inland empire review
A child watches from bed as a small sinister figure runs nightly across the room from window to door.
Each morning a young man wakes with a neat cross imprinted on his palm, and what looks like a reversed ‘c’ in the centre of it.
A boy lays winded in the road as the parked truck he’s rolled under after coming off his bike starts to rev its engine.
Each of these is the same person. Each is ignorant of the others, either because they don’t yet exist or because at that moment they’re absorbed in what’s happening now. In this they resemble first-time viewers of Inland Empire, or any film, but especially a film like Inland Empire. A film that doesn’t provide resolutions or explanations, a film that rewards engagement, and a film that stretches tension across its entirety.
The first-time viewer at the beginning of Inland Empire is ignorant of the person who will finish watching it. Partly, and simply, they will be transformed by watching a film that was new to them. In this reductive account the person partway through Inland Empire is another person, an intermediate stage between those at the beginning and the end. But that reductive account is like a synopsis of the film, accurate and fatally lacking. Because the viewer partway through is only an intermediate stage if we adopt a strictly narrative interpretation, where the end is more important than the journey. This is of course the interpretation that most movies and tv programmes train us to adopt. Inland Empire should alert us to the possibility that the viewer partway through is a wholly independent entity. Rather than a slow transition from one person to another in neat three-act structures joined end-to-end across our lives we are several. Sometimes we change slowly from one to another, and sometimes those changes may be irrevocable, but at other times the changes are jarring or numerous. We may return repeatedly to one or more of the people we are. We may be several at the same time.
Each morning a young man wakes with a neat cross imprinted on his palm, and what looks like a reversed ‘c’ in the centre of it.
A boy lays winded in the road as the parked truck he’s rolled under after coming off his bike starts to rev its engine.
Each of these is the same person. Each is ignorant of the others, either because they don’t yet exist or because at that moment they’re absorbed in what’s happening now. In this they resemble first-time viewers of Inland Empire, or any film, but especially a film like Inland Empire. A film that doesn’t provide resolutions or explanations, a film that rewards engagement, and a film that stretches tension across its entirety.
The first-time viewer at the beginning of Inland Empire is ignorant of the person who will finish watching it. Partly, and simply, they will be transformed by watching a film that was new to them. In this reductive account the person partway through Inland Empire is another person, an intermediate stage between those at the beginning and the end. But that reductive account is like a synopsis of the film, accurate and fatally lacking. Because the viewer partway through is only an intermediate stage if we adopt a strictly narrative interpretation, where the end is more important than the journey. This is of course the interpretation that most movies and tv programmes train us to adopt. Inland Empire should alert us to the possibility that the viewer partway through is a wholly independent entity. Rather than a slow transition from one person to another in neat three-act structures joined end-to-end across our lives we are several. Sometimes we change slowly from one to another, and sometimes those changes may be irrevocable, but at other times the changes are jarring or numerous. We may return repeatedly to one or more of the people we are. We may be several at the same time.
Scenes in Inland Empire often fade into blackness. This happens at the start in scenes that are all in some way peculiar. The faces of the men and the woman in the Lödz hotel room are obscured, highlighting the sexual menace of the scene. The affectless ‘sitcom’ with its rabbit-headed protagonists and canned laughter. The overbright California home of Nikki Grace, the stilted dialogue and matching delivery, the faces taking up too much of the screen. With the nervous laughter of the audience already tense these feel like a sequence of sketches. And for those familiar with Chris Morris’s Jam this would be an entirely plausible explanation. Perhaps watching the film again reduces the alienating nature of these devices, perhaps if the scenes occurred in the body of the film they wouldn’t seem so alien. It’s impossible to say, the first-time viewer at the beginning of Inland Empire is ignorant of the person who will finish watching it, is ignorant of what they are about to see. Or perhaps not. Perhaps the sinister figure that ran nightly across the room from window to door is now in David Lynch’s film.
The young man with the regularly imprinted hand is terrified of mirrors. In films mirrors show horror, transformation, or the uncanny. He’s afraid of seeing vampires, his generic name for the monsters that crowd the darkness. And on occasion he’s stared so hard at his reflection that it’s disassembled and reconfigured itself in utterly alien arrangements, fascinating and fearful.
The schoolboy sees ghosts. He knows they’re illusions his mind has created but he can give them real solidity. He can persuade other children that they can see the same ghosts. They’re simultaneously real and unreal, frightening to others and unworrying to him.
The young man with the regularly imprinted hand is terrified of mirrors. In films mirrors show horror, transformation, or the uncanny. He’s afraid of seeing vampires, his generic name for the monsters that crowd the darkness. And on occasion he’s stared so hard at his reflection that it’s disassembled and reconfigured itself in utterly alien arrangements, fascinating and fearful.
The schoolboy sees ghosts. He knows they’re illusions his mind has created but he can give them real solidity. He can persuade other children that they can see the same ghosts. They’re simultaneously real and unreal, frightening to others and unworrying to him.
