My theatrical experience was at the Plaza Theater in Atlanta, GA. They had a table set up with some fun feelies: Inland Empire bumper stickers, promotional cards for David Lynch's brand of all-organic coffee beans, and lobby cards with the title of the movie printed on them. The Plaza Theater is quite a nice space. At the time-I don't know what the Plaza looks like now-it had the look of an old-fashioned theater, with curtains and balconies-kinda like the movie theater you see late in the film itself when the Laura Dern character starts to become aware that she-or some part of her-is living inside a movie.
Inland Empire was dense, impenetrable, and atmospheric. It had the heaviest mood of being absolutely lost in a confusing nightmare space of conflicting cinematic realities that have been fused and sutured together by sinister forces-using eldritch means-into a labyrinth of oppression. It seemed to be another extended meditation upon the corrupting, crazy-making experiences of trying to make movies in Hollywood in the vein of Mulholland Dr., but with an extra forty minutes on the running time, and fewer minutes overall devoted to clever dialogue exchanges and quirky moments of comic relief. Much time is spent stalking hallways and corridors and going up staircases and magically teleporting between the studios and sidewalks of Los Angeles, California and the snowy streets and well-appointed old-world interiors of Lodz, Poland.
Laura Dern seems to be playing a few different versions of herself: successful Hollywood actress Nikki Grace; the character she's playing in a movie called On High in Blue Tomorrows; and a kind of grim and gritty real life version of the character in the movie. Dern warps from one shard of fractured reality to another, guided only by the surreal nightmare logic of an allegedly cursed screenplay that seems to absorb and torment anyone who tries to produce it. Dern's Nikki Grace is also oppressed by a psycho jealous stalker of a husband who may or may not be possessed by a supernatural hypnotist known as the Phantom-who is sort of like a 1960s Marvel Comics villain-think the Miracle Man or the Ringmaster-imported into a Lynch movie.
At some point during her wander of the nightmare labyrinth, Dern's Nikki morphs into a dystopian version of the melodramatic Southern Lady she plays in the movie, and she ascends a series of staircases inside a derelict building, only to find herself seated before an emotionally depressed, passive-aggressive man-hunched, bespectacled, and puffy-cheeked-in a shabby suit seated behind a desk who comes across as a cursed bureaucrat straight out of Kafka. This version of Nikki proceeds to give a deposition in which she expresses her rage at being poor and a lifelong victim of rape and sexual harassment by an endless succession of men in a miserable, polluted industrial town. This expression of rage is broken up into several sequences throughout the movie, and it seems to represent another part of the fractured reality that Nikki wanders through. The character is just this side of over-the-top. At first, the community theater American South accent draws attention to itself, and we seem to be back in the grotesque caricature of Wild at Heart; but as this nightmare deposition continues, the authentic emotions of rage and despair elevate the character and performance into an almost unbearably raw level of intensity. The Kafkaesque auditor, after listening to Dern for some time with almost no expression on his face-except a vague, oily contempt-asks her if she cheated on the husband who beat and raped her repeatedly, the implication being that she deserved the sadism inflicted upon her. This is a nightmare realm of misogynistic cruelty without compassion, mercy, or justice.
Nikki is sometimes an active force in the narrative, as she stalks the mad maze, and at other times she becomes a bewildered observer of other people's personal hells. It reminded me of Martin Sheen's assassin-traveler in Apocalypse Now. Dern has an almost impossible task as an actor: endless variations of bewilderment, terror, confusion, and cataclysmic rage as she is confronted by a series of incomprehensibly weird dislocations and alienations from her identity, memory, and the space/time continuum itself.
Oh, and it's a kinda/sorta musical.
And there's a sitcom starring people in giant rabbit-head masks that a kidnapped girl imprisoned within a purgatorial hotel in Poland is forced to watch. This does not alleviate her suffering.
Dern and her psycho-husband morph into alternate, working poor versions of themselves, which seems to embody some kind of rich white people's terror at the thought of losing their comfortable, privileged lives, and becoming consumed with the minutiae of daily budgeting for food and bills and toilet paper.
There's a lot going on here. I'm not sure it all works. I'm not crazy about this Lynch trope of a brutal man being possessed by an evil spirit and, therefore, is not truly responsible for his actions. The Phantom is a variation on Killer Bob. Did we need all 179 of those minutes? Can this clusterfuck of space/time identity confusions and disruptions be so directly resolved by discharging a symbolic firearm into a comic book villain master manipulator? I mean . . . if it's all in a dream, right?
Maybe this is the inevitable outcome of playing with dream logic to the extent that David Lynch does in this movie. You do find yourself asking, What's the fucking point if it's all a dream or a hallucination or whatever?
But aren't so many movies unlikely fantasies that pander to our desire for everything to be okay in the end? Comic book movies. Space operas. Rom-coms. Hyper-simplified biodramas. Pandering Oscar bait flicks. A lot of these kinds of movies strike me as more absurd and fucked-up than Lynch's idiosyncratic nightmares. At least, with a Lynch movie, there's a name on the front you can blame or praise. There's an author. I guess that goes far with me.
I haven't watched Inland Empire in awhile.
Will I be able to make the epic sit?
Diving in . . .
