Inland Empire

It's a bit difficult to write about Inland Empire. Not because the film itself is strange or hard to figure out - shoot - that's what makes it so easy to write about... But because it's only playing a couple places (NY and LA, for the Oscar season, and Cambridge Massachusetts - that I know of.) It will open in January in the wide world, I guess - this creates a dilemma. It's a film you have to take in full, in a way - to say much of anything coherent, you should probably get into the guts. But it's also a film well worth seeing in as raw a state as you can - navigating through it blind, at least once, is a pretty important step.... So - I'm not sure spoilers are quite the term for this film, but... there might be some. I imagine most of the plot of the film [snicker] will be well known by the time it comes out - still - I suppose I should make some kind of disclaimer before starting....

So what do we have? A Woman in Trouble. Laura Dern, in the role of Nikki Grace, an actress, playing a woman named Sue, in a melodrama about adultery, costarring with Justin Theroux as a rake, playing Billy, who's rich, and a rake, and... we get a bunch of movie set stuff, scenes from the movie in a movie, scenes of the actors hanging around, Harry Dean Stanton being very funny. There were some hints - rabbits on TV; an old Polish woman telling stories; flashbacks or scenes from a movie or a radio show set in Poland - and then things start to loop, and once they start, they never quite come back to anything resembling a stable storyline. There are dark secrets; there are morality tales; there are whores and corridors and dark streets in Baltic regions; there are dance routines. Also lamps, furniture and a crying girl. Mostly though, there is Laura Dern.

I imagine people will soon be trying to figure it out. Trying to parse what's "real" and what's not, trying to map the ontological levels of the thing. That seems a waste of time. Even more than Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire seems rigorously devoted to the logic of a dream - to the mechanics of dreams. Not just the swirl of imagery, the unconscious, bad conscience and the like - but the mechanics. The way dreams stitch images and places together. The way any image or place or thing in a dream can lead to any other place or image or thing. Films can do that too, though they don't all that often. It’s too easy to claim this film is incoherent or has no plot*: it may well be true that there is no plot as such, no ontological grounding, but it remains internally logical. It operates by the fairly simple principal that syntax precedes semantics. - that the logic of how things happen is more important than what, in fact, happens. Lynch maintains the syntax of films - shots/reaction shots, editing on actions, keeping the direction of motion the same, etc. Actions flow - if you go through a door you are in a different room; you go around a corner and you see something; you go around a corner, there is a cut to someone coming around a corner; you look through a window, there is something out there. But what you see isn't determined by what you just saw. The other side of the door isn't determined by this side of the door. Lynch keeps a coherent syntax - but constantly changes the semantics. Every cut can reinvent the world. There is no reason why a shot-countershot sequence has to cut between the same things. So Laura Dern and a lamp can become Laura Dern and a roomful of hookers. Or you can step into “Smithy’s house” and step out in Poland or the rabbit sitcom.

Dreams work like that. You walk through the house you grew up in, go through a door and are in your grandmother’s house. Or turn right and you’re at your job, turn left and you’re on a boat. Dreams do yeoman work of constructing something like narrative out of this flow of images - Lynch gives you a similar flow here. Dreams tend to keep throwing up the same images - a lot of the links in dreams come from some object or place or person who keeps recurring in the dream. That is certainly how Lynch works. He keeps a fairly stable group of places, faces, phrases, objects, actions - he keeps cycling through them, changing their position in the story - changing names, the way someone (actor, character, name) acts, what a door can lead to. All of it is anchored by Dern, passing through - though she is hardly playing a stable character: she might be the actress, might be the role, might be the actress playing the role, might be a hooker on the street, in LA, or Poland, or.... She is, though, always Laura Dern, though even that - she is a remarkably pliable performer, changing her face, her voice, her posture, her demeanor from scene to scene.... lazy reviewers will whine that of course she did, they made it up on the spot and stitched the film together afterwards. I will note instead that that is probably why they made it up on the spot - to get that kind of protean performance.

Still.... that's the story, so to speak. Then there is the film as an object. It is absolutely stunning looking. Not in a classically beautiful film way (which Lynch is a master of), but Lynch goes very deep into the textures and effects of digital photography. He revels in its look - the blurring, the crappy colors, the graininess of it, the way light and shadows react to the video, the way it gives light and darkness a kind of thickness. He revels in the different qualities of light - cutting between these milky, blurry shadowy shots and clear, sharply lit shots, or the brilliance of natural light. He takes advantage of the lowlight capabilities of video. Light itself, frankly, is close to the main subject of the film. If not light itself, then lamps - the quality of their light, the shape of the light and shadows they throw on walls and rooms. He seems to love everything about the video camera. He exploits the size and focal qualities of the video camera - shooting faces in extreme close-ups with wide angle lenses to get them all in - but leaving half the screen empty, but in focus - so your eye is drawn back and forth between the distorted faces the open spaces behind them. He loves the mobility of the camera, its size - he pushes it into some strange places. All that, applied to shadowy corridors, icky looking rooms, decrepit stairways, mysterious doors, and christ knows what else - beautiful!

All told - it's a masterpiece. David Lynch is the man.

* Two comments on the plot - more likely to cause a breach of the spoiler police than the rest...

1) the plot of the movie in a movie is in fact fairly clear. A rich man, Billy, with a wife and kids, has an affair with a poorer woman, possibly a cleaning lady (Sue) - the spouses find out, and actions have consequences, and they will be dark and inescapable. Roughly the same plot occurs in the Polish sequences. These stories are, however, fragmented, incomplete and discontinuous, and of course confused by the way people seem to keep moving around among the stories...

2) Under all the dreamscapes and Freud and moralism (and there is a lot of moralism, when you get down to it), it might be possible to take the film, Inland Empire, that we see, as an almost direct attempt to show the process of making films. The discontinuity, the lack of sequence, the repetition here all echo the process of actually shooting a film. It’s a denaturalization of the acting and filmmaking process - stripping out all the transitions, not providing the overall story, just presenting the on-the-ground, in the moment experience of making a film, out of sequence, playing a character and living as yourself.... This isn't that farfetched a reading, I don't think - the film repeats its emphasis on Dern’s performance, on all her roles - TV and theater and movies and radio are all major metaphors - and well - it ends with what looks like a wrap party, doesn’t it?