Violence against women. In a David Lynch film the subject is unavoidable. In most film and much popular entertainment the subject is unavoidable. Whether atavistic hangover of less enlightened times or contemporary reaction born of fear at their increasing emancipation, women often remain object and victim in the camera’s eye.
Prosecution
Women are beaten in this film. Sexual violence is threatened and perhaps carried out. Nikki Grace’s character is stabbed by a woman. A woman visits a police station with what may be an injury of self-harm. Women are portrayed as prostitutes and as grotesques. When Nikki is threatened by a character and shoots at him she shoots at her own distorted image. The entire film is a voyeuristic examination of the dismantling of a woman’s sense of self. Not to say voyeuristically obsessed with the female form.
Defence
Nikki Grace’s character (or perhaps her alter ego) describes acts of violence she’s carried out on men in retaliation to their violence. Nikki is a protagonist and not a passive victim. All characters other than Nikki remain half-drawn cyphers, leaving the film to be viewed from her perspective. Men are combative and alone, women have company. Men are shown as possessive and jealous.
Despite this the taste of misogyny can’t really be shaken from the film. There is a real repulsion for the way men treat women, and an acknowledgement that women have their own resources and strengths. But this seeming contradiction can be easily reconciled by thinking about post-romantic representations of women from Thomas Hardy and DH Lawrence through to Lars von Trier and Lukas Moodyson. They present ostensibly strong, independent and fully realised women, who are nonetheless misogynist caricatures. They are often victims, and only defined in opposition or in relationship to men. On the occasions when they are fully sexually independent they’re either presented as animals or as innocents verging on the mentally defective. The post-romantic male artist frequently portrays women in a sympathetic light, but with distrust and an unwillingness or inability to identify with them.
Although in a real sense Inland Empire is Nikki’s (and therefore Laura Dern’s) film it fits neatly into this tradition. Women are mystical grotesques who make prophetic utterances. They are whores. They are manifest primarily as body. They are ‘hysterical’. They become a kind of noble savage. Noble by virtue of a kind of second-sight, of a social solidarity, of nobility in the face of male oppression. Savage by virtue of their sexual otherness. And this is not just an abstract ideological quibble. Across the world, ‘developed’ and otherwise, sexual violence against women and girls is a major killer. Rape, sexual abuse, domestic violence and more affect at least one in four women. A film is not just a film. No one is suggesting that Lynch advocates violence or believes women are inferior, but in a serious film centred on a female character it’s worrying that the characterisation of women is so careless.
A white van with dust on the rear doors. The usual comments, ‘Clean me’, ‘Also available in white’, and a new one, ‘White is gay’. You can’t tell if it’s referring to the van or to someone’s name.
Oddities of scale pervade the film. The set in which the uncanny and affectless sitcom involving three human rabbits takes place feels like a tiny scale model and yet it towers over them.<>It’s reminiscent of the radiator in Eraserhead, but both more ‘normal’ and more unsettling. There are other cramped spaces: the room at the top of the stairs where Nikki’s character relates the violence she’s carried out on men, and the cheap and dated house she finds herself occupying. And there are outsized spaces like Nikki’s house. Like Alice in Wonderland shrinking and growing, or like an overheated brain hallucinating while you’re ill with measles, when you can hear voices. You imagine you’re in the centre of town as the mayor and townspeople discuss you. At one moment you’re small and hard-edged, sharp and dangerous, and at another moment you’re enormous, smooth and numb. You haven’t read it yet but at times it’s almost like being Gulliver guyed to the ground in Lilliput. But here Alice is the better analogy. Early on when Nikki and others are discussing the film they’re about to start making they’re disturbed by someone watching them from the closed set. Shortly afterwards Nikki goes down her own rabbit hole. If indeed she hasn’t already gone down it. If indeed it’s Nikki’s story, and not that of the prostitute watching tv in the Polish hotel room at the beginning - after all David Lynch merely said it’s a film about “A woman in trouble”, he didn’t say which woman. But whoever’s story it is shortly after being disturbed by the watcher Nikki passes through a door and finds herself on the closed set watching herself earlier.
Interstices. Places join one another in unexpected and impossible ways. A door from one place to a second place can be passed through one way, but leaves no way back. In the second place the door only ever opens to that second place.
Interstices. Corridors, stairs, the street. These are interstitial spaces that seem to exist outside of the other worlds Nikki experiences. The corridors and stairs and streets are all but indistinguishable, but the doors can open anywhere at any time. Recursion.
Interstices. Occasionally as a scene fades into view or out of view a third scene interposes over the joint. An alternative choice, or the hitherto unseen reality, or a phantom arising from confusion, or, or, or.
Perhaps the interstices and transitions are what’s really important in Inland Empire. Something that seems unchanging but turns out to be wholly ambiguous. White is gay.
