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My
ex-boyfriend, who knows what scares me, sent me a link to a BBC news story
about a Freddy Krueger-like killer who was just jailed. He made a bladed
glove and, obsessed by the horror-films as he was, attacked his roommate
in his sleep. But I had my ex tell me that, because I refused to click
on the link. This Lynchian, layered nightmare is an uncomfortably timely
segue into discussing the film.
In the vein of only the most gruesome moments in “Lost Highway,”
“Muholland Drive,” and “Blue Velvet,” Lynch executes
a whirlpool of psychotic imagery and grotesquely funny and horrifying
interactions in “Inland Empire.” It is enough to make the
audience reel back and crawl inside themselves, or duck behind an echo-wall
of implausible laughter. I want to use the word dream-like. But it is
not simply like a dream. Lynch successfully manufactures a nightmare.
The film opens with overdramatized music, angelic, fluid lighting, and
the tears of a beautiful woman like those only found at the climax of
other Lynch films. But here we are, having just found our seats at the
IFC, still fidgeting with winter coats and popcorn, and our emotions are
immediately, without origin, in high demand. Lynch, somewhere in the wings,
is laughing maniacally as he yanks at our heartstrings like an over-caffeinated
puppet master -- all before the credits. He rings us in with mel odrama
before the word drama has formed on our lips. Yet we have no idea what
is going on, and we are as disconnected from the larger-than-life woman
weeping on the screen as we are from the strangers in the seats behind
us. We don’t give a shit about her, yet the music and environment
are telling us we do, commanding us to. Twanging our heartstrings like
a child’s banjo in some higher domain, I imagine Lynch poking his
head through a cigarette hole like Porky the Pig, laughing his ass off
at our expectations of him.
“Inland Empire” is a film about making a film that is a remake
of a film that was never finished -- the retelling and re-aligning of
an old story, within a postmodern framework. But Lynch does not let me
feel intelligent for this observation for long, as one of Laura Dern’s
characters points out frankly, “this is an old story.” But
being an old story, Lynch takes elements from a variety of classic literature.
For instance, there is a mad group of whores, who ask the same obtuse
questions as the audience, filling the role of the Greek Chorus. “Who
is she?” they ask, heads floating, superimposed about the screen.
They even have song and dance numbers. And yes, we are allowed to laugh
when prostitutes do “The Loco-Motion.”
Lynch is so intertextual he becomes his own text. I cannot say whether
this is a grand experiment in film or if, having gotten too close to the
heat, Lynch has become Brundlefly,
or if, like Seth Brundle, Lynch has gotten to close to the heat and become
the fly. The role of character and actor become entangled, as each actor
plays multiple roles and each character plays multiple roles. There are
moments that feel like this is the play about the players stuck in their
roles not knowing what to do – a trick pioneered by Luigi
Pirandello and furthered by Luis
Bunuel. Lynch has always had a thing for doppelgangers, and this
time they are no less in reference to his own work than to work he’s
referenced before. There are so many over-the-top-Lynchian moments one
cannot help but to think he is not only citing but also mocking himself.
The rabbit scenes are directly from his film “Rabbits”
. There is no midget, but there is a one-legged girl with a “car
stick” for a leg (whatever a car stick is). There’s a pet
monkey also seen in “Twin Peaks,” while “Muholland
Drive” characters are found in the end credits. As always
there are references to the Tibetan
Book of the Dead and other spiritual endeavors of Lynch.
“Inland Empire” is Lynch’s first feature length to be
shot digitally, a decision that makes the film look at once, and eerily,
new and old. But analog cameras are also part of the film, almost as characters
themselves. In one of the concluding scenes, we are pulled back from the
action to these external dark shapes of cameras that feel alien and foreboding.
They are invasive and probing – perhaps one of Lynch’s qualms
about his own medium.
It’s not the only qualm he has.
The process of making a film begins with a linear narrative (the screenplay);
but that narrative is broken down in the process of filmmaking: scenes
are filmed out of sequence depending on convenience, the weather, the
actors, the union. The end may be shot before the beginning. Time is literally
rearranged and one cannot tell yesterday from tomorrow. The process is
quite literally akin to a waking nightmare – the very sensation
projected by “Inland Empire.” At one point Laura Dern finds
a way (a wormhole, just a door) from one set piece in one timeframe to
another setting on another day. “Wake up and find out what the hell
yesterday was about, says Nikki, one of Dern’s characters. “I'm
not too keen on tomorrow, and today's slipping by.” And so, in rearranging
days and leading scene into convoluted scene, Lynch cocoons us in the
a-linear and layered process of moviemaking.
Even cue
marks (“Fight Club” called them “cigarette burns”)
are used diegetically.
One of Laura Dern’s characters is told to burn a hole in silk with
her cigarette and look through. This hole moves about the screen until
it finds its way to the top right corner. What she then sees is yet another
layer of the film and story. This may also be linked with a monologue
about a hole in a woman’s womb later in the film. Or not.
There can be no plot spoilers for “Inland Empire,” because
Lynch has shredded to nonsensicality any notion of plot. Lynch takes us
on a postmodern goose chase, where all systems of signs are broken down
and signifiers don’t match up to their signifieds, or are inconsequentially
linked to a sign system in another world. Narrative threads lead nowhere.
Motifs and poetic repetition wind around and around, despite their irrelevance.
Time is stripped away in the “Inland Empire” – if it
exists, it is arbitrary and connects nothing to no one. Only our own associations
and experience with time hold us anywhere, trapped. Trapped, perhaps,
like his sitcom rabbits with sitcom laughter.[B]
CARMIEL BANASKY
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