelevant, coherence is vaporous, and comprehension is futile. And yet the film somehow manages to be scarier, funnier, fiercer, and more deeply haunting than the vast majority of contemporary American cinema.

At first, the director’s adamant admirers may think they’ve stumbled onto familiar ground. The brief first act of this three-hour opus is peppered with amusing cameos from Lynch favorites Grace Zabriskie, Harry Dean Stanton, and Diane Ladd. A semblance of plot seems to swirl around screen actress Nikki Grace—Dern—who is cast in a melodrama entitled On High in Blue Tomorrows, a project the director—Jeremy Irons—informs is a remake of a film that was halted in mid-production by the murder of its two leads. As Nikki’s character Susan Blue romances the dashing Billy Side, played by Dustin Berk—Justin Theroux—the actress begins to confuse her real life with that of her character. Much of this is reminiscent of Mulholland Drive, Lynch’s scathing look at Hollywood’s dark nature, and the destructive toll it takes on those who inhabit it. Yet when Nikki loses her grip with reality, so does the film, as it plunges the audience head-first down a mind-boggling rabbit hole where, as one character puts it, “stars become dreams, and dreams become stars.” And, oh yeah, all of this is being watched on a television set by a polish prostitute whose broodingly mournful state sets the tone for the entire film. It’s only natural that Lynch—who has made several films about the exploitation of women—would see Hollywood acting synonymous with prostitution.

During the Q&A following the film, Lynch commented on how “darkness” represents “negativity and nothingness”, while light is the sign of all life. The first shot of INLAND EMPIRE is a beam of light scorching through the darkness—with the aid of incredibly vibrant sound design—and illuminating the film’s towering title. As one of the world’s leading advocates for transcendental meditation, which he believes holds the key to world peace, Lynch sports the inventive spontaneity of a man whose mind is capable of boundless imagination. Consider a few of the film’s countless unforgettable moments: people in giant rabbit heads recite brooding dialogue out of sequence, to the sound of canned laughter; a group of horny prostitutes break out into a dance number scored to “The Locomotion”; and perhaps the film’s most extraordinary sequence, in which a character lies bleeding to death on the Walk of Fame, in between two homeless women who casually engage in an increasingly outlandish conversation about how to get to Pomona. Such sequences inspire bizarre guffaws from the audience similar to those on the rabbit laugh track. There are also some contorted smiles—yes, smiles—guaranteed to send viewers leaping from their chairs.

That this film succeeds as a triumphant work of art is a testament to the collaborative genius of Lynch and Dern. Using a seventy-minute monologue as their first “puzzle piece,” the director and actress went on to improvise the surrounding film, with Dern delivering her best work to date, and Lynch using—what he refers to as—the “Unified Field of consciousness” to pull all these dissimilar strands together. Shooting all the footage on an outdated digital camera, Lynch multitasked as writer, director, producer, editor, cameraman, and even singer of the lingering melody, “strange what love does.” Avoiding the distortion of his artistic vision by meddlesome studio-heads, Lynch decided to market the film himself, and tour the country with it. Thus, from the moment of this film’s conception, all the way to a last-minute Oscar-bid for Dern—in which the director dragged a cow down city sidewalks—David Lynch has achieved the purest form of American independent filmmaking since the days of John Cassavetes.

Despite its aggressive abstractness, the film truly seems to be, in the end, a meditation on the inherent mystery of existence, and how each human mind “weaves a web” of meaning around itself, thus creating its own unique ‘inland empire.’ However, Lynch stressed to the Chicagoan multitudes that his films can be interpreted multiple ways, and are a lot like “Certs breath mints – two in one.” All he asks is that his audience not “worry about the intellectual experience” while watching his films, and instead meditate on the emotional ideas they conjure. Meditating on anything else would prove useless because, as Lynch succinctly put it, “if you meditate on buttermilk, you’ll end up going to the dairy.”

Existential Lynch-Buff Rating: ***** (out of *****)

Everyone Else's Rating: **1/2 (out of *****)