Interstices. The human rabbit sitcom living room moves from the tv screen to being actually present and back again. A door in one of the places Nikki finds herself opens onto the human rabbit sitcom living room. Nikki in the cinema is simultaneously standing in the dark and projected on the screen. The silk Nikki burns a hole through and the flecked window in the cheap and dated house are both barriers and portals. They’re an uneasy intrusion between the camera and things only partly seen beyond. Things are suddenly close to them then gone. They half-hide the things you can see through them. A street lamp is in Hollywood and in Lödz. Another lamp is important, remember this. Recursion. Interstices. Reality and make-believe, both physically and emotionally.
Interstices. Reality and make-believe, both physically and emotionally. Although you know you’re watching actors playing actors who are acting, when they read through the script of the film they’re making (a remake of a ‘cursed’ Polish film) you suddenly start to believe what they’re saying. Spaces are both real spaces and sets.
Interstices. Objects cause breaks from one state/place/time to another. Recursions and relocations. Certain domestic objects become invested with terror. A bedside lamp. The silk. TV.
If even lamps, silks, tv, watches, windows, doors, faces, corridors and stairs are unreliable can we ever be safe? No wonder Nikki doesn’t know who she is, no wonder we’re so tense and unsettled watching her. Cinema like all art is a space shared by the artist and the audience, we enter it to try and decypher the clues the artist has left, their trail of breadcrumbs. It’s an interstitial chamber between imagination and the everyday. It‘s a story, but I’m involved with it. It’s a story, but I don’t really understand what’s going on. It’s someone else’s imagination, but I recognise elements within it. I know the ‘rules’ of cinema, but most of them are bent, distorted or broken here. The film is unreliable as entertainment or as intellectual stimulation. Cinema is an art of light and Inland Empire is dark, obscure and almost entirely black at many stages.
Is this what it’s like ‘waking’ from a protracted fugue state when you’re not used to the sensation, or when you’ve ‘lost’ days, weeks, months or years as opposed to hours or minutes? Is this what the world’s like for the newborn with no familiar points of reference? The flipside of Stan Brakhage’s “imagine how many colours there are in a field to a baby with no concept of ‘green’”.
Oddities of scale pervade the film. The set in which the uncanny and affectless sitcom involving three human rabbits takes place feels like a tiny scale model and yet it towers over them.<
Interstices. Places join one another in unexpected and impossible ways. A door from one place to a second place can be passed through one way, but leaves no way back. In the second place the door only ever opens to that second place.
Interstices. Corridors, stairs, the street. These are interstitial spaces that seem to exist outside of the other worlds Nikki experiences. The corridors and stairs and streets are all but indistinguishable, but the doors can open anywhere at any time. Recursion.
Interstices. Occasionally as a scene fades into view or out of view a third scene interposes over the joint. An alternative choice, or the hitherto unseen reality, or a phantom arising from confusion, or, or, or.
Perhaps the interstices and transitions are what’s really important in Inland Empire. Something that seems unchanging but turns out to be wholly ambiguous. White is gay.
Interstices. The human rabbit sitcom living room moves from the tv screen to being actually present and back again. A door in one of the places Nikki finds herself opens onto the human rabbit sitcom living room. Nikki in the cinema is simultaneously standing in the dark and projected on the screen. The silk Nikki burns a hole through and the flecked window in the cheap and dated house are both barriers and portals. They’re an uneasy intrusion between the camera and things only partly seen beyond. Things are suddenly close to them then gone. They half-hide the things you can see through them. A street lamp is in Hollywood and in Lödz. Another lamp is important, remember this. Recursion. Interstices. Reality and make-believe, both physically and emotionally.
Interstices. Reality and make-believe, both physically and emotionally. Although you know you’re watching actors playing actors who are acting, when they read through the script of the film they’re making (a remake of a ‘cursed’ Polish film) you suddenly start to believe what they’re saying. Spaces are both real spaces and sets.
Interstices. Objects cause breaks from one state/place/time to another. Recursions and relocations. Certain domestic objects become invested with terror. A bedside lamp. The silk. TV.
If even lamps, silks, tv, watches, windows, doors, faces, corridors and stairs are unreliable can we ever be safe? No wonder Nikki doesn’t know who she is, no wonder we’re so tense and unsettled watching her. Cinema like all art is a space shared by the artist and the audience, we enter it to try and decypher the clues the artist has left, their trail of breadcrumbs. It’s an interstitial chamber between imagination and the everyday. It‘s a story, but I’m involved with it. It’s a story, but I don’t really understand what’s going on. It’s someone else’s imagination, but I recognise elements within it. I know the ‘rules’ of cinema, but most of them are bent, distorted or broken here. The film is unreliable as entertainment or as intellectual stimulation. Cinema is an art of light and Inland Empire is dark, obscure and almost entirely black at many stages.
