Inland Empire

Inland Empire (2006). Dir. David Lynch.

Oneiric superimposition, a daydream full of empty spaces. Familiar things become unfamiliar, a dire jamais-vu grips the audience. Who are the things that inhabit the inbetweens? The story seems fractured, disjointed, unwilling or unable to resolve its spacious despair from the grips of shabby rooms and blank faces. Silence, darkness, and static superimposed over rooms habitually inhabited. A sitcom fished half-rotten from the trash, and filled with masked others that are fun-house reflections of ourselves and our pained delivery of our own disjointed lives.

The Inland Empire is an empire of ourselves, blinked into and out of our own day-dreaming. Tinged with menace as there are things that wait in there that we did not put there. It is the concatenation of dream permutations, the camera flees or is nailed to the spot, seldom traveling across the scene. Twisting to follow, fading from place to place. Conversations occur in a type of visual stupor, grandeur, menace, familiarity, and shabbiness. Verging just on laughing with an architecture of unseen relations. Who or what is anything to anyone?

It would be wrong to assume that there is any definite answer, this is mystery unhinged and swinging in a wind. Personal sadness buried with the pet in the shoebox. Innocent Laura Dern is at the eye of the storm of distortion and abjectness. Other and evil, perhaps. Magic and distortion.

This is the diametric opposite of fortune telling, this is dire warnings without joy. “Brutal fucking murder,” the old woman says. Dern replies, “I don’t like this kind of talk.” And, yet there is no escape, none implied. The camera is still fixed in an asymmetrical relationship between the two. Distortion and Normalcy juxtaposed. Happiness and a lost motive.

I find myself wanting to say that this is a film on films. But, that would be completely wrong. This is a film that spares nothing to show artifice. The question is whether there is substance to this dream? Are we seeing shreds of an oneiric vomit into a frightful Hollywood?

I keep speaking of dreams for a very good reason, there is a distinct feeling here as of a dream where everyone seems to know the secret, the revelation, the mystery’s answer; that is, except for you. Blank faces turn away from enquiries, depth is acknowledged and slips away on a current of static.

I can’t say that this film is for everyone, and don’t expect it to get more coherent than I have. However, that said, I enjoyed the film excessively much.

Actually, I may be speaking unfairly, giving too much leeway to my desire for incoherence. There is probably more consistency than I can admit, but there is to a greater or lesser extent a hint in each scene of pregnant malice. A restrained presence that is on the other side of a mirror.