Review

I have a great worry that Lynch is never gonna make anything again before he kicks the bucket. So I was thinking about his movies, and which of those I've seen thus far is my favorite. An exceptionally difficult question. Eraserhead is definitely his most spiritual film, of course. Blue Velvet has the immensely memorable villain of Frank Booth. Mulholland Drive I think is probably the most clear and concise distillation of his vision. The most successful at using his style of direction to convey his thoughts to the audience in a more or less approachable and digestible way. My off the cuff answer to which is my favorite would probably be Mulholland. "Silencio."

But then there's Inland Empire. Inscrutable Inland Empire. It almost resists explanation whereas I would describe his other movies as almost acting like invitations for discussion and dissection. Not that I think Lynch doesn't want you to think about what Inland Empire means. I just think it resists explanation more than his other works to a degree. The answers aren't as obvious. But it's also a culmination and celebration of what's come before as shown in the final Sinnerman scene. A scene I think about regularly. It's a movie that I think does serve as a good capstone to his work in cinema, if indeed it is the last movie he makes, as I expect it will be.

So Inland Empire. A woman in trouble. I think what makes Inland so interesting is the knotlike structure the plot exists as. Lynch is no stranger to unconventional plotting. See Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive's ouroboros loops. Things seem to go from scene to scene with clear connections but also no obvious overarching purpose. At least at first. As the movie goes on we do see things begin to converge to a breaking point. I take Inland as the culmination of Lynch's unconventionality with regards to structure. It's what happens when Lynch is allowed maximum creativity. He's not making this for a studio and in general is paying no heed to conventional filmmaking. To me, Inland is the movie Lynch has been trying to make for the past 20 plus years. It feels like the closest representation to the underlying ideas he's been interested in nearly all of his movies.

What is the movie about? Well, that's hard to answer. In general I would say it's about an actress taking part in a recreating a cursed movie. And as she acts in it, the lines between the movie and her reality blur to the point where it becomes entirely unclear what parts of her experience are real and what are not. Her death scene being the clear low point. It really seems like she's just been genuinely killed, only for Lynch to break out the studio lights and producers and shatter our illusion. It's a really clever scene. And it's only able to work because of Laura Dern's magnificent acting in it and the preceding scenes.

The theme of an actress becoming their character is very intentional. This is a movie about acting and the act of making movies. It's about the power that actors have, to get into the minds of their characters and portray them for us the audience. As well as the catharsis that the viewer can feel seeing their own experiences portrayed on screen. The movie itself is about that concept, while also portraying it in-universe with its characters.

We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe.

Who, in Inland Empire, is the dreamer? Whose dream is this? I would say the Lost Girl's. The movie opens with us seeing a character named the Lost Girl in a hotel room in clear distress. But she watches a TV and we go into it. Lynch is a fan of the magic of the red theater curtain being pulled back and it transporting the viewer into a new world. That imagery and use of red recurs throughout nearly all his of his work. The red hallway in Lost Highway. The red curtains in the sycamore grove in Twin Peaks. The Club Silencio theater in Mulholland. This TV in Inland works similarly. We are being told visually that we're being transported into a world that is like ours, but more magical. The framing of using a theater curtain or a TV or similar object to begin a movie isn't new at all, to Lynch or to the medium itself. (Fire Walk With Me opening with the static-y tv breaking to give another Lynch example) But Lynch does find a very him way of having these worlds interact (the world of the Lost Girl and the world inside the TV, that of Nikki/Sue).

Let's talk about then interplay between the framing world of the Lost Girl and what she sees on her screen. Throughout Inland, we primarily follow the actress Nikki Grace who plays the part of "Sue Blue" in the movie On High in Blue Tomorrows. This movie is apparently a remake of a German film entitled 47, itself based on a Polish folk-tale. 47 was abandoned after both of the leads were murdered. We're working with multiple layers here. (as an aside I suspect this is some commentary from Lynch about modern Hollywood's unoriginality, endlessly repacking the same shit) And indeed we learn that this polish folk tale involves a girl who becomes lost in a marketplace, referring back to the girl watching the TV. In essence, we have a character (Lost Girl) who is watching a version of her own experiences play out on the screen (On High in Blue Tomorrows). And we have an actress (Nikki) who is getting so deep into her role that her own life begins to resemble the character that she plays (Sue). So in essence we're working with something a bit more complicated than the ouroboros of Highway or Mulholland. In Inland, each of the layers of reality we see are referring to each other. There's a number of scenes in the film where it's not really clear if what we're seeing is actually really happening to Nikki, is happening only in the movie she's acting in (and so only happening to Sue).

To understand the structure of the movie, let's talk a little more about my earlier point of seeing oneself represented in a movie, because I think that's really the core ide of Inland that ties everything together. Without going into detail, Lost Girl has had a bad life. She's gone through a lot and is seemingly trapped in a purgatory-like place. But at the end of the movie (Inland, On High, 47, whichever you care to say), Nikki/Sue kills the Phantom character that has been haunting her and Lost Girl. Nikki/Sue then frees Lost Girl from her confinement and she is able to return to her family. LG sees her life on the screen and that gives her a catharsis and a sense of peace. An idea I've seen on this point is Lynch may have been inspired Sherryl Lee's performance in Fire Walk With Me as Laura Palmer and the apparent way it affected people who've been through similar abuse in their lives. That seeing themselves on the screen made them feel seen. Now, I'm not sure if that's all actually true or not, whether Lee's FWWM performance had any impact on Inland's theming. But regardless, I'm certain that's the general idea the movie is going for.

And after LG is freed and we head towards credits we get the Sinnerman scene. Here we're treated to a number of references to Lynch's other works while the prostitute troupe dances to Nina Simone's powerful and inimitable Sinnerman. The whole scene feels like such a celebration to me. To me it recalls the energy of perhaps an afterparty for a movie. Characters from Inland Empire, On High in Blue Tomorrows, and even previous Lynch works (Mulholland) gather together to celebrate the movie's premiere. To the beat of a lumberjack sawing of course. An unexpected high to the nightmare of the previous 3 hours.