Inland Empire (2006, USA)

Near the end of David Lynch’s Inland Empire – during the Hollywood burlesque club sequence, in fact – I got the feeling that I occasionally do during certain films, that this movie might in fact last forever, and that if it did, I would stay to watch.

I guess that this is my way of saying that despite the often-maddening non-linear nature of Inland Empire, Lynch has succeeded in creating a universe that is almost utterly absorbing. Not that it really makes much logical sense in the end, though perhaps like Eraserhead and the final section of Mulholland Drive (not to mention some of the dream sequences in Twin Peaks), the film’s dreamlike un-logic is what makes watching so compulsive. At least, this is true for me – I can see how some people might not make it through the first half hour, though the beginning of the film is probably the part that makes the most sense. After the first third, we’re really on our way down the rabbit hole – something like the paradigm shift at the center of Lost Highway, only on a much more massive scale.

As we left the theater, my friend commented that it was impossible to understand anything about what Lynch’s films are like from descriptions of them. In that case, perhaps this is just an attempt to explain Inland Empire through other Lynch films, since a simple description would be impossible, and a thematic explication too broad, at best. To paraphrase Jonathan Rosenbaum in his review for the Chicago Reader, it’s astounding that an artist who recycles so much of his material still manages to make his work seem fresh. Or, to crib again, this time from Pauline Kael – “Call me sick, but I want to see that again.”