INLAND EMPIRE

David Lynch, 2000

David Lynch likes abstract ideas. He claims he doesn’t always know what they mean but that they become clearer as the film takes shape. He encourages active rather than passive film viewing. He never explains his films. He says that his understanding of his work is his alone, and viewers should discover their own meanings and connections. All he’s prepared to say about INLAND EMPIRE is that it’s a mystery about a woman in trouble. But when it comes to the cryptic allegorical world of David Lynch, “a woman in trouble” may not refer to a person at all, let alone one specific woman.

Inland Empire is a place (just as Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive are places) in Southern California. As a title, it has nothing to tell us about the film except that some of the characters might live there, or might have lived there, or might not. Laura Dern casually mentioned the place to Lynch once, and he immediately thought it would make a great film title. This anecdote indicates that Lynch’s methodology is essentially intuitive and associative. It might also be a good way to approach his work, especially INLAND EMPIRE, so named (I suspect) because of the vibe or inferences it generated for David Lynch, and which I also suspect he hopes will be generated in us. It’s an ideal title for an allegorical film about — if I can put it this way — the impact of imperialism on the psyche once it has insinuated its way into the soul.

Of course, you might see it very differently because, from the get-go, Lynch invites us to interpret. The film opens with a burst of light from a spotlight that resembles the beam from a film projector. As the beam retracts, the film title gradually appears and then dissolves, suggesting that we are not about to watch a movie so much as a projection illuminated by the controlling hand of David Lynch. We are immediately plunged into a surreal world of mystery and uncertainty, key elements in almost all of Lynch’s mostly cryptic films.

Lynch likes to use what film theorist David Bordwell calls the ‘absent cause’, a formal device that withholds information in favour of showing consequences rather than reasons. INLAND EMPIRE is an elliptical arc consisting of smaller ellipses. Some are resolved, but many are not, content to remain teasingly ambiguous. There are various narrative and subtextual threads, but the meaning of the film is up for grabs, which, one presumes, is exactly how Mr Lynch wanted it.

Early in the film, a man and woman enter a room. The woman asks, “What’s wrong with me?” Those familiar with “Lynchian logic” know that the question has more implicit value than any answer. The man says, “This is the room” as if identifying part of a puzzle yet to be solved. Lynch enjoys toying with narrative illusions in this way. The man tells the woman to undress, “You know what whores do?” he says. This will be picked up later when prostitution becomes integral to the narrative, but for the moment, it’s one of many ambiguities the viewer has to temporarily shelve. And so it goes, scene after scene, impression after impression, ambiguity after ambiguity, cryptic conversation after cryptic conversation. All the while, we’re treated to some superb acting and terrific set pieces. Lynch loves to juxtapose iconic symbols of Americana against off-kilter depictions of an estranged consumerist society undergoing an erosion of focus and sanity. Such elements are central to INLAND EMPIRE.

Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) is an out-of-work Hollywood actress anxious to hear if she has secured a role in a film (shades of Sunset Boulevard and a reminder of Mulholland Drive). A menacing stranger claiming to be a neighbour (wonderfully played by Grace Zabriskie) pays Nikki a visit. She speaks in a vaguely European accent and talks cryptically about the emergence of evil and impending chaos (echoes of Transylvanian horror and classic noir). She says, “If today was tomorrow, you wouldn’t even remember that you owed an unpaid bill. Actions have consequences.” As she leaves, she murmurs, “They never like to hear the truth.” References to ‘unpaid bills’, ‘actions having consequences’, and “they” never liking to ‘hear the truth’ allude to a political subtext. This is emphasised further when characters talk about being “hypnotised into murder”, coaxed into enacting ‘cursed scripts’, losing their bearings and failing to distinguish between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy. Set in the contemporary reality of post-Iraq-invasion America, one can easily read these narrative inserts as metaphors for deliberate disinformation and political collusion.

Characters in Lynch’s work often embody societal dysfunction: fear, guilt, greed, etc. Nikki is the emotional and psychological heart of the film, and she’s under siege from all directions: the hollow rhetoric of her not-so-talented director and his Rumsfeld-like assistant; her indifferent husband; her self-serving co-star/lover; but the biggest threat is her increasingly tenuous hold on reality.

INLAND EMPIRE is a typical Lynchian puzzle piece. Narrative obfuscation, highly aestheticised low-tech imagery, and gradual descent into hell will be no surprise to Lynch fans, but the ‘real-world’ implications are more pointed than ever. Guilt, denial, self-destruction, self-loathing and psychological fragility inform the implicit backdrop for a subtext that speaks to a traumatised and deceived world, where notions such as “moral certainty” are not only questionable but increasingly meaningless. The film virtually haunts itself. Dialogue such as “You know what whores do?” resonate with political specificity by the end of the film, and Dern’s superb monologue about a potential rapist who “gets to reap what he’s been a-sowin’” is thick with subtext, although one may not twig to it immediately given the intensity of her extraordinary delivery.

INLAND EMPIRE is certainly challenging. Everything about the film, from its fractured narrative to being shot on low-tech video, demands a response or adjustment from the viewer. Lynch doesn’t allow you to simply wait to be entertained. He virtually forces you to be an active participant, so if you’re willing to fully commit to this ambitious, highly ambiguous film, you will be well rewarded.