Davy Lynch, one of my very favorite film makers, has a new opus out and word on the street is it’s a three hour mess.
Now, I’m not one to sleep on a new Lynch release, I’m a die hard, a bit of a completest you could say. So I bought a ticket to Inland Empire expecting I was about to sit through a three hour exercise in frustration. My expectations were low.

Lynch is a fascinating director to me. There are a lot of film makers who do dreams and dream logic. But Lynch suggests to me that he’s actually trying to adapt his dreams and especially his nightmares to the big screen. And even more fascinatingly, that he’s struggling to decipher them himself, secret messages smuggled from the depths of his subconscious, written in a forgotten code.
There’s a theme that runs through his career and unites all his work. There are two realities existing side by side. The normal everyday world and the sinister realm of dream logic that threatens to bleed into our everyday life. There are agents who can cross the divide between the two worlds. But there messages come across garbled from the translation to the point of being incoherent and their motives are suspect.
His reoccurring visual motifs are all about a transition between these two worlds. He photographs stairways, elevators, and corridors in a strange and conspicuous manner. And most of his movies have at least one scene with a flickering light source that implies some sinister invading force.
What makes Lynch such a compelling artist (as well as a frustrating one sometimes) is that I suspect his films have something resembling a literal explanation but Lynch is just as mystified and puzzled as the rest of us. He makes his films as an attempt to decode the dark regions of his brain.

Viewed from the perspective of his career as a whole Inland Empire is Lynch’s capstone film. It’s his most naked and unabashed exploration of his driving obsessions, freed almost completely from the confines of a narrative or commercial demands.
It’s also more linear than I’d been led to believe by early reviews. The story, which takes a while to congeal, treads some familiar territory for Lynch. It stars Laura Dern’s freaky gaping maw (I think a bat flew into her mouth at one point, but I couldn’t tell if it was a mistake or a part of the plot) which is constantly shown in distorted close up. It needs to be said that Dern is fantastic in this film. I’m sure there are those who would write it off as her wandering around in a confused daze for three hours, and that’s true but what’s great is that she gets us to go with her even though it looks like things might get scary. So I’m gonna say this is one of my favorite performances of the year.

Dern’s character is an actress who has been cast in a film with a mysterious history. Of course it’s much more slippery than any synopsis could ever do justice because there are mistaken identities and a sitcom staring rabbits etc. etc. Television shows and movies take on a life and reality of their own, and Laura Dern becomes lost in the labyrinth that separates the fictional film from the fictional reality. Her life becomes the movie and vice versa.

Perhaps more so than any of Lynch’s films since Eraserhead, Inland Empire does not feel the need to explain or justify itself to any audience other than Lynch’s own obsessions. It also gives us some of Lynch’s most memorable and disturbing images.

As for the three hour running time: this is the cinematic equivalent to getting lost in the woods with Dave Lynch for three hours. The kind of woods where hillbillies ass rape you. In other words I’m saying this is a flick for hard core Lynch fans. Divorced from his body of work I’m not sure what I would make of this movie, but if you’re familiar his history not only an important addition to his cannon but also a fascinating peak into what makes the guy tick.

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