David Lynch's "Inland Empire"

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Our first chance comes January 19th when Lynch is set to appear at the Rafael Film Center, which started distributing its new calendar last week. The film will open there for an engagement of an unspecified length on February 9th.

plot wise my theory is: that polish chick is stuck in purgatory cuz her movie was never finished and she died cuz she got preggy from some trick (or the other actor?) and her husband kicked the shit out of her or she killed herself with a screwdriver giving herself an abortion and laura dern like 50 years later or whatever finishes the movie or something and the crying polish chick watches the finally completed movie and is sent on her path to heaven or happiness or whatever during that emotional scene where they kiss or i dunno.

keep in mind i saw this movie twice. once on shrooms months ago and once sober last weekend so i dunno i might be wrong. someone help me. i still dont know that the fuck "hes good with animals" thing means.

Hello, did anyone ever answer this for you? There are several threads going on about the film--she's in the very last bit, the same scene Laura Harring shows up in aka the credits. It is completely, 100% "if you blinked you missed her," she's sitting off to the side of Laura Dern. If she shows up elsewhere in the film, I missed it though.

The Q&A in Silver Spring wasn't much cop--Lynch was great, very interesting and funny but it was hosted by one of the most awful people in the entire DC metro area and he got questions that boiled down to "Actresses are pretty huh?"

1. How did you shoot a movie using digital? Did you point the camera at the actors or what?

2. I like Polish composers too. Why do YOU like Polish composers?

3. How did you make this color digital motion picture? Was a camera involved? Perhaps more than one?

4. Do you like girls circle one yes no maybe

5. Was this film made using the Sony Pl508JSXminiDVcamcamcorder-corder? Should I buy one to make my thesis? Tell me about the features and the specifications, especially battery life.

6. Did you lie about your answer to number 4 circle one no yes sorta

7. Dude I want to have your babies, so what's it like, working in digital?

xpost please do not make it sound like there were that many technical questions, #7 did not actually ask Lynch a question at all and actually said "I just wanted to tell you I love you" or something to that effect. And it was the last question too! They cut off everyone else! If I was in line, I would've killed that little 14 year old fucker.

The more I am away from it the more I like it! There are a lot of loose ends and things that make very little sense to it but I like the core of it.

-- TOMB07 (tombo...), Today 1:53 PM. (TOMBOT) (later) (link)

i thought that meant the next bit with the screwdriver.

As for the Lost Girl, I guess being stuck watching TV in an attic is the perfect definition of Purgatory. I don't quite understand why her liberation is the joy of being reunited with her/Nikki's husband, who in all his previous guises has been a scary bastard.

anyway, need to see this again.

one of the two guys sitting next to me to his friend, both of whom left about an hour and a half into the movie: "this is the worst fucking movie i've ever seen, screw this shit..."

also: bjork and matthew barney were in attendance!

also, i completely forgot that william h. macy has a ten-second cameo in this

this was discussed, i guess on the sandbox, the song is by lynch, also sung by lynch

btw, happy birthday david lynch, and happy birthday to me

But I'm surprised that so many folks (not here, necessarily) have complained about the DV look. Thought it suited Lynch's style very well. Loved the heavy graininess on the blown-up and darker shots. Loved the bleary, blurry, supersaturated reds. The endless, swollen close-ups were great, as were the rougher, hand-held sequences. Visually, I thought it was a breakthrough for Lynch.

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!!!SPOILERS!!! Read at yr. own risk.

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Saw it as a film about redemption -- about "rescuing" oneself from the burden of guilt. Mulholland Drive was (arguably) about a character who is eventually consumed and destroyed by her own guilt and shame. In Inland Empire, Laura Dern seems to betray her husband and, as a result, is plunged into a purgatorial dreamscape of lost identity, madness, prostitution and murder. Her very powerful husband curses her: she becomes a whore, and her identity fragments. She tumbles through worlds-within-worlds and seeems, even, to die. But somehow, in finally, quite horribly, dying, she escapes the curse. She frees herself from self-loathing and self-destruction. In the endless hallways that seem to represent her unconscious mind, she confronts her demons, killing them and unifying the world -- which seems only to be her self.

Was she ever really an actress, or a whore? In a "real world" sense, did she ever betray her husband or lose a son? It's hard to say. So much remains unexplained. In the end, all I can say for sure is that the murderous Polish husband (in the historical sequences) and the screwdriver-weilding woman who stalked her and competed for her identity seemed only like fractured, male and female reflections of her own self-loathing.

In destroying/escaping these beings, she regains the power to author her own identity. Which leads into the very upbeat version Nina Simone's "Sinnerman" over the end credits, with its celebratory refrain: "power!" A movie about escaping cursed narratives (those placed on us by others and those we author for ourselves), about self-redemption.

But what or who is "LB"?
Why all the weird hostility toward Hollywood?
Whose star was it? ("Dorothy...")
What's the deal with looking through a cigarette burn in silk?
Does it have anything to do with the "cigarette burns" that match one reel of film to the next (visible frequently in the print I saw)?
"Good with animals"?
So, ummm, the rabbits...

And Allyzay's right. Kinski is sitting to Dern's left on the couch in the final party scene -- wearing a yellow dress, I think.

yeah i wondered that too. was the in-film cigarette burn in the top right corner of the frame as well? i forget now.

I believe that a "cigarette burn" (small white circle in the upper right-hand corner of the frame/screen) did appear during -- or right before or right after -- the first literal cigarette burning scene. Have to see it again to be sure.

Why all the weird hostility toward Hollywood?

Any kind of hostility toward it seems nonweird to me, esp regarding the exploitation of women.

I believe it was Dorothy Lamour's star.

Is it ever clear that the original attempt to film the Blue Tomorrows story was American? or Euro?

The "exploitation of women" angle you bring up is interesting, though. This film's primary character is both an actress and a prostitute. Mulholland Drive seemed to make a similar comparison, if more obliquely. Women frequently appear as victim/objects in Lynch's films: they’re subject to male desire and anger, powerful in their "mysterious" allure, but fundamentally other-than. Inland Empire is the only Lynch film in which the camera eye & authorial voice seem to genuinely identify with a female protagonist. Dern isn't an exotic bird that Lynch and his audience observe, perhaps pity -- she's us. While we're watching the film, we're experiencing her story, from her POV. This, too, seems like a breakthrough.

Is it significant that it was Lamour's star? Can anyone expand on this?