INLAND EMPIRE

“I must say that the people who get the movie, in general, have been wise and intelligent; the people who don’t get it are ignorant scum.” –Steve Martin on the poor reception of Pennies from Heaven

The day after I first watched David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE, I mentioned to an acquaintance that while I quite liked the film, it was an experience that he would almost certainly not enjoy and should probably be wary of stumbling into. Naturally, as sometimes happens to me after I say words to other people, he seemed a bit insulted.

In my head, I was being merciful and was trying to save this man from accidentally entering what could be one of the most boring, aggravating cinematic experiences of his life. Not that his plebeian mind couldn’t possibly appreciate a fine work of art in the way that I could. Not that his taste in films was less than discerning and not that he was, in any way, less than… but the man has BABY GENIUSES on his TiVo.

It may have been an insensitive declaration, but honestly, wouldn’t it be far, far worse to have someone all up in your face with a three-hour-long experimental film that you just HAVE to watch, “in fact, I have a copy right here. Have a seat!”

“Why?” he sputtered defiantly. “Why wouldn’t I enjoy it?” Well, let’s run through some of the basic facts, and you can decide for yourself whether or not you would be offended by my waving you off from David Lynch’s latest.

The facts of INLAND EMPIRE:

- Sometimes it’s a movie that is in Poland, other times, less so.

- Sometimes Laura Dern is one person and sometimes she is another, and sometimes she is possibly a third person and throughout all of this, there is the possibility that all of her characters are merely imagined by an entirely different character who is not Laura Dern.

- Julia Ormond is here as a spooky, potentially hypnotized, white trash psychopath and possibly a manifestation of Laura Dern’s fragile psyche. To sum up, she’s a kooky scamp who may or may not exist who sometimes uses a screw driver to stab people in their vagina.

- Laura Elena Herring appears very briefly as her shockingly attractive self and dreamily flirts with everyone around her. However, most of the time she appears as an ominous, ghostly, rabbit-headed demon.

- There are monkeys and anecdotes concerning monkeys, there are one legged women, and lumberjacks and Baltic circus performers eating hot dogs.

- There are also interrogators, murders, whores, a character known only as “the Phantom” who is either a pimp, a scorned husband or the devil; there are rumors of a gypsy curse–and most importantly–there is a “lost girl” who is trapped in a hotel room, doomed to watch a sitcom about the aforementioned rabbit-headed demons for all of eternity. Possibly this is because she had sex in this hotel room with a man who either made her feel like a whore or literally paid her money for sex; it’s not clear.

So, while it’s probably short-sighted to point someone away from such a wild film experience, that, hypothetically, could blow this square’s mind into some cosmic understanding and foster a new taste for such wicked inventions and possibly completely shatter their preconceived notions of identity and sexual politics, it’s entirely more likely that they would fall asleep within half an hour and in the future add a few more grains of salt to my film recommendations.

While many of Lynch’s favorite elements return-the logs, the lumberjacks, the angry static, the beckoning red curtains-the demons in EMPIRE don’t chase you down as aggressively as those of the TWIN PEAKS universe, they just tend to haunt the same rooms that you do. For the most part, INLAND EMPIRE is relatively slow, ponderous and as decidedly un-sexy a film as Lynch has made since THE ELEPHANT MAN. Sure, there are celebrity cameos, but I don’t think Mary Steenburgen or William H. Macy get the heart rates up the way they used to. Old men speak in Polish. People wander on icy, grainy Polish sidewalks. Laura Dern cooks scrambled eggs, stares through a hole in a silk blouse, is suddenly at a barbeque in rural California (maybe?) where her husband (maybe?) smears ketchup onto his chest as Dern looks on, horrified.

In general, my biggest complaints against INLAND EMPIRE can be summed up by a scene that takes place within the first five minutes of the film. A long time Lynch regular, the great Grace Zabriskie (the mother of Laura Palmer and almost mother-in-law of George Costanza), shows up to deliver an ominous warning about the new film that Dern’s actress character (and we the peoples) has just signed on to. Zabriskie cartoonishly spins threats of unpaid bills, brutal “fucking” murders, parables about the birth of evil and the tenuous nature of time, all while dueling extreme close ups with a very confused-looking Laura Dern (at least 70% of INLAND EMPIRE consists of Dern looking either baffled or horrified at strange people who are performing either baffling or horrifying acts), but the scene plays more as self-parody and alternates between being downright silly, pretentious and amateurish.