Is this what it’s like ‘waking’ from a protracted fugue state when you’re not used to the sensation, or when you’ve ‘lost’ days, weeks, months or years as opposed to hours or minutes? Is this what the world’s like for the newborn with no familiar points of reference? The flipside of Stan Brakhage’s “imagine how many colours there are in a field to a baby with no concept of ‘green’”.
While generic monsters are ‘vampires’ to the young man, the sinister but not really frightening creature that ran across his bedroom was a ‘goblin’. The ‘goblin’ was probably an illusion, car headlights through the window. A lighting effect. The shape of the window and the shadow of whatever was on the sill.
Watch tv for five minutes. It’s fucking weird. It doesn’t matter if you stick with one channel or constantly change. It doesn’t matter if you watch a public service broadcaster or commercial tv. Fucking weird, all of it. You just don’t notice how fucking weird because you’ve become acclimatised to it. It’s difficult to take a step back - do you remember when you were a child and familiar things became absolutely alien? You repeated a word so often it even became less than a sound. Your teeth felt enormous, filling your mouth like a pinecone. You stared at the wall until it dissolved into flowers of blackness. Everything human, everything human is fundamentally arbitrary, alien and downright fucking weird in exactly that way. You just stopped noticing. And somehow David Lynch manages to capture that weirdness.
It’s not a polite weirdness.
It’s not a weirdness of the freakshow
[It has been at times, in Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks].
It’s not a weirdness of the outsider.
It’s not a lollipop kookiness.
It’s not a weirdness to unsettle most of the world
[It is the world - didn’t you read the last paragraph?].
It’s a sinister weirdness indefinably different and the same.
Every time one subject seems to lead to another in this review I find it’s looped back to an earlier point.
The disassembled face in the mirror in the mirror and the ‘c’ imprinted backward on the hand are linked. In his sleep just before waking, or possibly in a fugue state, the young man gets out of bed and goes to the bathroom. There he leans into the mirror with his hands supporting him on the sink taps and stares at his own face. The mirror he’s afraid of. Possibly stares until the image dissolves into random fragments. Or since he’s asleep or unconscious of self perhaps he sees the face with a clarity he’ll never carry back to awareness.
Watch tv for five minutes. It’s fucking weird. It doesn’t matter if you stick with one channel or constantly change. It doesn’t matter if you watch a public service broadcaster or commercial tv. Fucking weird, all of it. You just don’t notice how fucking weird because you’ve become acclimatised to it. It’s difficult to take a step back - do you remember when you were a child and familiar things became absolutely alien? You repeated a word so often it even became less than a sound. Your teeth felt enormous, filling your mouth like a pinecone. You stared at the wall until it dissolved into flowers of blackness. Everything human, everything human is fundamentally arbitrary, alien and downright fucking weird in exactly that way. You just stopped noticing. And somehow David Lynch manages to capture that weirdness.
It’s not a polite weirdness.
It’s not a weirdness of the freakshow
[It has been at times, in Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks].
It’s not a weirdness of the outsider.
It’s not a lollipop kookiness.
It’s not a weirdness to unsettle most of the world
[It is the world - didn’t you read the last paragraph?].
It’s a sinister weirdness indefinably different and the same.
Every time one subject seems to lead to another in this review I find it’s looped back to an earlier point.
The disassembled face in the mirror in the mirror and the ‘c’ imprinted backward on the hand are linked. In his sleep just before waking, or possibly in a fugue state, the young man gets out of bed and goes to the bathroom. There he leans into the mirror with his hands supporting him on the sink taps and stares at his own face. The mirror he’s afraid of. Possibly stares until the image dissolves into random fragments. Or since he’s asleep or unconscious of self perhaps he sees the face with a clarity he’ll never carry back to awareness.
What are the elements of the recursion in Inland Empire? In simple terms the woman in trouble, whoever that might be, undergoes a trauma or shock and shortly afterwards passes through a portal (TV screen, door, hole in a silk) into a transformed reality where she has to work out the rules and her new identity until she undergoes a trauma or shock and shortly afterwards passes through a portal. It’s the trauma then that seems to trigger each recursion. But stories also play a part. A story previously heard either in the immediately preceding reality or earlier will define the conditions of the present reality and perhaps the role of the woman in trouble. Is Lynch suggesting that women are defined by the stories men create for them? Or does he suggest that women create stories to escape from present reality? Or is this a reflexive examination of the role of stories in film as other parts of the film explore sets and spaces, lighting, acting, costume, the camera itself: close to the beginning and end we’re aware of cameras as physical objects and as the intermediaries that bring the image to us and one of the most repeated phrases is “Check the gate.” More pertinently toward the end of the film one of the clichés of storytelling, that a gun shown in a drawer in the first act must be used by the third act, is given literal form in the space of only a few minutes.
