REVIEW: Inland Empire [2006]

Rating: R | Runtime: 180 minutes
Release Date: December 6th, 2006 (USA) / February 7th, 2007 (France)
Studio: StudioCanal / Absurda / 518 Media
Director(s): David Lynch
Writer(s): David Lynch

Through the hole in the silk.

David Lynch has made many masterpieces in his career. From the critically heralded Elephant Man to the cult classic Blue Velvet, his debut surrealist nightmare Eraserhead, and his most recent head trips Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr., Lynch has always found a way to get into our psyches, grab hold, and not let go until years after viewing … if at all. With his latest film, Inland Empire, we are given his least accessible plot yet. As far as comprehending anything happening before your eyes—once you think you have a grip, he totally tosses your ideas out the window.

Coherence, linear progression, or even characters staying the same characters they were initially won’t be found here. Instead, Lynch has crafted his most viscerally rich tale of imagination and dream, once again exposing the underbelly of society and the human condition. People cannot be trusted and everyone will betray those they love. If we are to believe what transpires here, acknowledging that the guilt and/or paranoia of discovering how someone let you down won’t kill you isn’t enough. Because your manifestations of fully choreographed dance sequences involving your prostitute friends most certainly will.

If you are reading this hoping for some semblance of a plot summary, I think Lynch’s tagline is all you need: this is a tale about “a woman in trouble.” Well, let’s make that women in trouble … unless we can find a way to think that all the different entities played by Karolina Gruszka and Laura Dern are in fact one and the same.

The story starts much like the last couple films Lynch directed have. There’s a strange visitor (played brilliantly by Grace Zabriske with a flawless Balkinish accent) who calls on an actress (Dern) to discuss her new role. Along with premonitions and cryptic talk about “9:45” and “after midnight” or “today” and “tomorrow,” she relays a couple of old stories. One is about a man and another about a woman going to market and the alley behind. Not only do these stories occur in some form later on, but the times themselves, and the aspect of time, play a strong role throughout. It’s when the tomorrow our visitor speaks about starts to play that we are thrust into the story as it struggles through scene changes, character swapping, and even a soap opera starring people in rabbit suits with canned applause and laughter.

What at first seems straightforward—a mirroring of adulterous lives between our actress Nikki and actor Devon, along with their fictional counterparts Sue and Billy—becomes much more. It begins to unravel to the point where the audience can’t tell which reality is true or if both are false with the truth lying in a third reality between a different Sue and Billy with his wife Doris’ eventually wielding a screwdriver for retribution.

However, once it seems to be continuing nicely—complete with a fourth mirroring of the Polish actors involved in the original version of the movie they are shooting—everything gets switched around. The screwdriver leaves Doris’ hands and enters those of one of Dern’s many iterations. Her husband, as Nikki, becomes the husband of many different female roles as a strange voyeur played by Gruszka watches everything transpire on television. Finally, Dern ends up discovering everything is being played out on a movie theater screen, her life shown for everyone despite its lone viewer being her.

Eventually, I started to see the many references to Lynch’s past films. Whether they be literal (Zabriske’s acceptance of a drink with a similar yet opposite reaction to that of Angelo Badalamenti in Mulholland Dr.) a common metaphor via prop usage (the colored lamps, curtains, and prevalence of phones as communication between parallel realities), or even notions of certain interpretations made about his oeuvre (Lost Highway being a dream by a man guilt stricken from killing his wife mirrored in a scene where Dern’s character is dying while those watching start mentioning things that have been happening, as if Inland Empire itself has been a manifestation of what she heard as she died). It’s almost like Lynch wanted his first foray into digital film to be one of rebirth (I’ll admit that, while I was a bit annoyed by the soft focus and inferior look to filmstock, what he does with the medium is astonishing).

Lynch is known for not explaining his films and never maintaining that there is one explanation to solve the puzzle. Maybe Inland Empire is his way of showing that the experience and visceral reaction is what he looks to accomplish. He wants to make his viewers think and find their own meaning from their own lives in what happens on-screen. In this way, he seems to edit the film to accommodate these interpretations and then, once one can be believed, turns it around to ask a different question. For every false answer, three questions arises. And the labyrinth’s center gets further away.

If I were to wager any kind of knee-jerk, post-screening guess towards the true meaning of this film, it would be as follows: Inland Empire is a commentary on the state of Hollywood and the inferior films being churned out. The general public goes to see drivel and, by allowing it to succeed, helps ensure more is made. Answers don’t need to be spoon-fed to the viewers. Actually they shouldn’t. I believe Lynch is calling out actors for facilitating this degradation in quality, calling them whores to the business.

As Dern’s character falls from aristocratic success to poor housewife (with a child from a different man) turning tricks on the street with friends that she “remembers from somewhere,” we see credibility drain. Harry Dean Stanton even asks multiple people for money, reminiscing about the time when he could sustain himself, while those around him smile and give in. Dern continuously watches herself slowly fall apart as she cheats on her artistic interest with vanity. Her friends even say how “great cleavage” sets you up for life because talent plays no role in success.

It is only Gruszka’s lost girl watching television that sees the destruction occurring around her and cries at the horror of it all. Desperate to do something, she finally gets up and sees her husband and son come home to her. Hers is the only happiness. The other characters find themselves trapped inside a house of vanity, surrounded by the other whores living their selfish lives without regard for the society to which they’re doing a grave disservice.