Inland Empire (2006)

On David Lynch

I saw Inland Empire for the first time at the Royal Cinema in Toronto in May 2007, where it opened about five months after its limited release in the United States. I was in one of my last weeks of high school, and in the years since I’ve learned that many future friends were at the sold-out opening-night screening. One was Colin Geddes, whose local distribution shingle Ultra 8 Pictures arranged the Toronto run, and I remember he said in his introduction that Lynch’s own brand of coffee was for sale in the lobby. There were some chuckles at this, because it seemed like another odd bit of performance art from Lynch: by 2007 he was already several years deep into posting those daily video weather reports on his website (“Here in L.A., beautiful blue skies… a few wispy clouds, golden sunshine coming. Very still. Around 65 degrees Fahrenheit right now, 18 Celsius…”), and a few months earlier, he had “gone viral” (a term that may or may not have existed yet) by setting up a lawn chair on Hollywood Boulevard, erecting a “For Your Consideration” banner for Laura Dern, and holding a cow. I regret not buying any coffee; for what it’s worth, I remember Colin saying that it was good.

So Inland Empire was a big deal in at least one Toronto neighbourhood for at least one night in 2007. For the most part, however, it was not initially greeted as a major event even in cinephile circles. Five years after Mulholland Dr. returned Lynch to critical favour and got him an Academy Award nomination, he delivered his most abrasive and difficult movie to date – an affront to many deeply-ingrained notions of how movies should look, behave, and be sold. Its cryptic, stream-of-consciousness story was not easily “solvable.” Its harsh digital-video cinematography was so unlike the 35mm industry standard. Lynch’s choice to self-distribute was also a conscious rejection of the Hollywood hype machine, and the stunt with the cow a joke about the very idea of independent Oscar campaigning. Inland Empire had its admirers in the critical community, but typical was the review in Variety, which said it “may mesmerize those for whom the helmer can do no wrong, but the unconvinced and the occasional admirer will find it dull as dishwater and equally murky.” Many reviewers noted that certain scenes began life as standalone experiments from Lynch’s website, with the implication that the finished film might be a little cobbled-together, and thus dismissible. Pretty much everyone agreed that it was a “fans only” proposition.

I wish I could say I was ahead of the curve, but I should admit that I didn’t like Inland Empire when I saw it in 2007. The dislike was complicated and uncertain: Lynch had clearly made it this unlikable on purpose, I just hated watching it. I think most assumed that Lynch would return to something closer to “normalcy” now that this was out of his system. Of course, that never quite happened, and in retrospect, Inland Empire can be seen as the flowering of several developments in Lynch’s life and art that had been growing since the turn of the millennium.

For one, he found way to turn filmmaking into something more like painting, the artistic discipline that was his first and perhaps primary love. He was early to recognize the creative possibilities of the internet, and for his short films on DavidLynch.com he embraced an ad hoc, improvisatory style of filmmaking that would have been impossible in the cumbersome, expensive world of mainstream cinema. The project that became Inland Empire began life as one such project, hatched between Lynch and his old friend/new neighbour Laura Dern, in which she plays a mysterious battered woman who delivers a long monologue to a silent interrogator about her history with abusive men. The movie that gradually emerged became a sort-of State of the Union of Lynch’s creativity circa 2001-2006… which is not to say that it’s merely an accumulation of random footage.

Inland Empire opens with a shaft of light, resembling the light from a movie projector, and segues into what looks like black-and-white surveillance-cam footage of a sex worker and a client, their faces blurred out. Then we see the same sex worker, in colour and her face now visible, crying while watching Rabbits (one of several repurposed DavidLynch.com projects) on TV. Shifting abruptly between different visual styles, these opening moments are immediately disorienting; I have the Inland Empire Wiki to thank for explaining to me that this sex worker character, identified in the credits as “Lost Girl,” is the anchor for the story, and that Laura Dern’s various characters are derivations of her. We learn more about the Lost Girl’s story when Nikki Grace (Dern), a glamorous Hollywood actress, is visited by a neighbour (Grace Zabriskie), who recites a folk tale about a woman who was murdered after cheating on her overbearing husband, and is doomed to repeat the cycle in multiple realities.

In this reality, Nikki is set to star in On High in Blue Tomorrows, a corny-looking drama directed by the pompous Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons), who seems at least as talented as the director who beat Lynch for an Oscar in 2002. Some of these early scenes are shot on an actual studio backlot, so quiet and empty that it’s as if Lynch and Co. just snuck in after hours, like Ed Wood stealing the rubber octopus. Characters like Justin Theroux’s soul-patch-wearing superstar Devon Berke and Diane Ladd’s vapid, gossipy entertainment journalist Marilyn Levins are gargoyle versions of popular Tinseltown archetypes. These early scenes are bookended by a later passage where an alternate Nikki, now a sex worker, is stabbed and bleeding on seedy Hollywood Boulevard – the tourist mecca where everything that Hollywood is supposed to be converges with everything it isn’t. Where Mulholland Dr.’s jaundiced vision of the Dream Factory was photographed in lush, dreamy 35mm, Inland Empire’s consumer-grade digital video is replete with artifacts, colour bleed, uncertain lighting, and all the other visual qualities that made digital appear “lesser” than film. Lynch finds a certain awful beauty in the Sony DSR-PD150 image, but not in Nikki’s ornately furnished Hollywood mansion, which the camera renders a tacky eyesore. Hollywood was Lynch’s home and frequent subject, but he always occupied an uncertain place in its entertainment ecosystem; and in the context of his career, Inland Empire feels like a final rejection of all that. As with most of his later films, the modest financing came largely from French sources.

