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| Rhino
Movie •••• Picture •••• Sound ••••½ Extras ••••½ |
Before I get to the picture and sound (this is a reference-quality disc) and the extras (completely satisfying — as much for their tantalizing restraint as anything else), indulge me for a minute while I talk about the actual movie. . .
If this was a standard action/adventure knockoff or a dumber-than-thou white-male teen comedy, I wouldn't bother. But Inland Empire wasn't widely reviewed (or seen) during its theatrical run, so almost everybody is going to be encountering this unusually provocative, stupefying work for the first time on DVD — a fact that Lynch, it becomes plain as you watch the extras, is acutely and even painfully aware of. Which is why he supervised every last detail of this two-disc set — something directors rarely bother, or are allowed, to do.
I hated Inland the first time I saw it, found myself admiring parts of it the second time through, and have since seen my appreciation for it grow with each viewing. It's too soon to say I love it, and I still have a hard time imagining the day when I'll place it up with Blue Velvet, the Twin Peaks pilot, Fire Walk with Me, and Mulholland Dr. — or even The Straight Story and the unmade Ronny Rocket (the script for which I've read). At the moment, I'm more appreciative than passionate, which puts Inland somewhere in the vicinity of Eraserhead and Lost Highway. But there are far less gratifying neighborhoods to be in — especially when you consider that practically every other current film deserves to be buried in some nuclear wasteland miles beneath the earth's surface.
Maybe the oddest thing about Lynch's famously perverse oeuvre is that Mr. Eagle Scout, who puckishly defined Americana's underbelly during the Reagan era, has turned out to be the greatest European filmmaker this country has ever produced. Inland Empire bears almost no resemblance to anything in mainstream American filmmaking; it's more akin to Jean-Luc Godard's postmodern-before-the-fact Tout Va Bien or all the dicking around with fiction in Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating than it is to even the dense and disjointed Mulholland Dr. In other words, at almost 3 hours, and with an all but complete absence of narrative lucidity, Inland can be tough going even for Lynch fans and seems aimed squarely at the most sensitive, but thickest-skinned, of cinéastes.
To the degree that Inland has a plot, it goes something like this: As in Mulholland Dr., a blonde actress's identity splits, causing her to tumble from affluence to squalor. And, as in Mulholland, filmmaking and Hollywood are somehow to blame. But unlike in the earlier movie, where a lesbian relationship seemed to trigger the heroine's downfall, here the actress (Laura Dern) has a more conventional affair with a co-star (Justin Theroux), causing her life to go to hell.
Beyond that, you can forget about Lynch offering any kind of a hand. He has stripped everything down to its dreamy essence here, so there are few of the cornball gags that ground some of his earlier works to a halt. (We should all be grateful he never got to make One Saliva Bubble.) Instead, there's one harsh, unrelenting, sometimes annoying, sometimes edifying, and more often than not emotionally draining set piece after another. Whatever it is that's bugging David, he wants us to feel its full, crushing force, even while offering only the barest of clues as to what the problem is.
It's a story as old as American culture itself: An iconic entertainer, more astute and adept than the run-of-the-mill popmeisters, veers toward a harsher and harsher vision as his youthful illusions fade away. And as Lynch has gotten older, his films have indeed become bleaker, less frivolous, driven by a tragic impulse whose full articulation seems to lie just beyond his grasp. This in turn has led to more and more opaque and labyrinthine images, structures, and emotional interplay. (Inland bears more than a passing resemblance to Herman Melville's infamously bitter, elaborate, and elusive Confidence Man.)
That's not to say Inland isn't entertaining, because it does offer ample rewards for anyone looking for something more nourishing than the usual cinematic pabulum. There are some breathtakingly witty moments along the way — like when a Madonna glimpsed in a ketchup stain turns out to be the opening scene's "lost girl" (Karolina Gruszka) playing Gloria Swanson playing Queen Kelly, the titular character of the film-within-the-film that Swanson, as Norma Desmond, watches in Sunset Blvd. (Lynch's debt to the still trenchant cynicism of Billy Wilder's masterpiece is apparent throughout both Mulholland and Inland. One of the deleted scenes on the Inland DVD opens, in black and white, with Dern's "assassin" [Julia Ormond] walking past the Alto Nido apartments — the seedy abode of Sunset sucker extraordinaire Joe Gillis.)
