Inland Empire
Written and directed by David Lynch
518 Media/Absurda/Canal Plus
2006
Rating:


"Inland Empire" takes its title from a region in California east of Los Angeles that encompasses Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. The film never journeys to this region, although it is referenced, loading the title with symbolic rather than geographic import. "Inland Empire," a film about identity, could refer to the internal self; as a tribute to woman it could mean the female interior terrain; a meta-film about acting, it could indicate the process of performance; or, as this is David Lynch unbound, it could be the surreal realm of Lynch's id (or, for his detractors, his rectum).

Outside of the extreme avant garde, their have been few films that have waded this deep into the abyss of abstraction since Ingmar Bergman's "Persona." Lynch's visual reference of that film right before the "Silencio" sequence in "Mulholland Drive" was the first real indication of that film's end game. "Inland Empire" makes the connection from its first frame, borrowing from the opening sequence of "Persona" to show light emanating from a film projector. Surprisingly, Lynch doesn't explode the machine. After all, Lynch, who made "Inland Empire" on a digital camcorder, has said film is dead, while the "narrative" of "Inland Empire" is a fervent toppling of cinematic principles. His shot of a beaming projector is followed by a collection of obscure scenes that have only a tangential connection: a prostitute is quizzed about her profession ("You know what whores do?"), she watches a Brechtian sitcom starring humanoid rabbits (played by Naomi Watts, Laura Harring and Scott Coffey), Polish gangsters brood menacingly and then the film launches into the closest thing it has to a proper plot.

Successful actress Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) is warned by her strange Neighbor (Grace Zabriskie) that she will be given the coveted lead role of Susan in the antebellum melodrama "On High in Blue Tomorrows" directed by Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons). Predicting "Inland Empire's" breakdown of time and space, the Neighbor even foretells where Nikki will be when she learns she has the part: with the Neighbor's glance at the couch, the film cuts ahead to the next day and Nikki's prophesied casting phone call. At the first table read with co-star Devon Berk (Justin Theroux), Kingsley and Kingsley's non-sequitur-spouting assistant Freddie Howard (Howard Dean Stanton), Nikki learns the production may be cursed — "On High in Blue Tomorrows" is technically a remake, but the original film was shut down when the leads were murdered. On cue, there are shufflings in the darkened set, raising fears tragedy will strike again. Filming commences, however, and Nikki throws herself into the role in the manner of Anthony John (Ronald Colman) in "A Double Life" so that she soon has trouble distinguishing where performance ends and reality begins.

As the thin wall between "character" and "actor" is dismantled, "Inland Empire" explores the metaphysical correlation between identity and difference while liberating time and image from each other in the manner of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Indeed, the title perhaps represents Lynch linguistically combining Deleuze's ideas of "internal difference" (the understanding of what something is "in its difference from everything it is not") and "transcendental empiricism" ("the abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained; and the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced"). Lynch, a long-time practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, doesn't necessarily adhere to these views, although his experiment in improvisation and creating cinematic story through editing were the right conditions to create something new and Deleuze's film theory of the "time-image" has been ingrained in Lynch since "Eraserhead."

Lynch's film-within-a-dream-within-a-nightmare-within-a-film-within-a-hallucination-within-a-film-within-a-film is defiantly set within the interior of Lynch's mind. Nikki-Susan is teleported into a room to talk with prostitutes who have also been mistreated by Devon (or his character Billy) and who launch into a rendition of "The Loco-Motion." Later, during the Fellini-esque end credits sequence that calls back all of the characters, they dance to Nina Simone's "Sinner Man." Nikki-Susan delivers a confessional monologue during which she says she fears her life is being played in a dark theater; later, Nikki-Susan walks into a theater playing the scene. In the final stretch, Nikki-Susan stumbles onto Sunset Boulevard, screams "I'm a whore" in such a way that "whore" has six syllables and then slowly bleeds to death as two homeless women talk banalities and ponder the Oz-like mythical town of Pomona. (It must be said that this is a bravura performance by Dern.)

"Inland Empire" casts a hallucinatory spell that is Lynch at his most surreal, dream logic at its most pure. Many will be tempted to parse some sort of sense from this 180-minute sprawl. Deleuze himself provides the most rational answer: "What remains? There remain bodies, which are forces, nothing but forces."

Posted Saturday, January 20, 2007

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/inland.empire