Like Mulholland Dr., Inland Empire contains a decisive moment where reality is ruptured and the lead character’s identity disintegrates. Unlike Mulholland Dr., that moment here happens early, and the character reappears in multiple new forms, united by a base identity, the Lost Girl. (This, I think, separates Inland Empire thematically from contemporaneous film about selfhood by another famous David, A History of Violence, which is agnostic on if identity is just an entirely arbitrary and constructed things) As we consider issues of selfhood and identity, it might be relevant to note the 2000s were the period when Lynch emerged as the public face of Transcendental Meditation with his David Lynch Foundation and other activities. The same month as Inland Empire’s U.S. release, Lynch published his book Catching the Big Fish, a mix of memoir and self-help in which Lynch credits TM with much of his artistry. He describes the practice as like diving into realm of “pure consciousness,” and writes of emerging from his meditations with ideas (hence the fishing metaphor of the title). The implication is that through this one easy trick, you too can tap into your hitherto undiscovered creative potential. Lynch’s thesis goes against everything I think I know about meditation, which I understand to be a relaxation technique aimed at clearing one’s mind as much as possible. Lynch believed that meditation gave him a greater sense of self. Re-reading the book recently, I was actually struck by the sense of separation he maintained between his conscious and unconscious minds. The way he wrote about it, the unconscious was a mysterious place that he visited, returning with treasure. This is consistent with Lynch’s many interviews, where he was comfortable articulating the technical and logistical aspects of his films, but flatly unwilling to explain their meaning.

Inland Empire’s issues of selfhood remind me of a passage from David Foster Wallace’s landmark 1997 essay on Lynch and Lost Highway. Though mostly laudatory, Wallace harshly criticized the filmmaker’s use of Richard Pryor, by then visibly disabled with multiple sclerosis, in one scene. “Pryor's infirmity is meant to be grotesque and to jar against all our old memories of the ‘real’ Pryor,” wrote Wallace. “Pryor's scenes are the parts of Lost Highway where I like David Lynch least: Pryor's painful to watch, and not painful in a good way or a way that has anything to do with the business of the movie, and I can't help thinking that Lynch is exploiting Pryor the same way John Waters exploits Patricia Hearst, i.e., letting an actor think he's been hired to act when he's really been hired to be a spectacle, an arch joke for the audience to congratulate themselves on getting.”

Wallace is not wrong to think that Pryor’s disability is the point – in fact, far from having nothing to do with “the business of the movie,” he fits comfortably in a cast that includes Robert Blake, Natasha Gregson Wagner, Gary Busey, Michael Massee, and other names with melancholy Hollywood auras. In his 2018 memoir Room to Dream, Lynch wrote that he cast Pryor after being moved by a talk show appearance: “He’d been through a lot in his life but he had a wisdom that was really beautiful, and there was greatness in him that just came through. So when there was a spot for him in Lost Highway I really hoped he’d do it, and it was great having him in the film.” Lynch is being typically cagey here, but I think his words are worth taking seriously because they suggest that Pryor’s scene, like so much in Lynch’s films, can mean more than just one thing. Wallace indulges in a worse cruelty than what he accuses of Lynch by creating a hard binary between the beleaguered 1997-era Pryor and the supposedly “real” Pryor of memory. Who’s to say that the older Pryor is any less himself? In light of Inland Empire, I might ask: isn’t there a common self that unites both Pryors?

In fairness to Wallace, he wrote his mostly-sympathetic essay in the post-Twin Peaks, pre-Mulholland Dr. era when skepticism towards Lynch was at its height. Some critics who invested a lot in Blue Velvet started wondering if certain scenes from Wild at Heart weren’t just a little flippant with their transgressive imagery, and if the second season of Peaks didn’t suggest an artist running on empty. The uncompromising nature of Inland Empire ought to have answered the skeptics once and for all, even if most people, me included, weren’t ready to see it in the mid-2000s. For a younger who grew up in the primordial ooze of Twitch, YouTube, and Pornhub, and for whom 35mm is no longer the default moving image style, I wouldn’t be surprised if Inland Empire is one of the Lynch movies they gravitate to first.

Wallace’s division between the “real” and real Pryor is typical of a certain kept of binary analysis that was once very in reviews of Lynch movies: the “dream” and “reality” sections of Mulholland Dr.; the Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty parts of Lost Highway; the placid surface of Blue Velvet’s small town vs. the rot underneath. This reminds me of a 1970s-era quote, cited in J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s book Midnight Movies, where Lynch describes his unhappy time as a young family-man in Philadelphia during the production of Eraserhead: “There was racial tension, and just… violence and fear. I said to someone, all that separated me from the outside world was this brick wall, and they started laughing, like, ‘What more do you want?’ you know? But that brick wall was like paper.” This quote resonates with Blue Velvet, in which certain spaces represent normalcy and others chaos, but where the border between these spaces is porous and no space is uncorruptible. For all its horror, Inland Empire ends on the most hopeful note of any Lynch film outside of The Straight Story, with the Lost Girl liberated from her endless cycle, and Nikki Grace parties in a loft with several sex workers, a lumberjack, some celebrity guests, and a monkey. It’s an ending that suggests Lynch had grown comfortable without the thin wall.