Even headier is the finale's hommage to Stanley Kubrick, and The Shining in particular. One wild moment has the wounded Dern aping the mad Jack Torrance lurching to his doom in the snow-covered maze, with the blurred succession of his son's footprints becoming the stars on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, as Krzysztof Penderecki's now-familiar music crashes and roars in the background. (Lest these references to Kubrick seem to anyone forced, consider that he and Federico Fellini are the only two filmmakers given their own chapters in Lynch's book, Catching the Big Fish. And Kubrick is the only filmmaker Lynch talks about in the "Stories" section of the DVD's extras.)
Another presence hovering over Inland is Roman Polanski. The whole shooting style suggests that Lynch gave himself an intensive refresher course in Polanski's work circa Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby while prepping the film. The lingering handheld close-ups, shot in extreme wide angle, evoke Rosemary's geriatric coven. And the backyard cookout at Dern's white-trash hovel uncannily harks back to that film's extended dream sequence. (This isn't the first time Polanski has reared his head in Lynch. Compare the benign-turned-demonic old couple that drives Naomi Watts to suicide in Mulholland Dr. with the taunting crowd of too familiar faces egging Polanski on to a similar fate in The Tenant.)
But I could shine a light on bits and pieces of Lynch's Empire all night long and not even come close to conveying its essentially abstract feel. The impulse toward pure abstraction has lain at the heart of some of the most sublime American pop — from Charlie Chaplin and Tex Avery to "Sh-Boom" and the Beach Boys — but Lynch seems obsessed with not just honoring that impulse but, at his peril, driving it out into the open.
This continual pointing to somewhere well beyond the objective (or, as Lynch would have it, the self-woven web of reality) is strongly reflected in Inland's radically conservative shooting style. There has always been an admirable purity to Lynch's filmmaking. He tends to let the camera sit and watch, cutting only when absolutely necessary. And his avoidance of tracking shots makes his prowling handheld shots that much more effective. At a time when sound-and-fury cutting and camera moves have become de rigueur, Lynch's restrained, even Spartan (or should I say "Puritan"?) technique alone goes a long way toward making his films seem otherworldly.
The big twist here is that Inland was shot using mid-line high-def camcorders, out of which Lynch coaxed astonishing images. (And saying "Lynch" isn't just convenient shorthand for the camera crew, since he frequently operated the cameras himself.) Opting for video was a huge gamble, but it pays off spectacularly. Lynch seems to have deliberately created a look halfway between film and video to keep the audience off-balance, and it's a look that you never entirely get used to as you watch the movie. But that, of course, is the point.
Shooting with camcorders brings a disturbing intimacy to Inland, and seems to mock the hulking Panavision cameras that occasionally rear up to record the film within the film (within the film within the film . . .). It also appears to feed the movie's subtext of analog (recurring shots of an ancient stylus working the surface of a 78) versus digital (high-def video). But Lynch seems drawn to video mainly for its inability to handle bright light.
Anybody who knows Lynch's work knows his fascination with flames, bare light bulbs, and other intense sources of illumination. Captured on video, that intensity inevitably burns out part of the frame, creating a kind of hole through the image. This parallels the Dern character's using a cigarette to burn a hole in silk lingerie and then peer through it — a ritual Lynch insists we need to perform if we want to see. (This would all seem an allusion to Jacques Lacan's notion of The Gaze — that we long to glimpse The Real, but can't help but be blinded by the experience. Then again, who knows? Check back with me after I've watched this thing another 15 times.)
Inland is a terrific reference disc. Many of the scenes are filled with out-and-out murk, and if your TV isn't properly calibrated, you're not going to have any idea what's going on. (As a public service, Lynch, as he did on his Eraserhead DVD 2000 and Short Films discs, includes a TV-calibration drill in the main menu. This will definitely do the trick for people who never bother to tweak their sets, but you'll still want to use a full-fledged test DVD to get the best results.) Beyond this, though, the subtlety of the photography — which is just short of miraculous, given that it springs from palm-sized camcorders — and the impact of the protean array of shooting styles will be completely lost on a poorly adjusted set.