Ghosts are easy to create. You don’t need any smoke, mirrors or hidden tricks. All that’s needed is a receptive audience and an absolute conviction in what you’re saying. Part of the trick is to do as little of the work as possible, make suggestions and allow those you intend to haunt to create the ghosts they find easiest to believe. In Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1965), in the stories The Woman of the Snow and In a Cup of Tea the ghosts are created by lighting effects. Inland Empire appears to be equally sparing in the means used to generate tension, fear, and phantoms of the mind A SUDDEN THOUGHT - the more crepuscular the scene then on the whole the safer it will be, it’s light that brings fear in this film. Like nightmares and dreams in that space as the brain rises from sleep to wakefulness. To be conscious is to be frightened. Phantoms of the mind. Phantoms of the mind don’t need lavish effects. If you can create tension you can make anything frightening.
Floating just below consciousness I dreamed I was in a large house. Some 18th century country house, in a living room. It was a late summer/early autumn evening, thick and dark with a possible storm. The French windows were a little ajar and the heavy red curtains covered half of each. I was already tense. Outside I saw a woman holding a pair of red slippers walk past. Then there was a narrative lacuna of the kind that makes dreams so disquieting. I was afraid. The woman was stood behind one of the curtains holding the red slippers, and this was a source of absolute dread.
Domestic objects are similarly invested with dread in Inland Empire. Primarily the lamp in the bedroom in the cheap and dated house (though it may also be in another building at the same time). The camera closes slowly in on it several times as noises on the soundtrack intensify. It takes us from one scene to another. Or there’s a shock and then the film resumes. The light it casts sometimes seems to have no effect other than to intensify the darkness around. The bed itself, and the corridor outside the bedroom are also threatening, but neither focuses fear in quite the same way.
Sound. In the world of Inland Empire sound is crucial in creating fear. Or at least creating the tension that allows us to create our own fear. We are, after all, far better at frightening ourselves than any filmmaker or special-effects house. One of the lasting impressions of the film is of constant tones - noise? drones? - sustained across scenes and creating the tension that something is about to happen. Sudden silences can be extremely disquieting.
Songs may provide some respite, but here’s a curious thing, the film infects them. If sound affects how we feel about what we see, what we see affects how we listen to the songs and pieces of music. The music’s a pretty hip selection, but not a Scorsese jukebox that could sit over any set of images. It doesn’t stand out in that way. The music seems to grow out of the film like efflorecences of unhealthy fungi. It’s queasy and sick because the film’s queasy and sick. As the film without the soundtrack would be something largely different, so the soundtrack without the film would mean something else. But if you want a soundtrack to stand alone unchanged then maybe you should be watching Quentin Tarantino’s adolescent fantasies.
Which leads to a knot of thoughts. Shortly after watching Inland Empire I saw Pan’s Labyrinth, which seemed to be a handful of striking images (mostly borrowed from elsewhere) in search of a plot. But did the absence of similarly striking images in Inland Empire indicate a less visual sensibility? Pan’s Labyrinth provided the answer. The Pale Man has eyes in his palms. Maybe they borrowed it from elsewhere, but in the art on Sonic Youth’s EVOL (1986) Thurston Moore’s photographed with his hands, palms outwards, in front of his face. Just as the Pale Man appears twenty years later. There are eyes drawn on his palms. Around five years after this, having been persuaded by Sonic Youth that signing to Geffen needn’t mean compromising their work, Nirvana released Nevermind. It clearly borrowed from Sonic Youth, The Pixies, Husker Du, Pere Ubu and many more, but with a more pronounced pop sensibility and a more subdued experimental aspect. Nirvana went on to enjoy success these influences have never known. But even with more obviously commercial tunes surely no sensible person would suggest that Nirvana were better musicians than Sonic Youth? In the end Nirvana largely existed in a separate, more conventional world than Sonic Youth. So Pan’s Labyrinth, for all its subtitles and relatively modest budget, is a more mainstream crowdpleaser than Inland Empire. Its images more obvious, easier to digest.
Floating just below consciousness I dreamed I was in a large house. Some 18th century country house, in a living room. It was a late summer/early autumn evening, thick and dark with a possible storm. The French windows were a little ajar and the heavy red curtains covered half of each. I was already tense. Outside I saw a woman holding a pair of red slippers walk past. Then there was a narrative lacuna of the kind that makes dreams so disquieting. I was afraid. The woman was stood behind one of the curtains holding the red slippers, and this was a source of absolute dread.
Domestic objects are similarly invested with dread in Inland Empire. Primarily the lamp in the bedroom in the cheap and dated house (though it may also be in another building at the same time). The camera closes slowly in on it several times as noises on the soundtrack intensify. It takes us from one scene to another. Or there’s a shock and then the film resumes. The light it casts sometimes seems to have no effect other than to intensify the darkness around. The bed itself, and the corridor outside the bedroom are also threatening, but neither focuses fear in quite the same way.
Sound. In the world of Inland Empire sound is crucial in creating fear. Or at least creating the tension that allows us to create our own fear. We are, after all, far better at frightening ourselves than any filmmaker or special-effects house. One of the lasting impressions of the film is of constant tones - noise? drones? - sustained across scenes and creating the tension that something is about to happen. Sudden silences can be extremely disquieting.
