Inland Empire is to Mulholland Drive how Twin Peaks: The Return is to the first two seasons of Twin Peaks — a film/TV series about returning to and reconciling with transformed landscapes stripped of their saccharinely surmounted exteriors. The sepia-infused warmth draping the monstrous horrors of Twin Peaks‘ first two seasons gives way to the gloomier landscapes of the third, haunted by the ghosts of a mythical past and the broken hopes of its inhabitants and tourists, all of whom are adrift in the liminal purgatory of past and present, good and evil, opacity and transparency. The theme song’s last-ditch gasps to resuscitate the cuddly nostalgia are met with the crushing finality of the whooshing wind and gloomy waterfalls, leaving us only with a dazed Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) in its wake.
Similarly, Inland Empire also picks up where Mulholland Drive left off, in a washed-up Hollywood teeming with the shattered dreams and bitter resentments of innumerable hopefuls. There’s no need for narrative anymore, as the candied coherence of Naomi Watts’ doe-eyed Betty in Mulholland Drive has collapsed, revealing Hollywood as the ruthless and rapacious machine it is. Lynch plunges straight into this surreal hellhole of Hollywood’s detritus — rejected actors, recycled storylines, shelved scenes, censored fantasies, and disreputable genres — excoriating Hollywood through a cheap Sony PD-150 camera built for rapid obsolescence that was already outdated in 2006. While it might seem ironic that the most lavish of fantasies is critiqued through the barest of means, Lynch, more than anyone, knows that some ghosts refuse to be exorcised by the overpowering myths of money and the market. After all, we have to keep reminding ourselves of Lynch’s famous quote, “Focus on the donut, not the hole,” to contend with the void left after Lynch’s death, but how can we forget that gaping hole when Lynch himself peers into it?
In a film with so many slippages, a loose plot does emerge for the first hour or so. An aspiring actress, Nikki Grace (Laura Dern), has a strange encounter with her eccentric, wide-eyed neighbor (Grace Zabriskie, who played Sarah Palmer in Twin Peaks) who prophesizes that Nikki will get the part she’s waiting for. Accordingly, she is soon cast in a Hollywood film directed by Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons) and paired with co-star Devon Berk (Justin Theroux). Both the actors are cast as Southerners, Susan Blue and Billy Side, in a movie about an extramarital affair, which actually turns out to be a remake of a German feature based on a Polish folk story. The leads of the German film were murdered, and this folklore-within-folklore haunts the filming of Nikki’s Hollywood feature, which then slowly dissolves all boundaries — metaphorical, temporal and geographical — in Inland Empire itself.
When discussing the film’s plot, Lynch merely mentioned that it was about “a woman in trouble,” and further added that Dern’s interpretation of her character as “a woman in trouble, a woman who is dismantling, and her emotional and abstract journey back to herself” was “extremely accurate.” However, this leaves us with the question of which version of herself Dern is talking about. Unlike his earlier “narrative” (in comparison to Inland Empire) features, Inland Empire doesn’t wallow in facile dualities of good and evil1 — or, in the case of Mulholland Drive, the stronger duality of dream and nightmare induced by Hollywood — but in pluralities, each role Dern plays spawning a completely different iteration, rendering the question of which Dern is more “real” a question Lynch (rightly) doesn’t care about. The neglected residues of Hollywood are given free rein to intermingle and lump together to form an incomprehensible, glutinous mass, and to disentangle a narrative from this shape-shifting muck only plays right into the hands of Hollywood.
