Reflections on Later Lynch: “Inland Empire” (and “Twin Peaks: the Return”, a little)

I missed “Inland Empire” the first time around. I lived near Boston and I assumed that it would be playing for an extended period because, hey, it’s Boston. People are hip to cinema, right? Well, to be sure, they are, but the film left before I had a chance to get to the theater and for me, this was blasphemy. I have seen every Lynch feature (except “Dune”) on the large screen since “Eraserhead”. 

That I know of, “Inland Empire” did not play the repertory circuit or at least, if it did, I missed it. I recall it being released on DVD/Blu-Ray but the idea of watching a Lynch film on a smaller screen is anathema to me. So when I found that the newly restored “Inland Empire” was playing at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts’ new Wyatt Theater, it was a no-brainer to get my ticket. 

Recounting the film would be a fool’s errand and the equivalent of telling you about a dream I had. I could do it, but my dreams are personal; I feel actually somewhat similarly proprietary about Lynch’s cinema. It is not the case that his world defies recapping, only that it misses the point; the content is guaranteed to be lush, disturbing, poetic, beautiful, ugly, and the narratives, at some point, disjointed, jagged or seamless, depending on where in the movie you are. Like a dream.

I understand why Lynch felt like he hasn’t needed to make a feature film since “Inland Empire.” It is both a kind of spiritual sequel to “Mulholland Drive” and a deeper exploration of the themes in that movie as well as a summation of much of his work from the prior thirty years leading up to it. 

It is a film very much centered on filmmaking but equally, it is about the fluidity of identity and the overlap of fiction, reality, and authorial agency. It also explores those odd reaches of the psyche where the image is the narrative, and where the sound design speaks more eloquently than the script. “Inland Empire” is Lynch’s most experimental feature and he pulls off something remarkable, maybe something not seen since Bunuel; a tale that works as more or less linear tale but refracted and told through sequences of increasingly disturbing and fragmented narrative structure. 

Anchoring it all is Laura Dern in what might be the greatest performance of her career out of a career full of them. She plays Nikki Grace, the lead actress in a film, the production of which may be/is cursed. Justin Theroux plays the male lead; he may be a bit of a stud, a player, a lady’s man, and perhaps a fop. But he’s been served notice by her husband and all around him to stay away from Nikki. 

But that’s not where the film begins. It begins with a prostitute who may be in trouble, who sees Nikki on the TV in the room where she’s been threatened and abandoned by a man. We will return to her later in the film and at the film’s end, but she is never far from us. Even when we detour to scenes from the sitcom “Rabbits”, to scenes of murder, of doppelgängers and near-twins. Even when we weave in and out of narrative twists and moments of shadowy reality bleeding into or impinging on brightly lit daylight sequences, the Lost Girl stays with us. 

Is Nikki she? No, no she’s not. Is the film Nikki is shooting “reality” or a version of it playing out simultaneously? Does it matter? Let’s revisit that question in a little bit. A thought has occurred to me: 

I could comb the internet for stills from the film, write a script that would run them as a random slideshow and I bet the whole project would support Lynch’s vision as readily as his own film. But in order to do so, the Lost Girl would have to remain in the same places. 

Thinking about that reminded me of Julio Cortazar’s novel “Rayuela”/“Hopscotch”. You can read the novel in the sequence Cortazar mapped out or you can read it from beginning to end. You can even read it randomly. Likewise, I believe you can take “Inland Empire” and potentially rearrange the film in a different order and the underlying sense and sensibility would remain intact. But you lose the film if you fuck with the Lost Girl. I am choosing those words precisely. 

Appositely, Dern’s Nikki - in the different guises that she assumes or into which she is inserted or appears - is a shapeshifter and leads away from and back to the Lost Girl. Is she the Lost Girl? I don’t want to force anything. We circle back to “does it matter?”: if we say yes, then there’s a sense of closure and relief. The fairytale has a happy ending. If we say it doesn’t, then we are left with a nihilistic openness where entropy abounds and the dissolution of the the Lost Girl at film’s end reads as something else. 

The film is about the film. Shot over three years between Poland, France, and the U.S., the fragmentation of structure replicates the piecemeal structure of its development. However, there is a unitary sensibility to the proceedings. Lynch filmed the movie on a handheld camcorder in low-resolution that lends a certain aesthetic to the enterprise that, in turn, lends a sense that it could all fall apart. There is a shakiness on the edges of each film, a kind of queasy definition or lack thereof in the images. Unlike his previous work, the darks here are sharper, defined by a kind of wobbly field on the edge of shadows; not immediately perceptible, but there nonetheless. Like a dream.

