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They'll hate it in Pomona

David Lynch's fever dream is worth having
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
July 18th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Down the rabbit hole. One of Empire's states (and that's Naomi Watts ironing).
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Inland Empire

Directed by David Lynch
With Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux, Harry Dean Stanton, Grace Zabriskie and Julia Ormond

Anais Nin and Henry Miller ate cheese to dream. They discovered that a slice of sharp cheddar made for a perfect psychotropic nightcap, and that their night’s visions became a fund of images they could feed into their fiction. If we didn’t know that David Lynch preferred caffeine to mold to achieve his own hallucinatory states, we might suspect him of being addicted to stilton or limburger, for his latest film, Inland Empire, has all the raw power and twisted sense of a vivid nightmare.
In many ways, Inland Empire is a sequel to the director’s brilliant Mulholland Drive. The action (if the word can be used for Lynch’s rummy shuffle of scenes) is set in Hollywood, where another actress, Nikki Grace (the excellent Laura Dern), makes a bid for discovery — though for Nikki, whose career has been on the skids, she’s hoping for a rediscovery.
Her comeback project, a film titled On High in Blue Tomorrow, seems promising. Her leading man, Devon Berk (Mulholland Drive’s Justin Theroux), is Tinseltown’s stud du jour, while the British director, Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons), is a respected auteur. But the film comes cursed, bearing a script of a Polish film called 47 that was abandoned halfway through production after its stars were murdered.
This bit of linear plot is, naturally, only a starting point for Lynch, as On High in Blue Tomorrow will be haunted, if not possessed, by 47. The films will share both action and actors. Nikki’s own life, too, will be infected by both films. Where her life ends and the two films within this film begin will become questionable.
Faded movie star Nikki becomes her damaged Blue character, Susan. Or is it that the wife-battered, tough-mouthed Susan Blue survives by entering a psychogenic fugue in which she’s a movie star named Nikki Grace? As for 47, is it a room number where a woman is locked up in the scrapped Polish film, or is it the address for three anthropomorphized rabbits, who utter trite lines before a studio audience? (The rabbits are cut from Lynch’s online short film series, Rabbits, which stars Mulholland Drive’s Naomi Watts).
Inland Empire is an expanse of land east of Los Angeles that includes Rancho Mirage and the American version of Timbuktu: Cucamonga. It also claims Pomona, where Lynch once lived, and which he references, often obliquely.
Is it important to know that a mathematician at Pomona College once invented a joke maths proof proclaiming that the number 47 appears in a higher frequency in nature than other natural numbers? Or that the director’s nods to Pomona lead us by twists and switchbacks to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (that perfect title for lives at the end of the line)? In a doggedly linear film, perhaps, but not here. “They’ll love it in Pomona,” Joe Gillis says to Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. But Inland Empire?
The film is Lynch’s first major experiment in digital. Most of the film seems to stream from a handheld camera, though intriguingly, some segments are shot more classically. The Polish film segments (and at least 20 percent of Inland Empire is in Polish) has the somber graininess of an Andrzej Wajda film from the ’70s, while the sequences from Rabbits, as well as some of the film-within-a-film moments, seem more solidly real than what is supposed to pass as “reality” in the rest of the film.
The bric-a-brac of Lynchworld is all here: empty theaters, ominous lampshades, obsolete technology. There’s also the foreboding strains of an Angelo Badalamenti score just off, continually promising new levels of doom and madness.
As in Mulholland Drive, Lynch’s contempt for Hollywood is palpable. Though some of his images bizarrely risk obviousness (Susan Blue’s death stagger down the Hollywood Walk of Fame), there are some wry asides. On the set of On High in Blue Tomorrow is a flat-constructed exterior of a house that, like the looking glass that Alice enters, conceals depth. “Disappeared where it’s hard to disappear,” reports Devon Berk after chasing a studio intruder toward the house. That this “house” belongs to a man named “Smithey” leads one to “Alan Smithee,” the pseudonymous name that Hollywood directors and writers use to hide their association with films; perfect for a film filled with dissociation.
The looking glass and the rabbit hole (here, a cigarette burn in a swatch of silk) seem to lead to the rabbit sequences. Nikki/Susan falls Alice-wise into terra incognita--an inland empire of fever dreams, fears and unexamined impulses. We, the audience, follow. This is better than any cheese.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (18/07/2007):

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