Songs may provide some respite, but here’s a curious thing, the film infects them. If sound affects how we feel about what we see, what we see affects how we listen to the songs and pieces of music. The music’s a pretty hip selection, but not a Scorsese jukebox that could sit over any set of images. It doesn’t stand out in that way. The music seems to grow out of the film like efflorecences of unhealthy fungi. It’s queasy and sick because the film’s queasy and sick. As the film without the soundtrack would be something largely different, so the soundtrack without the film would mean something else. But if you want a soundtrack to stand alone unchanged then maybe you should be watching Quentin Tarantino’s adolescent fantasies.
Which leads to a knot of thoughts. Shortly after watching Inland Empire I saw Pan’s Labyrinth, which seemed to be a handful of striking images (mostly borrowed from elsewhere) in search of a plot. But did the absence of similarly striking images in Inland Empire indicate a less visual sensibility? Pan’s Labyrinth provided the answer. The Pale Man has eyes in his palms. Maybe they borrowed it from elsewhere, but in the art on Sonic Youth’s EVOL (1986) Thurston Moore’s photographed with his hands, palms outwards, in front of his face. Just as the Pale Man appears twenty years later. There are eyes drawn on his palms. Around five years after this, having been persuaded by Sonic Youth that signing to Geffen needn’t mean compromising their work, Nirvana released Nevermind. It clearly borrowed from Sonic Youth, The Pixies, Husker Du, Pere Ubu and many more, but with a more pronounced pop sensibility and a more subdued experimental aspect. Nirvana went on to enjoy success these influences have never known. But even with more obviously commercial tunes surely no sensible person would suggest that Nirvana were better musicians than Sonic Youth? In the end Nirvana largely existed in a separate, more conventional world than Sonic Youth. So Pan’s Labyrinth, for all its subtitles and relatively modest budget, is a more mainstream crowdpleaser than Inland Empire. Its images more obvious, easier to digest.
Hitting the deck and finding himself winded under a truck about to move off the boy recited a similar litany to those times he’d stand up suddenly and find he was utterly disoriented. At those times he’d quietly repeat to himself his name and where he lived until it started to make sense and the boiling of his peripheral vision ceased. Now he told himself over and over again that it didn’t end here that he was going to live because he had a purpose. Each litany was an assertion of self and a call to action. He had a powerful sense of his own narrative - probably most people do.
In a film your audience can’t be as connected to your characters as they are to themselves, or even to characters in a novel. They can’t share that personal, subjective sense of a narrative, so conventionally narrative tends to be imposed from the outside. And the narratives imposed from outside tend to be very conventional. The three act structure. The protagonist facing obstacles that they have to overcome. It all seems eminently sensible, until you try to analyse existing stories using it as a tool. It describes them all. A descriptive tool that reduces every story to an identical skeleton is worse than useless. It tells you nothing. You can’t use it to construct your own stories unless you have the innate ability to breathe life into them yourself. It stands to reason that something so limited can’t possibly connect you to the protagonists.
But of course that’s just one layer. The mise en scene, the costume, the music, the dialogue, the lighting and so on all help to create the world, the people, the story. And the editing. Put one scene next to another and however different they are the human brain will create a link. Lay more scenes together and a narrative will start to emerge, however fragmentary and confusing. Whether linear, circular, fractured or in some other configuration.
Inland Empire uses similarity and repetition to create its narrative. Spaces, interstitial or otherwise are revisited. Someone turns a corner ahead of us in half-light a couple of times. We enter and re-enter the bedroom with the sinister lamp. Nikki ascends endless stairs to the room(s) at the top of the stairs. Nikki walks on the street. The narrative is like a Droste effect. A form of visual recursion where a larger picture - say on a box of cereal - contains a smaller version of itself - a box of cereal sits on a table with the same image on it, including a box of cereal on a table... We’ve been here before.
In a film your audience can’t be as connected to your characters as they are to themselves, or even to characters in a novel. They can’t share that personal, subjective sense of a narrative, so conventionally narrative tends to be imposed from the outside. And the narratives imposed from outside tend to be very conventional. The three act structure. The protagonist facing obstacles that they have to overcome. It all seems eminently sensible, until you try to analyse existing stories using it as a tool. It describes them all. A descriptive tool that reduces every story to an identical skeleton is worse than useless. It tells you nothing. You can’t use it to construct your own stories unless you have the innate ability to breathe life into them yourself. It stands to reason that something so limited can’t possibly connect you to the protagonists.
But of course that’s just one layer. The mise en scene, the costume, the music, the dialogue, the lighting and so on all help to create the world, the people, the story. And the editing. Put one scene next to another and however different they are the human brain will create a link. Lay more scenes together and a narrative will start to emerge, however fragmentary and confusing. Whether linear, circular, fractured or in some other configuration.
