..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

In The Empire Of Lynch's Land
by Larry Gross

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I feel that all of us who care about movies will be troubled by the power of David Lynch's Inland Empire for quite a long time to come.

Here's one way to describe it: What Lynch does in the first few scenes - the one in the polish hotel room, the first scene with the bunnies, the ominous dialogue between Laura Dern and Grace Zabriskie - is lay out what on a web page would be a MENU.

It lists:

Sexual depravity
Ferocious violence associated with erotic longing
Jealousy
Fairy tales
How evil came into the world
Lynch's own past work which he is inclined to review revisit and/or invoke
Self-consciousness about the film-medium (introduced specifically in Mulholland Drive)
The indeterminacy of the filmic tense
The possibility that we are “in” more than one time zone
The past-present-past all at once somehow

And what he then procedes to do rather than embody these topics in a linear hiarcharchal narrative is to surf around on this menu. The movie works quite insistently even deliberately through a sort of structured attention deficit disorder.

It's hard to say that Inland Empire is a good or great film…but on the other hand, it seems easy to say that it has a kind of importance, a kind of interest, and poses a certain challenge to filmmakers that makes terms like good and not good seem somewhat irrelevant. In other words IE is strong enough a work that it starts to offer up - perhaps even demand - its own criteria for discussing it…it changes your conception of movies as you watch it. Or at least challenges it.

Where do the strengths lie?

Dern - Obviously, in Laura Dern's performance. Everyone's calling it brave, but to me that's the obvious aspect. It's also smart. It's a performance that an actor can only give when they are an active conscious collaborator with the film maker. Lynch is trying to sustain numerous realities in this film and Dern's acting has to register all of them. It's more than just a real-life-movie dichotomy that she has to accomplish. There are several levels within that dichotomy.

Video Images - Statements that the movie is ugly are ludicrous. .There seem to be about five or six looks in the film, ranging from hideously tacky, to lustrously beautiful (much of the street stuff in Poland). But if you don't think Lynch is controlling this, consider the lighting in the room where the bruised Dern does her most down-home, painful “realistic” monologues about the past crises she has had with men (these commence just prior to half way into the film), where she seems to be sitting opposite a strangely eastern European looking interlocutor who barely ever speaks.

Irony - Continuing from the Mulholland Drive breakthrough, Inland Empire is enriched and deepened by a new level of comic irony that Lynch has added to his work by balancing his morbid-obsessive psycho-sexual concerns with a more positive explicit emphasis on the pros and cons of the creative process. The comedy of Naomi Watts incongruously “passionate” audition in MH is explored and expanded upon in a variety of ways here.

Sexual Horror - There is a war in Inland Empire between Lynch's typical preoccupation with sexual horror and the possibly redemptive power of art that reminds me at least a little of the two great recent Almadovar films All About My Mother and Talk to Her. Not that Lynch is an equally inspired screenwriter as Almodovar. This "script" such as it was clearly evolved interactively with what was shot.

The easy defence of IE is that it's a cubist painting. It does to narrative what cubism did to Renaissance perspective. There's some truth to that “description.” But at the end of the day a description, no matter how usefully accurate, doesn't tell you if the method is being utilized in a manner that is worthwhile. To my way of thinking, for instance, Wild at Heart and Lost Highway are full of intriguing methodological procedures that ultimately give the viewer close to zilch

At the end of the day what is fractured about the story telling process in IE has an honorable link (mostly) to emotional experience.

Must it be so fractured? No way to reply.

Must the purported “real life” foreground seem to disappear so completely? No way to reply.

But you feel you are going on a particular kind of emotional trip here that you could not go on if you were following the regular rules. That opens your head and your heart up to other kinds of cinema.

And if IE is good-or-great, it may not be so much good-or-great-in-itself, but as a continuing harbinger of the possibility of another cinema to come.

One could make a fairly substantial list of things in Inland Empire, as in all Lynch's work, that are inanely repellent or outright dumb. Godard and Warhol and Tarkovsky are other filmmakers who veer wildly between genius and utter puerile shit, sometimes from minute to minute within a given work-of course this gets into the whole issue of how certain forms of stupidity, sloppiness, impatience, sometimes act as protective covering for genius... but that, as they say, is another subject.

- Larry Gross
December 5, 2006

Larry Gross is a 25 year screenwriting veteran and Winner of Sundance's Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for his most recent release, We Don't Live Here Anymore.

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