Still staunchly strange

>> David Lynch keeps forging his own peculiar path with the cryptic, hilarious Inland Empire

DESCENDING INTO DIGITAL HELL: Laura Dern

by MATTHEW HAYS

Some years ago, when I had the incredible luck to interview the late Robert Altman, I posed a question I had been dying to ask since Ron Howard had won the Best Picture Oscar for A Beautiful Mind. For those of you who don’t recall, Howard’s film won while both Altman’s Gosford Park (considered a high point in the director’s career) and Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (ditto) didn’t. But the most telling point came in the reaction shot: as Howard ascended to the stage, there was a shot of Lynch and Altman saying a few words to each other, then embracing.

I asked Altman: What did you say to Lynch? “I told him, ‘Thank Christ we didn’t win!’” Altman responded. “It’s such a load of crap.”

It was a very funny response, and it says something about both directors. Both Lynch and Altman have worked inside and defiantly outside of the Hollywood studio system, on one hand in need of production money and distribution networks, on the other desperate to forge their own peculiar paths.

Well, Altman may be gone, but Lynch is still at it. The writer-director-painter-furniture-designer behind such massive pop cultural oddities as Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart has created a typically cryptic, often hilarious and mystical feature film with his latest, Inland Empire.

Inland Empire has a few things in common with Lynch’s last opus, Mulholland Drive. It involves the film business: here, Laura Dern (in a striking performance) plays an actress thrilled to learn she’s been handed a choice role. Tough thing is, it turns out her role is in a film that is cursed. Dern is soon descending into a kind of big-screen, digital hell: is she in a dream? Is the film she’s in cursed? What are we supposed to be reading as the “real” part of the narrative, and what part are we supposed to be reading as someone’s dream?

Of course, part of the fun of watching a Lynch film is simply letting yourself go and not getting too worked up about it. Some Lynch fans will be left a bit unsettled by the digital aesthetic of Inland Empire; gone is the lush 35mm depth of Mulholland Drive. But Lynch found the confines of money demands too much to endure, and was thus drawn to the no-budget non-expense of going digital. Others will simply be confounded by a two-and-a-half-hour-plus odyssey in which Lynch takes a kind of Hitchcockian set-up and drags it into a ludicrously surreal universe.

Dern repeatedly stated during interviews that she really doesn’t know what the movie is about, and didn’t know the entire time she was making the movie. It’s a pretty funny statement, but, of course, Lynch being the revered auteur that he is, this film will undoubtedly launch a million graduate student papers.

I would suggest that much of Inland Empire is intended as parody; of the industry, of the act of performance itself (my favourite part is a sitcom performed by rabbits) and of surrealism. (Though the other critics at the press screening I attended seemed afraid to laugh at it, apparently for fear of offending someone.) Though this is no Blue Velvet, Elephant Man or Mulholland Drive, it showcases Lynch’s staunch defiance as a writer and artist.

Altman would approve.

Inland Empire opens at the
Cinéma du Parc this Friday, May 4

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