This is a film that Lynch shot in his free-time over the course of two years and sometimes it certainly feels that way. Being shot entirely on digital video adds certain elements to Lynch’s style- I actually quite enjoy the look of it-but it also strips him of some of the lovely cinematography he’s been able to pacify audiences with in the past. As entirely as EMPIRE’S shortcomings are exposed, Lynch doesn’t seem all that concerned with correcting them as his attention throughout the film seems to be elsewhere. His enthusiasm for the freedoms allowed to him by the medium of digital video is infectious, and his experimentation with the format buy him some elbow room with some of us anyway, but in almost every aspect, this is Lynch at his sloppiest. He’s in Ed Wood mode here, “it’s not about the small details, it’s about the big picture/we’ll fix it in the editing room/etc…” Not to mention the worst dialogue he’s written and yes, I have seen LOST HIGHWAY, thank you. Luckily for Lynch, his big ideas are pretty damned seductive and the man does some amazing things in the editing room, but these are not small complaints.

Which all begs a pretty fair question–what exactly did I like so much about INLAND EMPIRE? Well, almost everything else. This is a film about BIG IDEAS and strange ideas that I think a more guarded brain is unlikely to tolerate. This is a film as bull headed as the staunchest of Lynch’s critics, but through all of its impenetrable arrogance, there is something incredibly human, affecting and redemptive here.

While Rammstein is woefully absent from the film’s soundtrack, it still manages to flare up with a few treats like the wonderfully creepy “Ghost of Love” which Lynch himself wrote and performed. There are a few other classy tunes, all of which are surprising and effective, but for the most part, the soundtrack is either more ERASERHEAD style industrial clanging, haunting train whistles, or industrial-based orchestral music that’s the sort of dull, throbbing pulses and random ambient swooshes that, if placed on vinyl by themselves, would send the average pitchforkmedia.com reviewer into those spasms of infectious delight that drive me to, again, swear off Pitchfork for good. But it works wonderfully here, and I’d almost go so far as to say it sounds like the echoing, empty, howl of an indifferent universe but that might seem a bit overstated. So I’ll just say it’s a very nice soundtrack, indeed.

Also, it would be a huge disservice to the film not to mention just how stunningly good Laura Dern is in this. I’m not sure how the actor/director relationships work on a Lynch film, if he wrestles or coaxes or just inspires these sometimes grotesque but completely fearless performances from his leads, but they’re unlike anything else that exists in film. Jeremy Irons gets to be all haunting and detached, which is generally the only way Jeremy Irons is in any way tolerable, but it’s Dern that has to screech and moan and crawl around on Hollywood Boulevard vomiting blood and, well, she’s damn good at it. Like Sheryl Lee’s performance in FIRE WALK WITH ME, which was so insanely over the top that it’s generally, and unfairly, considered to be just downright unhinged, Dern is at that level of THIS ACTRESS GOES TO 11, and that such extremes manage to be both this effective and terrifying is nothing short of miraculous. Alternately, like Naomi Watts in MULHOLLAND DRIVE, once Dern has fully unleashed her inner Kraken, you can see that the earlier scenes where she seemed to be stiff and just generally delivering a half-assed performance are damn near as brave as all the wailing and the screaming and the bleeding. It can’t be easy for a talented actor to allow themselves to be portrayed as so seemingly talentless, no matter what the director has in mind for the later chapters, because what if he forgets about you like he did with poor Patricia Arquette in LOST HIGHWAY?

Whether or not you’re inclined to suffer any of Lynch’s wayward instincts is basically a question of whether or not you think the man has any credibility as a serious artist, and Lynch’s stubborn refusal to explain his awful behavior has plagued his career with angry film critics fuming accusations of both sexism and the more universally damning “weird for weirdness’s sake.” Most famously, Roger Ebert has never been able to forgive Lynch for Blue Velvet, and I’ll certainly admit that watching Dennis Hopper rape and humiliate Isabella Rosellini was far from one of my favorite scenes in film history, but I really don’t think Lynch rubs your nose in the bizarre or in brutal sexual violence from a lack of better ideas, or, worse because he finds it pleasurable; I believe there are recurring themes to Lynch’s films and they’re themes I appreciate and believe in. I think the man’s a romantic who firmly believes in a sense and order to the universe. It might be one that we little brains aren’t capable of fully grasping, but it’s there and it is, as the Phantom’s one-legged-sister gasps, sweeeeeet.

So, perhaps by challenging my acquaintance with INLAND EMPIRE, promising that there is in fact something of great value beneath the seemingly impenetrable layer of hellish surrealism, he’ll begin to grow curious about the film and seek it out with the intention of proving me wrong and finding the value in this weird, dark gem, but it’s almost entirely more likely that he’ll get distracted, angry and then fall asleep hating the universe, but at least it won’t be my fault.

You have been warned.

You want to know my spoiler-filled take on “what exactly happened?” swipe away at the INVISO-TEXT!

I have no fucking idea what happened. For seriously reals.