INLAND EMPIRE
Various cinemas
The splendid Ritzy cinema in Brixton, where I saw David Lynch’s Inland Empire, organizes occasional autism-friendly screenings – the soundtrack is kept low and the house lights stay dimly on, while patrons are encouraged to move around and make noise if they want. On this occasion, it was the film which seemed autistic, enclosed in its private rituals, making contact only flickeringly with anything outside itself.
Lynch is credited with the script as well as direction. He also served as a camera operator, wrote some of the music and helped with re-recording mixing. So this is pure Lynch – except that his is a magic that works more strongly by tincture than by saturation. It would be hard, for instance, to deny The Straight Story (1999) full status as a David Lynch film, as one of his masterpieces, even. Yet the script, based on the real incident of a man travelling hundreds of miles on a lawnmower to visit an estranged brother, wasn’t his – and the film was financed by Disney, no friend or booster of the auteur. It’s partly that Lynch’s slow rhythms make everything look different, but also his ability to locate the mystery in an image.
There is a moment in that film when Sissy Spacek, playing the hero’s daughter, looks out of the kitchen window while washing up. We see a pool of light under a street lamp. A ball rolls into it. Nothing happens for a few moments, and then a boy trots up to retrieve his ball. Later in the film it is explained that Spacek’s character was bereaved of a child, which accounts for the intensity of her gaze but not the effect of the image on the audience. At this moment, Lynch seems to be saying, “Tell the truth – weren’t the images more beautiful when you didn’t know what they ‘meant’?”. Well, yes and no. The images float free of the story. But they need a story to float free of.
The story in Inland Empire is everywhere and nowhere. It becomes clear very soon that this is only para-narrative, a simulation of character, situation, sequence. Logic is broken almost before it is established. Still, here goes. Nikki Grace, played by Laura Dern, is an actress making a comeback, in a film called “On High in Blue Tomorrows”. It turns out that the film is in fact a remake of a European film, “47”, rumoured to be cursed and never finished, whose leading players may have been killed. As the filming gets under way, Nikki begins to have intimations of another nightmarish reality alongside her Hollywood life, and even to enter it.
This is all very much more lucid than the film is or wants to be, and doesn’t take into account a whole series of prologues. The first image is of a needle in the groove of a record, accompanied by the sound of low thunder. Then a subtitled scene is played out in black-and-white between figures whose faces are obscured not by the usual pixels but large smears. When colour arrives, we are watching a sitting room occupied by rabbits dressed in human clothes, or rather, humans dressed as rabbits. One of them is ironing. Canned laughter is added to their dialogue, as if this was a show on television, but at arbitrary moments, without any possible correspondence with humour. This tableau of bourgeois bunnies is the most stylized image of the film. It is returned to a number of times, with variations, but nothing actually happens.
If the humanoid rabbits represent a homage to Richard Kelly’s wonderful Donnie Darko (2001), with its bunny glittering with ominous secrets, then it’s not a wise one. Donnie Darko managed to be in several possible genres at once – time-slip science-fiction fantasy, horror film, subjective account of mental illness – and to wrap up its plot (more or less) without choosing between them. Inland Empire abstains from genre. All you can say with confidence is that it occupies cultural space somewhere between The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies and The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
The most constant theme in David Lynch’s work is the dissolving of identity, seen as a process both terrifying and rapturous. In Blue Velvet (1986) the hero (Kyle MacLachlan with his stolid shine) transgresses – by etymology, simply crosses over – into territory mined with pleasure and danger. The twist in the construction of that story is that he simply crosses back into a world of artificial innocence. There’s no integration of his light and dark sides. He explores one and then the other.
Variations of the theme include: possession (the television series Twin Peaks) – two people in one body. Amnesia (Mulholland Drive) – a body whose resident is missing. Exchange of bodies, as in Lost Highway, where the characters played by Bill Pullman and Balthasar Getty swap places in defiance of physical law (human law also, since one of them is in jail at the time).
With Inland Empire we follow the experience of one person in two bodies, or perhaps simply two worlds. There are similarities with such arthouse favourites as Jacques Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go Boating and Krzysztof Kie§lowski’s The Double Life of Véronique, but Lynch’s film has less emotional immediacy than either (which is really saying something).
Perhaps the choice of Poland as the location of one of the worlds is a tribute to Kieslowski. Perhaps it was just cheap. It is hard to care, when so much of what I love about David Lynch is missing from the film. I miss this uncompromising outsider’s one-man siege of the mainstream. The Elephant Man (1980), co-produced by Mel Brooks, was his big break, and he responded not with perversity but with insight and also calculation. Perhaps he was excited by a story of a man whose real identity was the opposite of his body’s. But what appears on screen is a meticulous transformation of voyeurism into empathy (in Blue Velvet, too, voyeurism is a sin that leads to grace).
Lynch withholds the full sight of John Merrick for so long that the audience is made aware of its morbid curiosity, our claiming of the right to see what will horrify us. All we get is reaction shots or silhouettes of a freakish shape. Then when we do see Merrick, Lynch keeps on showing him. First he disputed our right to see, now he overrules our right to look away. The result is that the ugliness melts, and this strange body takes on quite new associations.
Twin Peaks (a collaboration with Mark Frost), too, took television audiences to unprecedented places in terms of beauty and terror. Mulholland Drive itself was originally a television series. The legend is that it was cancelled after a dispute about an image that included dogshit, with Lynch saying in exasperation, “I didn’t invent the stuff, you know! It’s really out there”, and the television company setting a size limit for the proportion of the screen that could be occupied by canine excreta.
When Mulholland Drive reached the cinema, I was braced for a vast ziggurat of dogshit, but the image was perfectly discreet. And again, the effort to reach a mainstream audience had resulted not in dilution but concentration. For two hours, Mulholland Drive was irrational but consistent and entirely spellbinding – the two hours, presumably, which corresponded to the opening double episode of the series. It was also very funny. The last half hour was a free fantasia which I admit I found less thrilling.
I miss the contribution made by Angelo Badalamenti’s music, never far from kitsch but serving to anchor Lynch in the decades when his imagination was formed, the 1950s and 60s. The music of Inland Empire is mainly dark (there’s some splendid Penderecki) and when something of the 1960s appears it feels out of place. For no particular reason a roomful of women mime and dance to Little Eva’s “The Locomotion”. I thought this was a rather calculated piece of comic relief, intended to provide a vent for exasperated laughter that might do damage elsewhere.
A review of Blue Velvet referred to Laura Dern’s face “going Goya” in one particular stylized reaction shot. She does a lot of that in Inland Empire. In fact her performance is really one long reaction shot, as the world stops making sense around her. There are extraordinary moments, such as a sequence in which the heroine, wounded in Poland, lies down to die in Los Angeles, between street people who both address her with apparent full knowledge and chat about mutual friends. Yet the impact was somehow not as great as it should have been. I missed the slickness of earlier films, which gave irrational imagery a perverse lustrous authority.
Inland Empire harks back to Lynch’s highly eccentric first feature, Eraserhead (1977), whose graininess, though, had everything to do with lack of resources, and whose visual texture was startlingly tactile. There are images to which David Lynch has been faithful for thirty years and more – light-fittings flickering, for instance, to denote a deeper, existential convulsion. Perhaps it would have been more rewarding to be loyal to the idea of an audience. Eraserhead may have been his most private film, but he cut twenty minutes, unprompted, after its first screening at a Los Angeles film festival. That is the aspect of David Lynch that I missed most of all during the three hours of Inland Empire.
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Adam Mars-Jones's new book of novellas, Hypo Vanilla, will be published later this year.
