Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Inland Empire (2006)

In the conclusion of his Message on his website, The David Lynch Foundation, David tells us,
Thank you very much for your interest. And please remember that Consciousness-Based education is not a luxury. For our children who are growing up in a stressful, often frightening, crisis-ridden world, it is a necessity.
Of course, Lynch is intimately familiar with this world: He filmed much of its salient features in Inland Empire, with Laura Dern as his Lewis & Clark/Klaus Kinski, the two of them stepping into the deep woods with a small light, so that the image is grainy and smeared, fraught with anxiety and imminent horror.

Inland Empire is another Lynch film that shows you what happens when you don't meditate--or maybe when you do, "diving within"--too far, breaking on through to the other side, turning so quickly as you stand before the mirror that you see the back of your head--and there is a wound there, an opening you'd never noticed, and nothing seeps out--oh no, you seep in.

I have nothing definite to say about this film; some will assure you it has a plot, it reveals a pattern, it makes sense, if you squint just so. I can't go that far. But I will say it works for me as a perfect Instant Play movie, each scene searchable, so that they stand alone as small experiments in tonal narrative and sonic atmosphere, not so much a movie as an exhibition, a long look inside. I had to take it off my Queue; it kept calling to me, like The Fly, in a high-pitched voice filled with terror and entreaty, drawing me--the opposite of silencio, so important in Mulholland Dr., here abandoned. At the end, everyone gets together to dance and sing, Nina Simone hysteria yelping undulations up to God--Who comes into the room in flashes, illuminating Laura's smiling face.

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