Inland Empire

David Lynch's movies tend to grow on me, either through repeated viewings or just through time, as the images, themes, and mood indelibly seep into my brain, resisting being forgotten or discarded. That Lynch has a talent for burrowing his way into my mind even without my conscious consent makes sense. This is the director, after all, whose films' visual and narrative content consist so much of unconscious projections. And despite the great irritation- yes, even fury- I felt throughout Inland Empire, Lynch's latest film from 2006, its tone of despondence and violence returns to me, haunting and disturbing, even now. In that sense, I can't say that Inland Empire is a total failure. But my overarching displeasure, intellectual and sensory, while viewing the film, lead me to conclude it is a failure nonetheless. For all the evidence about the "illusion of the conscious will" I am a sentient being, and this movie fucking pissed off my sentient self.

Man, where to begin? Let's start with the obvious: it is utterly incomprehensible, making every other Lynch movie I've seen seem narratively quaint. Except for a stretch within the first hour about Nikki (Laura Dern) a washed-up actress starring in a southern melodrama with co-star Devon (Justin Theroux) nearly all of the action is locked in impenetrable ambiguity. The rabbit sequences, the subplot involving Nikki's husband, the gaggle of weird whores, and by far the most abstruse: everything set in Poland with the "Phantom" and the young hooker...what all of these threads add up to may never make sense- not even to Lynch who made up the sequences as he went along without a total vision in mind before beginning the project.

The problem isn't so much, though, that the parts don't add up to a neat structure. Rather, the parts are fucking boring, slow, and annoying even taken as self-contained vignettes. Granted, the weird whore "Locomotion" dance is gloriously intriguing and the rabbit sequences have a certain "Juice by Sara!" sinisterness. But as I mentioned, the Polish sequences communicate nothing- not a mood, not a sense of character, and certainly not plot information.

Lynch also succumbs to the technique that kills so much of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me: the extended bewildered close-up. Call it the EBCU. Just as he spent about twice as many shots lingering over Laura Palmer's face in Twin Peaks, Lynch abuses the EBCU here- except to a much more damaging degree. The shot, which communicates confusion and bewilderment on the face of its troubled main character, thrives like an alien weed no matter how much you want it to just die away with new contexts or the passage of time, but there it is, persisting... We don't know why she seems so bewildered because no matter what happens she wears the same facial expression, and Lynch holds on it for what seems like five minutes a take. Justin Theroux's character seems to perfectly echo my feelings as a viewer when, during one scene, he screams, "GET TO THE POINT!"

Lynch's vow to never work on film again is disappointing as evidenced by the results of Inland Empire. Here, the grainy DV erases the sumptuousness, the lushness, the silkiness so essential to his style. Can you imagine the lesbian love scene in Mulholland Dr shot on DV? Or the closet voyeurism scenes at Dorothy Vallens's apartment in Blue Velvet? Or the bang-bang club dance in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me? No one looks attractive or appealing in Inland Empire and it's not entirely clear if that's supposed to be the case. Theroux, so wiry and sexy, seems bloated and ordinary. Dern looks ghastly for much of the movie, cast in gaudy, clown-like hues as the supposedly classy Nikki and then bruised and scraggly as the damaged Sue. Lynch is a sensual, erotic director, and the grittiness, the supreme ugliness of DV shunts that sensual charge.