Review: David Lynch’s Inland Empire on Abursda DVD

David Lynch’s new movie is many things, among them a sinister waltz through a SoCal underbelly known as Inland Empire, a murder mystery, a film-within-a-hallucination-within-a-film-within-so-on, and the story of love affairs that span the boundaries of time, space, and reason. It is happening again, you may think—or dread, as Lynch has his haters: a redux of Mulholland Drive, which in the end is only half true.

Perform a post-mortem on this three-hour beast of a film and you will find only half a heart beating inside its chest, but you will also discover innards that coil in more grandiose directions. Mulholland Drive, possibly the greatest work of American film art since Nashville, is an impossible act for Lynch to have to follow, but the bug-eyed director—pupils dilated and imagination tripping in almost inconceivable directions—has made the Atlas Shrugged of narrative avant-garde films, compulsively watchable and insanely self-devouring.

Seeing Inland Empire early on a Sunday morning for the first time wasn’t unlike slipping into a nightmarish reverie not long after my equally prolonged adventures in REM sleep the night before, which, incidentally, accommodated a screening of a Lynch movie that was not at all similar to this extraordinary freak-out. There’s a very clean divide in Mulholland Drive between a woman’s dreams and waking life, but the walls between the two are completely dissolved in the more fragmentary Inland Empire, Lynch’s most self-reflexive creation to date.

Lynch has vowed never to work on film again, and for this, his first feature shot on digital video, he lobs a cherry bomb at his entire canon, recording the jagged remnants that resonate from the blast as they slide and dissipate into the swirl of his mind’s projector beam. Some may call it a toilet, but I like to think of it as a splendiferous whirlpool of wonders.

Where to begin? At the end, perhaps, with the word “sweet,” Inland Empire’s answer to Mulholland Drive’s “silencio,” though sweetness isn’t something that Inland Empire exactly radiates. Much earlier, a nosy neighbor played, at once hilariously and unsettlingly, by Grace Zabriskie walks into the home of an actress, Nikki (Laura Dern), in order to rant and rave about the younger woman having “it”: the part of Sue in a remake of “a Polish gypsy story” titled 4/7.

That film was never finished because two of its actresses were murdered (the American version goes by the Sirkian title On High in Blue Tomorrows). Zabriskie’s nosy interloper, like Lee Grant’s Louise Bonner from Mulholland Drive, ostensibly sees into the future, offering an implicit warning—to Nikki and, by extension, Lynch’s audience—that time is about to collapse on itself, leaving identities crushed and blurred almost beyond recognition.

Inland Empire weirdly, eerily, insanely picks up reception from metaphysical wavelengths past and present and places here and there, sometimes from Lynch’s own short work. The story’s hilarious depictions of white-trash home life are essentially live-action variations of the director’s Dumbland series, and Rabbits, an anthology of shorts starring Laura Harring, Naomi Watts, and Scott Coffey as sitcom rabbits possibly waiting for Godot, is fascinatingly folded into this film’s metaverse. This time, however, when the rabbits’ phone rings there’s someone on the other end, and when their door opens someone walks through.

From her own den of frustration, a woman—Nikki/Sue’s 4/7 proxy, as well as ours—watches Rabbits, whose canned laughter undermines her fit of busy tears. These shorts act as one of many exciting portals in the film through which characters cross between worlds, and what is Inland Empire in the end but a hall with walls equipped with barbed rabbit holes, each one daring us to peek through, possibly even to take a plunge into the sea of Lynch’s id?

You may ask what the film’s seemingly endless stream of non sequiturs, anecdotes, clues, doublings, folk tales, and psychotic episodes mean. We could say nothing and declare that Inland Empire doesn’t so much fall into the abyss as it resides in it, telegraphing dizzying sounds and visions from its drowned world toward the outside, which should suffice as an explanation if you’ve learned to respect the fact that Lynch carves his films much closer to where our subconscious impulses resonate from than any other artist has ever dared.

