The last feature by David Lynch was an unusual avant-garde piece that foreshadowed what Hollywood would be doing in their films. To cap a film career (for now) full of tales about dreams and nightmares, he decided to go on his own completely as no major studio would finance this very ambitious project except French company StudioCanal. It then got remastered before Criterion re-released it on physical media and then put it on the Criterion Channel. I was curious about the movie because I had not seen it and had no expectations. So, I took a dive into it with the three free hours I had (the film’s running time) and this is what I got from it.
The Plot…And Other Stuff
A Polish woman tells her neighbor, actress Nikki Grace (Laura Dern), that she will get the role she auditioned for, but the story is much darker than she realizes. During a rehearsal with her co-star (Justin Theroux), the director (Jeremy Irons) acknowledges that it is a remake of a German film based on a Polish tale. The film was not completed when the two leads were found murdered. An affair between the two actors begins despite the director’s warning that inevitable consequences will occur and not of the direct personal kind.
What follows is the surrealism from Lynch that is common, but the rabbit hole is deeper and the lines blur. It becomes evident that Nikki now takes on her character as if she is now living the story, shifting the setting to Poland in the 1930s for a time. Moments of that pure surrealism – rabbits in a sitcom, dancing to the loco-motion – get inserted as you try to piece together what is the real Nikki and what is fiction. By the end, when she is done with her work, Nikki’s parallel lives and her alter ego, Sue Blue, seem to have been permanently fissured. Or, are we just thinking the two have become one?
It’s Mesmerizing…Yet, I Don’t Get It
I am not as hardcore Lynchian as others are when it comes to dissecting his work. However, I can only find his resume attractive and intoxicating and I have to look closer. Many things stand out here in comparison with his previous film, Mulholland Drive. More clues are dropped in there than in Inland Empire, which adds to the difficulty of trying to piece together Nikki’s path. The mood shifts from scene to scene as Lynch builds in the entire web that links it all, yet only the Lynch fans who have studied the living hell out of this film can probably make sense of it.
From my point of view, this requires a deep dive into Lynch’s past work and the psychoanalysis so many people have studied to explain what is its meaning. Lynch is notoriously quiet in explaining what his movies are about and conspicuous in what they mean. Is there a sinister message about Hollywood he is telling us? Cursed stories and actors who get in too deep with their characters are well known. There is a quote Lynch gave as a hint, from Hindu scripture, when presenting the movie: “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.”
Stripped Down To The Core
Also interesting was how Lynch and his then-wife, Mary Sweeney, made the film. In announcing the movie, Lynch said he was finished with celluloid and was going to digital for this movie. He was his own cinematographer, using a low-resolution DSR-PD150 Sony camcorder throughout, then edited the final product on Final Cut Pro at home. Even more radical was the screenplay when Lynch said in an interview that there wasn’t any and that he wrote the day’s scenes in the morning before shooting in the afternoon and evening. Outside of their actual characters, no one in the cast knew what the movie was about except for the single premise, “A woman in trouble.”
Most famously, Lynch created an eye-catching “For Your Consideration” for Laura Dern’s performance. He sat outside with a live cow on Sunset Blvd. by Empire Records and a sign reading, “Without cheese, there wouldn’t be an INLAND EMPIRE,” for several hours. Passersby recorded the odd sighting and uploaded it on YouTube, making it viral. Obviously, Dern missed out on major nominations, but for a grassroots campaign, something close to Andrea Riseborough’s shocking nod for To Leslie, it’s not a bad start.
What Is Inland Empire?
To me, Nikki is like Alice going into Wonderland, but it is not a fun side where the Mad Hatter is there to greet her. Falling down the rabbit hole, Nikki finds herself in an underworld filled with figures that are part of an expansive world connected to this story she is taking part of. With all of this, it turns outward and is portrayed on screen when Jeremy Irons finally calls, “Cut!” It is a matrix of links that only David Lynch can explain, but he forces viewers to disseminate it all. There is no single interpretation of what Lynch does with his movies; I think that’s the fun of watching his multilayered work. You have to see it all, tune out like dropping on acid, and break free from conventional wisdom. It’s probably why Dern didn’t get nominated for a phenomenal performance and Lynch only got an honorary Oscar rather than a competitive one.
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