David Lynch feature

Jessica Winter wintesses David Lynch on the trail of selling his experimental new film, 'Inland Empire'.

Jan 18 2007

David Lynch is often referred to as a 'cult filmmaker', and a rare opportunity to gauge the size and intensity of that cult presented itself last week in New York's Union Square. For his appearance at the Barnes & Noble bookstore on Thursday evening, 1,000 people crammed into the top floor of the big-box retail outlet, and hundreds were turned away. The throng evoked the mini-frenzy set off in December when Lynch's latest film, 'Inland Empire', opened at downtown's IFC Center, with screening upon screening sold out hours in advance and scalped tickets going for $75. Not bad for a self-released, three-hour experimental film with a negligible advertising budget and no conventional plot to speak of, shot on a cheap digital camera.

'Inland Empire' is a boldly atonal remix of Lynch's motifs, familiar from 'Blue Velvet', 'Twin Peaks', and 'Mulholland Dr.': lost and exploited women, split and recombined personalities, riddle-me-this dialogue. In other words, it's a difficult sell. But the plain spoken Lynch, who's 61 this month, is a consummate salesman, whether boosting his new line of Signature Cup Coffee ('There's ideas in those beans,' he promised), celebrating transcendental meditation (he started the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace in 2005), or promoting his new book, 'Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity'. His long-shot campaign to snag an Oscar for 'Inland Empire' leading lady Laura Dern redefined 'grassroots': Lynch parked himself on a Hollywood corner with a screen-size 'For Your Consideration' poster of Dern and, for reasons that remain open for interpretation, a cow. A sign added insight to the odd tableau: 'WITHOUT CHEESE THERE WOULDN’T BE AN INLAND EMPIRE.' The encoding is pure Lynch, and may evoke fond memories for those fans who used to wade faithfully through the secret sauce of 'Twin Peaks' week after week.

To the naked eye, dairy products are not a staple crop in 'Inland Empire', but given the cacophony of ideas and images in Lynch's splintered horror-melodrama, anything is possible. Let's try to explain. The actress Nikki Grace (Dern) anticipates a comeback when she wins the lead as an adulterous wife in a Tennessee Williams-ish production called 'On High in Blue Tomorrows'. Nikki shares so much in common with her character, Susan Blue – a possessive husband, a wandering eye – that the line between actress and role starts to dissolve, and she becomes Susan Blue. Or perhaps, Susan Blue becomes Nikki Grace. There's a third woman, too, a dead-eyed shrew who is auditioning for the lead in her own squalid biopic. 'Inland Empire' chases Nikki, Susan, and Woman No 3 from a haunted studio to the Hollywood Walk of Fame to a snowy Polish city. Poland, you ask? Well, it seems 'On High in Blue Tomorrows' is a retelling of a Polish gypsy folk tale; a previous film adaptation ended in catastrophe when, as director Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons) puts it, 'something inside the story' took malignant hold… And we haven't even mentioned the prostitution ring, 'The Loco-Motion', or the jolts of sheer terror.

With its supernatural flavours, nerve-shredding sound design, and anguished intimations of family fracture and reunion, 'Inland Empire' is instantly recognisable as a Lynch-designed item. Yet it's also a sharp departure for the filmmaker in terms of its grainy, grubby photography (Lynch loves the DV picture, which he says leaves viewers 'room to dream') and its unorthodox production process. In 'Catching the Big Fish', Lynch reports that 'Inland Empire' began 'as an experiment for the Internet'. 'I wrote the thing scene by scene, without much of a clue where it would end.' The bemused actors received new dialogue each morning, and the use of digital video allowed for near unlimited takes.

This improvisatory working method, coupled with the final product 's frankly deranged crypto-narrative, seems to reinforce the major complaint of Lynch's detractors: that his movies are randomly generated pile-ups of canned weirdness and non sequitur plot twists – that his films, in short, don't 'make sense'. The charge is both disingenuous ('Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest' doesn't make sense; neither does 'The Big Sleep') and immaterial (our daily life and our dreams often don't make sense; why should our cinema?). It's also untrue. One of the many satisfactions of 'Mulholland Dr', for instance, is the fulfilled promise of piecing together a mystery that on first encounter seems impenetrable. With repeat viewings, the movie's fault lines – between 'real life' and dream, dream and nightmare, life and afterlife – become dazzlingly clear. 'Inland Empire' doesn't offer the same puzzle-making pleasures; rather, the sense it makes is intuitive, associative, emotional. It doesn't follow a narrative thread so much as it attempts a three-dimensional representation of profound psychological turmoil, refracted through acting and actors: their unsettling ability to transform themselves from moment to moment, and the melding and corrosion of identities that results.

Like 'Mulholland Dr', 'Inland Empire' taps its hallucinatory power from the soul-mangling machinery of the Hollywood star system. But it's also a movie about the machinery of storytelling. A signature Lynch image is the tracking shot: down a hallway, or down a rabbit hole (this time, with real rabbits included – or human actors in costumes), riding a Möbius strip into another, eerily familiar world. Here, as never before in Lynch's films, a story is a life force with an unstoppable will, switching between reality, play-act, and nightmare. Burning cigarette holes through space and time, Lynch proposes a string theory of filmmaking – parallel lives playing out in parallel universes, or alternatively, one story reincarnated as another.

Reincarnation might well be a topic of interest for Lynch, who says he gathers his ideas from the 'ocean of pure consciousness' attained through meditation. Indeed, though 'Inland Empire' refers to a region of California, the title also invokes consciousness itself. If the creative mind has its own manifest destiny, perhaps Lynch is daring us to push further and deeper in our notions of what a film, a story, or a character can do. It's pretty bewildering at first. But to hear Lynch rhapsodise about 'pure bliss consciousness' is to discern a promise only to give you, the moviegoer, everything: a unified field of filmmaking that, as he said in New York, 'holds everything: past, present, future, and that cow.'

'Inland Empire' will preview at the NFT on Feb 8, followed by a Q&A with David Lynch. The film opens on March 9.

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