David
Lynch, 2006, US/Poland, 180 mins
Cast: Laura Dern, Justin Theroux, Jeremy Irons
Review by Mike Bartlett
Wake up. Wake up. Come on,
the dream…I mean, the
movie’s over. Wake up.
Eh? What? What’s wrong?
Come on, wake up. We’ve gotta
go.
Look… It’s not me who’s waking up, it’s
you who are falling back asleep.
About an hour into watching Inland
Empire and the screen seemed to jump, the print appeared
to jar and we were parachuted into a scene which felt like
it was almost halfway over. What had happened? Had the
projectionist made a mistake? Were the reels the wrong
way round? The film suddenly stopped making sense. Events
were referred to that had not taken place and the protagonists
were now loved-up in bed with barely a pre-coitus kiss
in sight. I felt completely lost – and
this from someone who thought Lost Highway and Mulholland
Drive made perfect sense. Perhaps I had unwittingly recognised
the pivotal point of David Lynch’s new film, the moment
where he finally abandons a linear narrative (linear in terms
of a progression of congruent moods rather than successive
plot points) and goes all-out for Surrealist chaos. Whatever
the answer, that’s the abiding impression left by Inland
Empire – that you’ve just missed out on a vital
piece of information, that something significant occurred
at the corner of your eye.
This three-hour opus marks the culmination
of a movement in Lynch’s work. Starting with Blue
Velvet, the director began crafting modern horror films
where the monsters were sexual jealousy and identity loss,
and the settings were dreamscapes where everyday towns
morphed into crepuscular mazes and faces dissolved into
the semblance of others. This vision finally led to a masterpiece
in Mulholland Drive (2002), but whether, in Inland Empire,
it has reached its peak or a messy afterlife, is a moot
point.
The film is, in fact, a virtual reconstruction
of its predecessor – same
themes, same characters, same type of narrative trajectory – except
that the dual roles played by Naomi Watts and Laura Elena
Harring in the former film are now telescoped into one, Nikki
Grace, played by Laura Dern. Nikki is an actress who wins
a part in a film, only to discover that the first version
of the project was apparently cursed and that its two leads,
playing an adulterous couple, were eventually murdered. Cue
the start of a burgeoning romance between her and her own
on-screen partner and suddenly identities start warping and
dovetailing into each other. Like the two actresses in Mulholland
Drive, Nikki finds her sense of self spiralling downwards
into a hell of alter egos, personal failure and sexual compromise.
But the differences between the two
films are significant. Gone is the lush cinematography
of old to be replaced by the gritty coldness of digital
video. From the warm, womb-like interiors of Hollywood,
the audience is blasted into the biting fresh air of the “real” world. And this “real” world
makes itself felt in other ways, too. While Mulholland Drive’s
lovelies were trapped in the never-never land of Sunset Boulevard,
Laura Dern’s character finds herself teetering out
onto the real thing, loitering with the hookers, the homeless
and the drunks, pissing their lives away on the very pavements
that bear the names of the stars. It gives her fall from
grace a more socially aware charge than has been found in
Lynch’s work before. Though, intriguingly, whereas
the darkness in this film is more profound than any Lynch
has ever touched upon – dealing, as it does, with the
effects of domestic violence, poverty and prostitution – yet
the ending is his most transcendent and optimistic. One should
never underestimate Lynch’s inherent innocence and
his belief that Good may well triumph after all…
However, behind the innovations lies
a lurking suspicion. Isn’t this Alice Through The Looking Glass for the
21st century – in which a woman plunges through portal
after portal into other worlds and other selves – building
a tower of ideas onto precariously small foundations? Has
Lynch merely constructed a vast puzzle movie or the reductio
ad absurdum of that hoary old chestnut, the actress getting “lost” in
her role? Isn’t this just Mulholland Drive Version
Two, only more distended and overblown? Certainly, the economy
of that film has been lost and Lynch’s trademark tricks
feel either overcooked – the endlessly rumbling soundtrack – or
needlessly drawn out – Nikki’s weird conversation
with a Polish neighbour.
Ultimately, any review of this film
must end on a personal, and therefore frustratingly ambiguous,
note – after
all, we’re each of us trapped in our own inland empires.
And for me, a little Surrealism goes a long way. This digital
scrapbook of a movie needs some tidying up, the non-narrative
experiment having turned into an audiovisual riot. Like Kitano’s
Takeshis’ (2005), this feels like a turning-point film,
where the director is shedding his old skin and playing with
the medium in an effort to find a new direction. But I can’t
help feeling that Lynch has only backed himself into a corner.
I left the cinema somewhat disheartened, but I woke up the
next morning reeling with ideas about half-remembered scenes.
Had my unenthusiastic response just been a bad dream? Had
I witnessed the first ground-breaking masterpiece of the
new millennium? Reader, I still don’t know – the
nightmare of uncertainty goes on.
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