Inland Empire uses similarity and repetition to create its narrative. Spaces, interstitial or otherwise are revisited. Someone turns a corner ahead of us in half-light a couple of times. We enter and re-enter the bedroom with the sinister lamp. Nikki ascends endless stairs to the room(s) at the top of the stairs. Nikki walks on the street. The narrative is like a Droste effect. A form of visual recursion where a larger picture - say on a box of cereal - contains a smaller version of itself - a box of cereal sits on a table with the same image on it, including a box of cereal on a table... We’ve been here before.
Nikki is alone through most of the film. Even when she’s with other people she’s profoundly separated from them. One of the reasons for that may be that she seems to be quite wealthy, or at least married to a wealthy man. Those who have the closest community with one another appear to be the most powerless. The prostitutes and the homeless - who may only exist in the film Nikki’s making - sit together, live together and talk together in ways that the privileged don’t. It seems to be a comment on contemporary capitalism, that social Darwinism that measures worth by what you notionally contribute to the economy. If you’ve stepped on others to get to the top, if you’re close to the apex of a pyramid based on the labour of masses, then not only is your world sparsely populated but you’ve probably suppressed most fellow-feeling. Whatever truth there is in this it’s a distinctly Romantic view of the world, “Kings, and ministers of state, the real authors of the calamity, sit unmolested in their cabinet, while those against whom the fury of the storm is directed are, for the most part, persons who have been trepanned into the service, or who are dragged unwillingly from their peaceful homes into the field of battle” (William Godwin, Enquirer, Essay v - quoted in Shelley’s notes on Queen Mab).
Hang on a bloody minute. You didn’t go to the cinema for abstract disquisitions on capitalism. It’s a cinema not a bloody lecture hall. Is the film any good? What’s it about? What kind of film is it? - horror, thriller, noir? What’s the acting like? What other films is it like? What’s the best bit? Isn’t three hours a bit long? How many stars out of five?
The answers are subjective, but here we go: it’s very good; it’s about identity, about crisis, about storytelling on film; all three - horror, thriller and noir; the acting’s fucking amazing and has to be in different registers at different parts of the film; like some of David Lynch’s other movies, but there are echoes of Donald Cammell, Nic Roeg, and Alfred Hitchcock; several - the read-through that becomes real, the human rabbit sitcom, the prostitutes when they’re all together indoors, the end from Nikki’s character’s overextended death through the credits, the shocks that make you jump; not really if you go for the ride; if five’s perfection then four stars. Happy now?
Whatever her name, whatever the reality (dream, fantasy, another life), whatever the clothes, whatever the personal history, whatever her security, whatever the location, whatever the story that seems to be unfolding, whatever the circumstances, Nikki Grace’s identity remains essentially unchanged. Her reactions and behaviour seem to be consistent throughout. There’s never a moment when she needs to stop and repeat to herself, like the boy dazed from a rush of blood, “I’m Nikki Grace, I live at... I’m Nikki Grace, I live at...”
Again she’s almost like Alice in Wonderland. She certainly has the paraphernalia, the watch and the silk that help her look into another reality. The watch could be the White Rabbit's pocket watch, the silk could be her handkerchief present at least in Tenniel’s drawings. They’re not white, but there’s a trio of rabbits in the sitcom. Like Alice she faces a series of weirdly transformed realities. Or maybe this is just wildly overextending from a couple of half coincidences. But then, isn’t that part of the fun in analysing movies or any piece of art? You can play this game for yourself. Take a story, any story you like, let’s say Beauty and the Beast, and see how many parallels you can draw.
But back to that Romantic view of the world as corrupted by the social Darwinism fostered by capitalism. If the rich are isolated and few, then the poor are many and the little strength they have lies in community and co-operation. The Chartists were one of the strands of middle-class and working-class radicalism in early 19th century England. They sought parliamentary reform and a broadening of suffrage. George Bernard Shaw wrote that an elderly Chartist later in the century described Shelley’s Queen Mab (mentioned earlier) as ‘The Chartist’s Bible’. The poem and especially the notes to the poem expound a wide range of radical ideas. One of which is that “[p]rostitution is the legitimate offspring of marriage”, a view that would probably be derided as hopelessly naive by the group of prostitutes Nikki encounters. Although I suspect it’s doubtful that many prostitutes would recognise themselves in this group. While they seem to be the happiest most vital people in the film they’re also the most cartoonish, like a sixties girl-gang in some exploitation movie. They even have co-ordinated dance moves, one of them wholly unnecessarily exposes her breasts for a good few seconds, and Nikki’s even given a line of dialogue right out of some prurient ‘issue’ picture: “I’m a whore!” So yes there’s female solidarity but it’s pretty unbelievable.
