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Inland Empireby Scott Gleine
After arriving early to make sure I got a ticket (didn’t completely sell out anyway), I met up with my friend Nate and went to hang out in the school’s lounge area, where I was interviewed by a student/die hard Lynch fan writing a piece on the film for the school paper. He asked some decent questions, such as whether or not I preferred my Lynch abstract or linear (either is fine for me), and how I felt about Lynch’s decision to use digital video (more on that later). The guy said he wanted to catch up with us after the show to get our immediate reactions. With its DV aesthetic, wildly non-linear narrative, and constant experimentation, Inland Empire comes off as the most ambitious (and best) student film ever made. Ok, that’s just a joke (and not a particularly good one), but in some ways it accurately sums up some things about how I reacted to the movie. I appreciate the use of digital video for the sake of experimentation, but it wound up being a bit distracting to me at times, mainly because I’ve spent the past three and a half years learning how to use video. There are times where the footage gets too dark and too grainy, and it appears that Lynch kicked up the gain on the camera to get an image, something that always diminishes the quality of the shot. During some of these dark scenes, it also seems that the camera is on auto focus (a cardinal sin in professional videography), causing the shots to blur in and out of focus. Also, there are scenes where the dialogue recording is rather poor. These things distracted me, but then the more I thought about it, Lynch was probably aware of all this and wanted it to look that way for reasons we’ll never be too sure of. All things considered though, there are plenty of shots and sequences that look quite nice. In order to accomplish this project, I am convinced that there was no other way for Lynch to do it than to use digital video, and in the end I fully support the choice from an artistic standpoint. By the end, it really does add to the overall effect of the film. However, if he continues to shoot this way on his future projects, I’d recommend he use a better camera. There are better options out there these days and I bet he can afford them.
Anyway, enough with the technical nitpicks, here are my thoughts on the piece itself. Though it probably won’t go on to be considered quite the artistic achievement that Mulholland Drive is, Inland Empire is still a mind-blowing motion picture. This is Lynch at his most daring, completely unfiltered and willing to try just about anything. Laura Dern turns in a mesmerizing performance, and there is also some great work from Justin Theroux, Jeremy Irons, and Harry Dean Stanton, though they don’t appear in the film enough. Many of Lynch’s usual thematic concerns pop up in the film, such as issues concerning dreams, identity, image, etc. Much like Mulholland Drive, there is plenty of razor sharp Hollywood satire sprinkled in as well. To sum up the closest thing to a “plot” in the film, it’s about “a woman in trouble”(Dern), who gets a major breakthrough when she is cast in a new motion picture, only to find out that the film had failed to complete production in the past and is now considered cursed. Anything beyond this really just has to be seen and experienced, which is part of what makes it so great. From one minute to the next, it is near impossible to know what is going to happen, a feat that is hard to come across these days in cinema. Even when I thought that I had seen one major twist coming, it turned out to be part of something entirely different, which then led to even more insanity. Now, one can argue that this only happens because Lynch just did whatever he felt like doing next, without any rhyme or reason. After just one viewing, I can’t make a complete argument against that, but I’d have a hard time believing that Lynch didn’t know exactly what he was doing. Despite its seemingly non-sensical nature, somehow the film makes sense to me. I don’t know how and I’d have to see it again to take in everything that is going on, but it seems like there is a definite, pre-determined puzzle here. There are many “clues” and pieces of information that somehow seem to fit together, though there’s usually not much time to think about how. For the first hour or so, everything seems to be moving along in a mildly straightforward manner, detailing the beginning stages of the film within the film’s production and developing the relationship between Dern and Theroux’s characters. Then, out of nowhere, there is a moment where everything noticeably changes (it literally takes place as the third reel switches to the fourth – the one hour mark) and the next two hours unfold like a bizarre lucid dream, following Dern’s character more or less to the end of the nearly three hour running time and coming to a satisfying and absolutely stunning conclusion. There seems to always be a moment of beauty near the end of a Lynch film where some lovely song kicks in on the soundtrack and things start to fall into place, at least to some extent. I’m still piecing it all together and I need to see it maybe half a dozen more times to pick up on everything that’s there, but I found Inland Empire to be a particularly worthwhile experimental journey into another macabre, Lynchian world. Cinema needs David Lynch now, possibly more than ever. As expected, I walked out of the screening in a bit of a daze. The interviewer from before never came up to my friend and I to ask us what we thought. I’m not sure what kind of answer I would have had for him anyway. I tried to catch bits and pieces of people’s reactions and it seemed as if many of them enjoyed it, or at least thought that they did, even if they were perplexed by what they had just seen and weren’t sure why they liked it. The most unusual reaction I heard came from a guy sitting in the row behind me who said, “I didn’t think Jurassic Park 4 would be that long.” Yeah, pretty weird, but I guess I was in the right kind of mood to laugh at his remark. I drove all the way home pretty much by instinct, not thinking much about where I was going, but instead going over it all in my head, once again mesmerized by the overwhelming power of the cinema. I can’t wait to experience it again. |
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