Lynch willingly subjects his earlier films to the same treatment handed to Hollywood. Inland Empire is also a collection of free-floating signifiers of all his pet peeves and themes — violated women, interchangeable identities, campy interjections, horrors in darkened hallways, maniacal grins, bizarre non-sequiturs, and murderous melodrama. The absence of a coherent, narrative force integrating all these elements and the loose imitation of film grain through his industrially-discarded digital camera might lead some to call this film a pastiche of Lynch’s features, which was the case among some critics when the film was initially released. However, the murky, low-res digital images are woozier in their texture, with the colors dripping like paint from one frame to the next. Lynch sharply contrasts these loose, flowing colors with glaringly lurid lights, throttling his frames with both a soft dreaminess and nightmarish coarseness. Even the classic shot-reverse-shot acquires a heightened strangeness through Lynch’s digital filming and his actors’ uncanny performances, using grotesque closeups in combination with Zabriskie’s concentrated stares and Dern’s elastic lip movements. Lynch’s unleashing of Hollywood’s (and his) unconsciousness also unlocks the digital camera’s id, tumbling into rabbit holes of associated narrative strands. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that Lynch recycled one of his digital video shorts for his website, Rabbits, in Inland Empire. This is a Hollywood feature that is invaded by the device of home movies and cheap Internet videos, metamorphosing due to the vagaries of a digital hyperspace not restricted by geography.
One famous Lynchian theme, however, as yet unmentioned in this piece, is his somewhat overpraised take on evil lurking beneath his sanguine surfaces. In works such as Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, this “evil” lies at the heart of small-town America, a cosmic, transhuman force that seizes the lingering darkness in human vessels to do its bidding.2 In other cases, the darkness manifests as Lynch’s adolescent fear of female sexuality, as it did in Lost Highway and Blue Velvet. But in Mulholland Drive, this nebulous “evil” is more concrete, informed by Lynch’s personal experiences in Hollywood and its callous treatment of people. One of the finest shots (among many) in Lynch’s career, an exemplar of his famous theme, is the slow, sinister track along the café towards the street corner in Mulholland Drive, where the monster of a man’s nightmare is revealed to be lurking. That this shot happens in the more “narrative driven” first half makes it more affecting, foreshadowing the devastating breakdown of Watts’ Betty and her dreams in the second half. Even in the highly organized, sun-kissed, candied city of dreams, the cracks are clearly visible.
Inland Empire develops this slow, Lynchian motion along straight lines, curves and corners, with the exception that the masks of Hollywood are already off. But this is Lynch’s perverse recognition of (rather than tribute to) the works from the dream factory. Every narrative in Inland Empire, as the opening prophesying indicates, is tinged with predestination. Even if the characters/actors have an inkling of the horrors in store for them, they still follow their urges to see what’s around the corner. They (and we) are condemned to abide by the narrative “curse” (as Adrian Martin puts it) — an extrasensory edict that demands them to find appropriate closures for their foregone conclusions.
By returning to these irrevocably transformed landscapes, Lynch’s tics and tropes also expand in meaning and scope, becoming a meditation on his filmography and poetics. We are not passive observers either, as familiar cinematic techniques no longer remain the same even when we “return” to Lynch’s earlier works. When Susan dies after retching blood on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Lynch pulls back from her to reveal a camera filming the events. Kingsley says “cut” and appreciates Nikki’s performance. Nikki, however, is unable to shake herself off from this stupor. Dazed, she wanders into an empty movie theatre and watches herself (her performance, alternate reality, past life?) on the screen. Lynch spends 20-odd minutes with her as an “audience” after the final shot of the film-within-the-film. The whole of Inland Empire, rife with predestinations and retrospections, involves Dern looking into or back at her, reconfiguring and recontextualizing the past, present, and future through different lenses. We enter Inland Empire as Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks: The Return: immobilized, reverting to a familiar and insular Lynchian past, one which we thought we had a firm grasp of, only to be left in a seemingly forbidding wasteland that resists overarching interpretations. Hopefully, by the end of Inland Empire, we leave as Laura Dern (and Dale Cooper at the end of The Return, as well), knowing that the so-called familiar contains more mysteries than we can ever comprehend, and reconcile (and revel, like all the women dancing to Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” in the final scene) to the endless possibilities of the unknown.
1 Despite Lynch’s conceptions of good and evil, and his muddled politics, I have always felt that his pictures go beyond these categories as he lets his crazed poetics take their flights of fancy. Of course, this hasn’t stopped people from vociferously defending their interpretations on twitter.
2 The nuclear family does seem to be an obvious target, though I don’t think that Lynch says particularly insightful on that front. What’s interesting is how he lets his dreamscapes run riot, but the lack of interrogation of his nightmares doesn’t sit too well with me.
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