On the audio side, you'd be hardpressed to find another movie disc that can give your surround sound setup a better workout. (Inland cries out for a high-def release with a PCM or losslessly encoded soundtrack.) Of course, there aren't any battle scenes or fighter-jet flyovers — but whoever said that subjecting yourself to a merciless sonic bludgeoning is the best way to appreciate your system? What you have instead is a singularly imaginative soundscape, both natural and wholly synthetic, that traverses the gamut from the lowest lows to the highest highs, and at times leaps instantly from the faintest whisper to the loudest roar. (Just venture a minute into the main titles to experience what I'm talking about.)
Lynch eschews aural gimmickry, always using sound in the service of Inland's emotional impact. And while it's hard to imagine hamfisters like Michael Bay or Tony Scott spending much time thinking about the expressive possibilities of dynamic range, it's a subject that visibly moves Lynch. Consider this impassioned monologue, from the disc's "Stories" section:
"It would be very great to have the potential for massive volume — and real tasty quiet. You know, the dynamic range — you don't do it for the doing of loud for loudness sake, but sometimes, just to have that power reserve would be so great — but, like, unreal reserve, just [puts his head in his hands] shudderingly loud. And solid — [looking up again] no distortion. Just ripping the screen off. Just beauty. [shakes his head]"
With Inland, you get a mesmerizing, soul-rattling movie, disturbing and ravishing sound and image, a consistently fascinating bunch of extras, and — a first for a Lynch-supervised DVD — chapter breaks. (No, there's no "scene selection" menu — which is just fine, since we're spared those cutesy little titles the geeks at the DVD production house always come up with — and you can't just punch in the chapter number. But you can skip from one judiciously chosen scene break to the next.)
Those extras include over an hour's worth of deleted scenes, 16 in all. None of them have the power of the scenes that made the final cut or offer any stunning insights into what the hell's going on here. But they do show Lynch trying out variations on his themes, using the cameras, actors, sets, and so on to explore his concerns. The idea of actually creating on the set has, sadly, become old hat, now that a gang of storyboard addicts has taken over Hollywood.
In a similar vein, the "Quinoa" section, which many will likely dismiss as a glorified cooking lesson, is actually an exercise in no-budget filmmaking (similar to the quickie film-school lessons that Robert Rodriguez likes to put on his DVDs). A simmering pot offers Lynch an opportunity to reminisce, which — thanks to the lighting, soundtrack, and storyteller — transforms into something of a campfire tale. The only real snore is the short film Ballerina, which is pleasant enough to watch but nowhere near as riveting as everything around it.
The best bonus, by far, is Lynch 2, a 30-minute documentary of David at work. And he really does work, manufacturing his own props, adding details to the sets, designing the lighting effects, and operating the cameras while performing the director's usual myriad duties. It's also great to see Lynch sans the whimsical goofball persona he tends to adopt for interviews (and which he dons for much of the anecdotal "Stories" section). Here he's a highly focused, no-nonsense taskmaster, berating slacker crewmembers, dealing expertly with the inevitable crises, and, best of all, leading by example. Most directors are pampered, bullhorn-toting nerds, so it's exhilarating to watch a real filmmaker at work.
Given that all-too-rare dedication to the creative process, it's not too surprising to find that Lynch cares deeply about how you experience his films. And he's well aware that, given its experimental-for-the-masses approach, Inland is far more likely to be seen, and appreciated, in home theaters than movie theaters. All of which explains this emotional plea (in the "Stories" section) to his audience:
"If you're playing [Inland] on a telephone, or on your computer, you will never in a trillion years experience the film. You'll think you have experienced it, but you will be cheated. It will be a weak — you'll be experiencing weakness, an extreme putrefication [sic] of a potential experience in another world. So, don't let your friends, or some television advertisement, trick you into accepting weakness. It's such a sadness. Power in that world is critical. Everything has been worked on to be a certain way, and if you don't have a setup for your films, it's a joke. It's just the most sickening, horrifying joke. And this world is so troubled, and it's such a sadness that you think you've seen a film on your fucking telephone. Get real."
Amen.
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