We expect and adapt to fragmentation in dreams and film is the one art that captures that fragmentation most adeptly. Unfortunately, few are able to capitalize on the medium’s inherent ability to do so without descending into the hacky or the cliche. Dreams in most movies are feebly recreated and we often don’t realize how feeble until you inhabit a fever dream like “Lost Highway” or “Mulholland Falls” or this one. 

“Inland Empire” also presents us with the end of one period and the beginning of another. If the film is a summation of themes and images that have occupied him since his early short films, it spells the beginning of something else; the application of a process to narrative storytelling that would be too audacious for mass consumption but is indispensable for the tales that Lynch needs to tell. In other words, “Inland Empire” is the necessary pathway back to Twin Peaks. 

When “Twin Peaks: the Return” was announced, my heart kind of sank. I get really nervous when filmmakers return to works that made them popular. Yes, Lynch is not your average filmmaker and Lynch and Frost’s foray into television is not your average TV show. However, I feared the worst and I needn’t have. 

“Twin Peaks: the Return” was something new, just as groundbreaking as “Twin Peaks” was 25 years earlier. Yes, many of the same characters return, as well, but so many of the actors portraying them had died (from Catherine Coulson to David Bowie to Don Davis and Jack Nance) and that didn’t necessarily stop the series from taking shape, That seemed to be the point or one of the points of the whole endeavor. 

Let’s be clear: this next iteration of the Twin Peaks saga was more demanding, more of a concentrated emotional and oneiric adventure than its predecessor and as such, I don’t think it could have happened without what Lynch accomplished with “Inland Empire”. There are moments of intense abstract beauty and terror (particularly Part 8) throughout the series that subsume and underpin the more linear moments. These sense of reality fraying and fissuring is rife in every episode and sometimes, in each moment in any given episode.

I don’t believe that the series is self-reflexive like “Inland Empire” but in one sense, it is a commentary on its earlier iteration. It may have to be, in the same way that history repeats itself (or rhymes), the later series is a kind of antiphonal response to its progenitor. We come back to see characters older and slower. They deceased float through or are transformed (Bowie’s Agent Jeffries, in particular, is as chilling and enigmatic as I could imagine; my suspicion is that Bowie would approve.) This time, the metatext of our waking reality of the interpolating quarter century is as much a part of the narrative as anything Frost and Lynch have put into what we see on screen.

In this way, the series transcends the medium more substantially (or transubstantially?) than did the original when “The Diary of Laura Palmer” was published and proved to be an integral part of what played out in the series then. 

Late Lynch, then, is proving to be as audacious (that word) as his younger self. To be sure, another dimension regarding David Lynch is that film is not the only thing he does. At heart, he remains a painter; while he may reference other films or other moments in film history, his project is not that of an enthusiast like Tarantino or a student of great cinema like Scorsese. A Lynch film has its own imprint, its own distinct imprimatur; his films don’t look like anyone else’s and since the beginning, I’ve tended to approach his work almost more as a purely visual artist than as a storyteller with works that have a beginning, middle, and/or end.

Of course, that does a disservice to Lynch, the narrative artist; yet, I would ask that we take a look at how he has changed in that department. 

If his first feature was a blast across the bow, he showed his mastery of story in “The Elephant Man” and “Blue Velvet”. I’m not a huge fan of “Wild at Heart”, though I do like it, but it, too, is a concise bit of a fabulist tale. Then, he starts to fracture and crack open narrative film with “Lost Highway”, his first feature after the “Twin Peaks” initial run. Then he returns with “The Straight Story” in 1999 before introducing a more non-linear or more intuitive approach to the feature film in “Mulholland Drive”. In many ways, David Lynch is the closest we have to a Luis Bunuel; a unique and uniquely protean filmmaker whose works look only like themselves. 

He also tends to remind me of Laurie Anderson, who many of us knew more for her performance art (and some of her cool etchings on plastic - man, I loved that stuff), whose recorded and live work have expanded the possibilities of live and recorded performance. Both her and Lynch’s works share a kind of thematic density. Anderson’s is, I think, broader and richer, but Lynch’s is no less rich in terms of what I can only think of as more personal and less commentarial.

With an artist like Lynch, I find the question of “What does it mean?” to be both empty and nonsensical as well as, natural. Faced with ambiguous images and words and the interplay of both, “meaning” can vacillate and change by the moment upon reflection. It would be relatively easy to write a thousand more words about “Inland Empire” or “Twin Peaks: the Return” and what I think they mean, but the internet is replete with essays about both, many worthwhile and many, well, not so much. 

What does it matter? I think “Inland Empire” and “Twin Peaks: the Return” matter a lot in terms of contemporary filmmaking. The film “matters” as a late masterpiece of one of finest living directors, but it also matters as a transitional piece leading to a long-form narrative work that may be the most demanding series to appear in the medium. 

I thought seriously about going into greater detail about the performances and the structures in place of “Inland Empire” but thinking about the film took me elsewhere. Like a dream.