Lynch, more so than Godard, embraces the dark, dingy contours of the DV format, which reflect Nikki’s in-too-deep thesping. She goes after her married co-star, Devon (Justin Theroux), thinking he’s really Billy, the character he plays in On High in Blue Tomorrows, screaming for him not unlike Irene Miracle does when she flashes Brad Davis her breasts in Midnight Express, only to finally confuse her own self. Nikki is Sue and Sue is Nikki and never shall the two part—and realizing how they inhabit and torture each other may just save the world.

Lynch indulges familiar fixations, risking the self-importance of the “Mirror, Father, Mirror” short film that Illeana Douglas’s character screens for her class in Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World, but he’s serious about burrowing into Sue’s psyche and tapping its resources. And through it all, Dern works fiercely with the director to send us blistering imprints of how Nikki’s consciousness filters itself into her unconsciousness and then back again, and together they weave a meditation on the ecstasy and healing power of watching movies.

Dern’s is the performance of her career, a spectacle of freakish facial expressions, primal screams, and howling monologues. And like Watts in Mulholland Drive, she isn’t afraid to get ugly for her art, which also happens to be what informs Sue’s own artistic daring. She’s a mess of hurt trying to find herself, but what she ultimately stumbles upon, like Watts and Harring do inside the club Silencio, is a form of rapture that permits others to transcend loss.

Image/Sound

Consider Inland Empire’s premiere on video as an invitation to experiment-over and over and over again-with new ways of entering its labyrinthine hall of mirrors. For sure, the film is its own high, but it reaches new levels of groovy after a good toke. Shot on video, blown up to film, and now brought back down to video size, Inland Empire looks “better” than ever, which means haters might want to give it another whirl. (There seemed to be some worry that the film would make the jump to video from the original DV cut as opposed to the DV-to-film blow up, but that isn’t the case.) In short: While the image preserves the veracity of the film’s original theatrical presentation, the smaller scale of your television improves its resolution. The sound, it should be noted, defaults to stereo, but two superior Dolby Digital 5.1 surround options are also available: near-field and far-field monitor playback. Lynch is totally tubular about loudness (see the “Lynch 2” extra on disk two for details), and you’ll know which sound is right for you by toggling back and forth between the three audio options. Some advice: Use the shit that goes down at the two-hour-seven-minute mark for calibration purposes.

Extras

The much-hyped highlight of this two-disk Inland Empire DVD is the 70-plus minutes’ worth of junk that Lynch couldn’t fit into the film’s three-hour trunk. But I use the word junk lightly: It’s easy to see why much of these scenes were scrapped (had Niki’s masturbation scene passed muster, there would have been nothing rapturous about her finally getting to the Lost Girl’s room at the end of the film), but every minute is deliciously watchable, and a few scenes are actually rather illuminating (my fave is Sue being teased by the crazy lights outside her home-a scene that cuts to a dead Billy and her hubby ringleading a circus act featuring a horse). Next is the closest we’re going to get to a commentary track from Lynch: A 41-minute interview reel on which the director talks about diving into the sea of knowingness, mimics the subtle wind sound that begins the movie, calls watching Inland Empire on a telephone or computer an act of “weakness,” begrudgingly defends chapter stops, and talks about holding the film’s “loudness” in his hands. The director is oddly less chill on the behind-the-scenes reel “Lynch 2,” on which he washes floors, questionably guides his actors through a number of scenes, praises Diane Lane’s professionalism as an excuse to guilt trip his cast and crew, writes a scene from the movie after a sudden bout of inspiration, and says “sweet” (yes!). Rounding out the extras: the short film Ballerina, ostensibly directed by Lynch; the director’s recipe for quinoa (click here for more details); a bunch of stills; and three trailers that prominently feature Lynch’s awesome “Strange What Love Does” tune.

Overall

Inland Empire is another excuse for Lynch heads not to leave their house. Fine, just make sure to change the batteries in your smoke detectors.