Then there are the homeless people, or the actors playing homeless people, around Nikki’s character as she’s dying. They seem to have a kind of family lacking in the more privileged people we’ve seen, but again it’s unconvincing and unreal. They’ve stepped out of Greek myth or some other fantastical source, not the streets of L.A. If the film’s attempting to make a social point then that’s a criticism, but I don’t think that’s the film’s purpose. Even so, if you have a duality between privileged isolation and deprived community, then maybe we should be able to believe both. Unless we’re being shown that films and other media mediate the world for us and inevitably distort it.
But Inland Empire is not a documentary, it’s not a news package, it’s not even an essay. It’s a movie, a fiction, a dream, a nightmare. Whatever we may automatically believe about film it’s not objective, and Inland Empire doesn’t even pretend objectivity. If I saw a goblin run across my bedroom nightly then it doesn’t matter what the mechanism was, it’s still a goblin. And so is Inland Empire.
Hang on a bloody minute. You didn’t go to the cinema for abstract disquisitions on capitalism. It’s a cinema not a bloody lecture hall. Is the film any good? What’s it about? What kind of film is it? - horror, thriller, noir? What’s the acting like? What other films is it like? What’s the best bit? Isn’t three hours a bit long? How many stars out of five?
The answers are subjective, but here we go: it’s very good; it’s about identity, about crisis, about storytelling on film; all three - horror, thriller and noir; the acting’s fucking amazing and has to be in different registers at different parts of the film; like some of David Lynch’s other movies, but there are echoes of Donald Cammell, Nic Roeg, and Alfred Hitchcock; several - the read-through that becomes real, the human rabbit sitcom, the prostitutes when they’re all together indoors, the end from Nikki’s character’s overextended death through the credits, the shocks that make you jump; not really if you go for the ride; if five’s perfection then four stars. Happy now?
Whatever her name, whatever the reality (dream, fantasy, another life), whatever the clothes, whatever the personal history, whatever her security, whatever the location, whatever the story that seems to be unfolding, whatever the circumstances, Nikki Grace’s identity remains essentially unchanged. Her reactions and behaviour seem to be consistent throughout. There’s never a moment when she needs to stop and repeat to herself, like the boy dazed from a rush of blood, “I’m Nikki Grace, I live at... I’m Nikki Grace, I live at...”
Again she’s almost like Alice in Wonderland. She certainly has the paraphernalia, the watch and the silk that help her look into another reality. The watch could be the White Rabbit's pocket watch, the silk could be her handkerchief present at least in Tenniel’s drawings. They’re not white, but there’s a trio of rabbits in the sitcom. Like Alice she faces a series of weirdly transformed realities. Or maybe this is just wildly overextending from a couple of half coincidences. But then, isn’t that part of the fun in analysing movies or any piece of art? You can play this game for yourself. Take a story, any story you like, let’s say Beauty and the Beast, and see how many parallels you can draw.
But back to that Romantic view of the world as corrupted by the social Darwinism fostered by capitalism. If the rich are isolated and few, then the poor are many and the little strength they have lies in community and co-operation. The Chartists were one of the strands of middle-class and working-class radicalism in early 19th century England. They sought parliamentary reform and a broadening of suffrage. George Bernard Shaw wrote that an elderly Chartist later in the century described Shelley’s Queen Mab (mentioned earlier) as ‘The Chartist’s Bible’. The poem and especially the notes to the poem expound a wide range of radical ideas. One of which is that “[p]rostitution is the legitimate offspring of marriage”, a view that would probably be derided as hopelessly naive by the group of prostitutes Nikki encounters. Although I suspect it’s doubtful that many prostitutes would recognise themselves in this group. While they seem to be the happiest most vital people in the film they’re also the most cartoonish, like a sixties girl-gang in some exploitation movie. They even have co-ordinated dance moves, one of them wholly unnecessarily exposes her breasts for a good few seconds, and Nikki’s even given a line of dialogue right out of some prurient ‘issue’ picture: “I’m a whore!” So yes there’s female solidarity but it’s pretty unbelievable.
Then there are the homeless people, or the actors playing homeless people, around Nikki’s character as she’s dying. They seem to have a kind of family lacking in the more privileged people we’ve seen, but again it’s unconvincing and unreal. They’ve stepped out of Greek myth or some other fantastical source, not the streets of L.A. If the film’s attempting to make a social point then that’s a criticism, but I don’t think that’s the film’s purpose. Even so, if you have a duality between privileged isolation and deprived community, then maybe we should be able to believe both. Unless we’re being shown that films and other media mediate the world for us and inevitably distort it.
But Inland Empire is not a documentary, it’s not a news package, it’s not even an essay. It’s a movie, a fiction, a dream, a nightmare. Whatever we may automatically believe about film it’s not objective, and Inland Empire doesn’t even pretend objectivity. If I saw a goblin run across my bedroom nightly then it doesn’t matter what the mechanism was, it’s still a goblin. And so is Inland Empire.
None of the above photos are from Inland Empire, they were all shot yesterday on the Ashton Canal between Stalybridge and Manchester.
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