NP: Inland Empire

[Steven Koteff]

We finally finished Lynch's hopefully-not-last feature, *Inland Empire*. We
watched the first half (it's three hours) and were interrupted, and didn't
have time to finish it for a few days, which is sort of sacrilege for a
Lynch movie, I think. If nothing else, the experience served as sort of
self-fulfilling evidence (to me) of Lynch's general thesis on movies as
sustained dream-like experiences. This may be more true of *IE *than any of
Lynch's other movies.

I felt very much like I had an excellent handle on the movie merely by
paying attention to it, and asking of it no explanation other than what was
happening in front of me, and what I felt in response (also I was taking
kind of ridiculously detailed but ultimately notverysensical notes
diagramming every further leap the movie makes between settings, universes,
layers of reality, human selves, etc.). Then I had to stop halfway through.
And coming back to it, it took a while before reentry really started to
take. Though it ultimately did.

The movie is as compelling and immersive and disorienting as most of his
stuff, though in its complexity and unfixedness it definitely sacrifices at
least some of the basic pleasure of caring about particular characters for
a sustained period of time and being able to anticipate what might happen
to them and being able to be surprised. My guess, after consuming all of
Lynch's work and reading a lot of stuff by and about him, is that this is
entirely purposeful (if not conscious). And probably relates both to a
sustained personal emphasis toward a merging of consciousness and un-
(toward a constant presence and unity), as well as a belief that cinema at
its best immerses the viewer in a world other than the one they usually
inhabit--that is, frees the viewer of the oppressiveness and the fallacy of
having to believe in oneself as occupying one particular world.

The movie frequently jumps from one "storyline" to another. This can take
the form of moving between narrative arcs, settings, apparent realities
(all the characters do not seem to possibly occupy the same world as one
another--their worlds operate according to completely different rules and,
maybe more importantly, *moods*), meta-realities (Laura Dern plays an
actress though of course we also peer into the frame of the character she
is portraying, and the actress seems to--in some of the movie's more
astonishing moments--forget that she is not the character; Dern also
possibly plays other characters or other parallel variants of these
characters), forms (some of the movie consists of a repurposed short film
Lynch made of a family of humanoids with rabbit heads who seem to live in
the universe of a multi-camera sitcom and who speak in kind of aphoristic
one-liners that are at once totally unlike anything you would see on a
sitcom and yet also totally conformative to something familiar: they seem
to be distilled reductions of conflict as opposed to actually enacted
scenic conflict; these aphorisms seem to deal primarily with the characters
perceiving of themselves and one another as departing from some Way or
Path; I think this is key to the movie), etc.

However, I wouldn't say that the structure operates according to chaos (at
least as opposed to organization), exactly. Or not primarily. It is more
balanced than that. Lynch's work, at its best, resists or destroys any
thinking that suggests one of a binary of possibilities must be true, like
Pynchon's.

The movie doesn't chaotically jump between different "storylines" so much
as the begin to unfold, to accumulate. It is like following the
increasingly-divergent branches of a tree. They seem to keep opening
outward and eventually they begin entangling with one another (Dern's
actress forgets what reality she is operating in; occasionally we have the
feeling that a character has moved from one of the movie's intra-realities
to another, or that they have intersected somehow). However, the
entanglement does not necessitate a disentanglement, even though I think
this is the impulse. The entanglement itself is the thing, becomes the
organization. You zoom out from the chaos and see that it is part of a
constant sort of fluxing harmony. Where did I read recently--was it Lynch
saying this?--that the universe consists of many different spheres of
reality, and that when these spheres come into contact with one another,
what results is what we call a miracle?

The movie, for me, is great. I loved it. I felt totally gripped by it and
occasionally astonished just at what the movie was achieving.

Dern kills it.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160220/4170fd04/attachment.html>