Get Lynched!

INLAND EMPIRE violently rocks the cradle of cinematic convention.

EVAN JOHNSON STAFF

David Lynch, never a filmmaker known for accessible or coherent narratives, has outdone himself (incoherence-wise) with his latest film, INLAND EMPIRE — a schizophrenic, terrifying and truly disorienting three-hour orgy of disconnection that is completely exhausting and utterly frustrating. Somehow it peaks as an experience some three days after it’s over.

I hardly know how to begin thinking about beginning to write about this movie, but movie critic protocol compels me to attempt some kind of preliminary plot synopsis. However, INLAND EMPIRE contains less a plot than an intersecting jumble of plot-like fragments. As with Lynch’s superior Mulholland Dr. (2001) — still regarded, by me, as the best American film of the past 20-odd years -— and his vastly inferior Lost Highway (1997), the film’s disparate fragments, while never fully coalescing like a happily completed crossword puzzle, still seem to demand at least some kind of narrative reconciliation. That’s all part of the fun!

Anyway, here goes: Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) is a Hollywood actress whose fading career receives a boost after she’s cast in a Southern romantic drama with the truly excellent and completely absurd title of On High in Blue Tomorrows. The director of the film, Kingsley Stewart, played with unctuous relish by a hilarious Jeremy Irons, informs Nikki and her co-star Devon Berk (Justin Theroux) that the film is rumoured to be cursed. Veering off into all sorts of strange places, Nikki’s identity becomes a blurred mixture of her character in the movie and a seemingly unrelated, abused working-class woman (among others).

A sinister Polish man called “the Phantom,” involved somehow with prostitutes and a traveling circus, insinuates himself into this mess; as does Nikki’s Polish husband, whose cool and detached jealousy is terrifying and vaguely metaphysical. Despite the three hour running time, the film has remarkably few actual scenes and a lot of wandering around in dark hallways.

Like Mulholland Dr. and Lost

Highway, INLAND EMPIRE appears to centre on a sort of psychogenic fugue, in which a traumatic event, or a series of events, causes a rupture in the life of a character, which allows multiple identities to bleed into one another. The film has a number of such potential traumas, two of which are particularly compelling: one involves Nikki rehearsing a scene for her movie and acting too convincingly for the fiction to remain merely fiction; another features an adulterous sexual encounter between Nikki and her co-star that is simply too good to be believed. There’s also the spectre of an unwanted pregnancy, possibly related to this adulterous encounter. Confused? I know I am.

INLAND EMPIRE was shot over the course of a couple of years on a low-grade digital camera; a strange choice of equipment for a director with obsessive attention to detail. But while a small number of scenes seem deliberately blocked, framed and lit for maximum “home-made” ugliness, most of the film is typically “Lynchian” in the artful precision of its design. Also intact is Lynch’s unerring sense of dream logic; no film artist, excepting perhaps Luis Bunuel, or Jean Vigo in his better moments, has ever been better at evoking dreams.

Part of Lynch’s decision to film with such low-tech, inexpensive equipment is no doubt borne of what seems to be his increasing contempt for typical Hollywood business logic, particularly the way it treats artists. In an extraordinarily unsettling scene, probably the best in the film, Laura Dern vomits blood onto the star-encrusted pavement of Hollywood’s Walk of Fame after being stabbed in the stomach with a screwdriver. It’s hard not to read this devastating scene as a bitter attack on some of the more inhuman aspects of Hollywood, especially since it’s preluded by a brilliant and uneasy monologue, by an apparently homeless woman, that strangely recycles a number of minor dialogue tidbits from Billy Wilder’s 1950 film Sunset Blvd., which is itself a bitter attack on Hollywood’s cruel machinery.

Laura Dern is fantastic. Through all of the film’s dark twists and absurd turns, she remains fresh and full of ideas at the centre of it all, even when her face is being cruelly distorted by digital trickery.