Movie Review : Inland Empire (2006)
I have this theory that David Lynch didn't get bored of movies, he got bored of us and our simplistic desires instead and moved out of a business that had little use for him. He got tired of us wanting to be weirded out for the sake of being weirded out. That’s why I hadn’t seen his (yet) final movie Inland Empire, hailed to be three hours of his most abstract material since Eraserhead. I didn't want to leave that life-affirming relationship on a defeat. But like it's often the case with Lynch, public perception of his work is both right and wrong.
Inland Empire is both quite simple and completely fucking elusive. It tells the story of actors Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) and Devon Berk (Justin Theroux) who are set to star on a production called On High in Blue Tomorrows. Upon the first rehearsal, Nikki and Devon learn from the director (freakin’ Jeremy Irons) that it's a remake. The original production was cursed, both leads were killed and the film was never completed. Nikki is about to find the fuck out why and how this thing was cursed in the first place.
The Unraveling of the Mind in the Internet Age
First thing that hits you in the face like a shovel upon watching Inland Empire is how freakin’ ugly it looks. David Lynch filmed it with a handheld Sony camcorder, giving it a rough, amateurish look like early internet videos or 90s point-and-click games like Phantasmagoria or Police Quest. It feels bootleg and unreal and it's 100% by design. Lynch wanted to harness the unsettling power of this new aesthetic in order to sharpen his movie's feeling of inherent threat. It feels unhinged without even trying.
Now, the story of Inland Empire is super duper coherent for the first hour. It might even be David Lynch’s most coherent hour of cinema. But once you revisit the rehearsal scene from the point of view that was missing from the first, all bets are off. It introduces a series of loosely related vignettes where reality and fiction become increasingly more difficult to tell apart by Nikki. She’s drifting from scene to scene, feeling anxious and unsafe. Good luck reading a deeper meaning into it, because there isn’t one.
Inland Empire mirrors the disjointed feeling of surfing hyperlinked materials in the early days of the internet. Nikki stumbles upon her double on Hollywood boulevard or she has to figure her way out of a prop house full of sex workers because she kind of asked for it, but not really. It’s a byproduct from wanting to be in a feature film, just like a hyperlinked site is a byproduct of what you were originally looking for. The mind drifts to places it didn’t originally planned to explores, which is the Lynchian shit there is.
David Lynch Hates Hollywood
This is the third and final movie David Lynch made about Hollywood being an existential hellhole where dreams to go die. I don’t think he hates Hollywood in the way people conventionally hate things, though. It’s also a place of great mysticism and magic to him, but the fate suffered by Nikki Grace at the hands of shady execs and unknowable interlopers is one of the angriest and most intense things David Lynch ever shot on video. Nikki’s a pure, anachronistic vision of movies that gets fucked, enslaved and abused.
I believe it's also why David Lynch decided to film Inland Empire on a deliberately ugly format. It’s a goodbye letter in the form and in the content. It’s the dumbed down, corrupted vision of what once inspired him. I’m probably doing some revisionist history here and Lynch didn’t plan his exist methodically like I’m claiming, but his wear and tear is palpable. You know whenever you phone in a project because you’re burned out and you don’t care what the fuck people will think? This is Inland Empire for you.
*
I’ll put it as simply as I can: if you don’t like Inland Empire, you don’t really like David Lynch. It’s some of the most spontaneous and visceral material he’s ever filmed. It’s rugged and directionless, but it never feels purposeless. Inland Empire is a window into the creative burnout of one of our most exceptional filmmakers. It’s not a film you can watch ever week or so, but it’s something unique and strange that could only happen there and then. A must watch for David Lynch completists, which I am.
