INLAND EMPIRE/The Naked Gun fanfic mashup

I kept seeing Leslie Nielsen invading David Lynch's 2006 digital video epic Inland Empire.

He's in-character as Frank Drebin from The Naked Gun.

Drebin kicks down the door leading into the room with the rabbit-head people,
and he fires and fires and fires his .38 service revolver into the rabbit-head people.

Those rabbit-head masks are magnificently squibbed-up, blasting fake blood, and fake cerebro-spinal fluid, and chunks of hamburger all over the place.

Later,
Drebin's chief is interrogating him about the motivation for shooting the rabbit-people to death,

"It is not this department's policy to condone careless use of force in the line of duty."

Drebin says, "When I see three rabbit-headed weirdos tormenting a kidnapped Polish girl trapped inside a Purgatory Hotel outside of our space-time continuum, I shoot the bastards, that's my policy!"

I tried to get this fan-film made for 8 years.

Just thought I'd share.

The Lynch Meditations 23: Inland Empire (2006)

MAJOR FUCKING SPOILERS, PEOPLE.

OR MAYBE NOT.
WHEN IT COMES TO SUCH A BIZARRE MOVIE AS INLAND EMPIRE, I ACTUALLY DON'T REALLY KNOW IF I UNDERSTAND IT PROPERLY. 

I THINK I DO.

I'LL PROCEED WITH CONFIDENCE I DON'T ACTUALLY POSSESS.
THAT USUALLY WORKS.

You know what?

I blame the Phantom.
For everything.
It's his manipulations of people's minds that create all the chaos and displacement and contortions of space/time inside this cinematic nightmare. He's like the Robert Blake character from Lost Highway. The difference is that here, the Phantom seems to have less godlike control over people's fates, and ultimately he is vanquished. The guy even seems relieved when Laura Dern dumps a clip in him at the climax. The Phantom's death is presented as a relief. The gunfire manifests as flashes of liberating light. And then his face distorts and ruptures into a frightening underwater bloodmouthed clown. And all is right with the world. The women trapped in Hotel Purgatory run free. Even Laura Dern's psycho hubby gets to go back home to Poland and be the working class father he was meant to be, as opposed to the wealthy Hollywood power spouse. All ascend to Heaven-which is a ballroom filled with beautiful women dancing and lip-synching to Nina Simone's Sinnerman, by the way.

Why not?

The nightmare becomes a dream.

Laura Dern's Nikki Grace-somehow-manages to remember she's in a dream which seemingly gives her access to the symbolic power-represented in the handgun-to see through the Phantom's lies-which have even seemingly ensnared him-and blast her way out of the nightmare labyrinth. I like that the villain seems to have forgotten his own identity. In his death, he remembers himself, and awakes into his own crazy clown time hell.

This is all great.

My only criticism is that I would've liked Nikki to shoot the creepy rabbit-head people,too.
She opens the door into their TV show world.
Why not sort them out, too?
Wasn't one of the rabbits also the heartless auditor who an alternate version of Nikki endlessly confessed to throughout the movie?
Fuck those creeps.

Not bad.
It's a hella decent film.

After this movie, David Lynch didn't do much. He supervised the official releases of deleted footage from Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. I think he directed an expensive viral ad for some perfume company.

And then came 2017. And the third season of Twin Peaks. Also called Twin Peaks: The Return.
One more journey into the Black Lodge.
Another reboot, another excavation of pop culture past-you could almost call it a remake.
Just what we need, right?
It's probably gonna suck.

The Lynch Meditations -23

Inland Empire was the second-and, to date, last-David Lynch movie I saw in an actual theater, on a decent sized screen, albeit with digital projection, which wasn't exactly the greatest back in 2007. I think they just set up a consumer-grade digital projector-the kind that many aspiring filmmakers and film buffs buy to stage their screenings anywhere they please. (At the same venue, this was better than a screening of an actual film print of Argento's Suspiria, which was so fucked-up that much of the film looked like it had been invaded by obnoxious demon fireflies.) The movie was murky. You had to squint. You needed a full night's rest and an empty bladder to make it through its shadowy 179 minutes. This is pre-HD, we're talking, but maybe this murkiness was intended to add to the atmosphere of mystery. My circa 2007 DVD copy of the movie actually looks pretty good playing on a Blu-Ray player hooked up to a decent-sized modern LED TV. It's murky, but in all the right places. The lo-fi video look is actually quite slick. And some moments really jump out at you in contrast to the SD-nightmare shadows. So, I guess that's a plug for the DVD release. No, I'm not on the David Lynch payroll.

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 . . .