Walrus Comix DVD Review:
INLAND EMPIRE

 Lock up whatever notions of coherent plotlines and straightforward narratives you may possess, as everyone’s favorite bizarro auteur straight outta Montana, David Lynch, is armed with a camera, his imagination, and not much else in the way of a script in unleashing his latest absurdist romp, INLAND EMPIRE (no, I’m not shouting; Lynch wants the title capitalized). Having previously returned to his brilliant form with Mulholland Drive, Lynch is once again displaying the resistance to cinematic inertia that has made him one of the world’s most consistently interesting and frustrating filmmakers. Whatever the textbook definition of insanity may involve, you can bet that attempting to make sense of every one of Lynch’s moves would factor heavily into the equation, and given the director’s long established track record, only a fool would waste his energy with such machinations in lieu of simply enjoying the ride through the creative recesses of one of cinema’s true individualists.

Plotlines certainly have their place in the world, but Lynch’s body of work is proof that some stories can be told in fascinatingly oblique peeks without being overtly spelled out in an easily digestible manner. Even when you’re not quite sure what the fuck is going on in a given story, certain directors allow you the ability to ascertain a mood or visceral tone that plugs you back into the elemental mainframe. Lynch has often preferred to operate in the nuanced periphery of his medium, and his impulsive gloves are even further off now that he’s made nice with digital video and the relative ease with which DV cameras can be utilized and efficiently commissioned in the filming of whatever images may be riding the synapses that stoke his considerable imagination. To this end, INLAND EMPIRE, feels like a true peek behind the curtain into the creative process of someone who occasionally values subtext over pretext in unfurling his creative vision. More important than whatever semblance of a script or plot Lynch has pulled from the ether is the pervasive sense of doom and underlying tension that envelops the proceedings. Though you may lose track of which character is operating in which dimension, the one constant is the sense of dread and the feeling that, perhaps owing to the lack of a readily explained narrative, chaos could descend in full upon the characters at any time. For all of his absurdist and erstwhile elitist urges, Lynch has always mined familiar cinematic subject material in tending to the basic instincts that unite us all, namely sex and violence. For all of his seemingly interdimensional meanderings, the director has also always been an expert at utilizing basic cinematic concepts related to the use of music and at times Hitchcockian methods of suspense. Lynch has a firm grasp of many cinematic building blocks; he simply most often deigns to paint his picture outside the (plot)lines while communicating with his audience and whatever voices must most assuredly give him counsel inside that deep and dark subconscious.

Luckily for Lynch, he isn’t making this trip through INLAND EMPIRE alone in assembling a cast that includes Laura Dern, Justin Theroux, Jeremy Irons, Julia Ormond, and Harry Dean Stanton. While Lynch utilizes his ensemble while darting between set pieces and timeframes, Dern is the central figure whose performance ultimately makes the trip worthwhile. She ostensibly stars as an actress who unwittingly takes a role in a remake of a movie based upon a Polish folk tale. The movie is being remade without a nod to the original production because of Hollywood lore that suggests the project is cursed in a manner that promises unhappy endings galore for whomever undertakes its lead roles. Once this premise is set, Dern finds herself catapulted into the either real or imagined filming of the movie as the parameters between her initial character and her role within a role are continually blurred. Along the way she encounters Eastern European carnies, a television set inhabited by life-size rabbits echoed by a studio audience laugh track, loco-motioning hookers extolling the virtues of “tits” and “ass”, and several ruminations on the often catastrophic results of roving eyes and genitalia. Throughout the maelstrom, Dern lends the proceedings an air of buoyancy, as she anchors the film in a way that prevents it from completely receding into the gray matter of Lynch’s psyche. In grounding the film with a deft performance that seamlessly follows every temporal shift her director throws at her, Dern (who doubled as a producer with her longtime collaborator) effectively connects the dots in theory just enough to compensate for a lack of clarity in terms of exposition. Her pivotal scene on Hollywood Boulevard gives Lynch the opportunity to inject his film with a fleetingly beautiful and haunting touch of humanism amidst the conceptual high art. Dern’s journey through the minefield of Lynch’s imagination proves most valuable as an inclusive means of locating the pulse of the story within the story of INLAND EMPIRE, much to the mutual benefit of David Lynch and the audiences that reside both in and outside of his wonderfully bent brain.

Lynch’s foray into the world of digital video does give some reason for pause considering the lush tones and cinematography of his earlier tones, as he may have actually peaked in these aspects with Mulholland Drive. He opted for a DV approach this time around in part because he didn’t so much script some of his scenes as ride the cranial lightning in an effort to crystallize the fluidity of his ideas without the stress of major on-set set-ups. While he may sacrifice some of the visual grandeur of previous works, the translation to the DVD medium actually works quite nicely for INLAND EMPIRE. The film looks pretty striking now that is has been restored to its original ratio, and the ascertainable differences inherent between the DV and standard film platforms lend many of the scenes the kind of claustrophobic immediacy that ultimately compliments Lynch’s vision. Lynch must be feeling pretty fertile, as he includes a second set devoted to extra features that account for more than an hour’s worth of content. Included are a couple of appropriately trippy deleted scenes that the film ultimately didn’t need but still make for worthwhile viewing in rounding out some of the would-be plotlines. Lynchphiles will rejoice in an in-depth interview with the director in which a variety of subjects are covered and Lynch’s ability for cognitive multitasking is on full display, although the featurette devoted to his on-set practices isn’t quite as illuminating as one would like given what certainly must have been a pretty unique filming experience, even for those familiar with Lynch’s process. The extra disc is rounded out with a short film, set shots, and a slew of trailers. True to his warped form, Lynch even doles out his personal recipe for quinoa, although he regrettably fails to utilize “BAM!” even once during his culinary lesson. I guess he had to hold something back for a sequel. 

- Brant Miles