Lynchathon III, Part III: Inland Empire, Conclusion
FINALLY.
Actually, I think I've pretty much sabotaged myself, and probably did so intentionally, by waiting so long to write my reaction to Inland Empire that I'm left without much of anything to say, but in a more justifiable sense than I would've had nothing to say right after seeing it.
I suppose it's convenient at this moment in his career to look at Lynch's oeuvre as a whole and momentarily pretend that he's not going to do anything in the future. I assume that's not the case; in spite of my various misgivings and difficulties with much of his work, I very much hope it's not the case. But what you get by pretending that Inland Empire is Lynch's farewell work is that it's very much a return to the beginning of his career, as though he'd been following a long creative loop away from the example of Eraserhead and finally made his way back to the beginning; back to home. Like Eraserhead, Inland Empire begins with what appears to be an intelligible plot and then dives headlong, deeper and deeper, into a pool of Lynchian filmic dreamspace. It's as difficult to grapple with as every intervening Lynch film combined, and it's twice the length of Eraserhead. (Also, both films took literally years to make, unlike the rest of his works; the ever-unfolding production schedule undoubtedly both stems from and feeds the dreamlike, elusive relationship with normal cinematic storytelling that binds these movies.)
While I wasn't in the best frame of mind to watch it, I was in a more receptive mood than I was for Eraserhead, which is part of why - despite the aformentioned length - I drew more from it and had a better experience. But perhaps more importantly, and if I were going to pretend that Lynch specifically learned something from his sojourn in the relatively more accessible territories he mined for the 25 years between his first film and his most recent one it would be this, Inland Empire presents us with an inscrutable structure and story but marries it to a very scrutable emotional core, based in Laura Dern's astounding performance. The performances in Eraserhead are effective, but they're as inscrutable and outside the waking experience of life as everything else in the movie; we can reconstruct what the main character is going through emotionally - the film is, after all, more or less a dramatization of what's in his head and his heart - but the performances aren't so viscerally engaging because the emotional experience is presented in a way that's detatched from metaphorical viscera (though not literal, gastrointestinal viscera, of course). Whatever Laura Dern's character (characters?) is going through during Inland Empire, she puts that emotional experience onscreen through her own work as much as the film around her dramatizes it; though, as in Wild at Heart, her performance is by the necessity of Lynch's script and his world somewhat off-kilter, it's off-kilter in a way that ties directly back to recognizable human behavior, or rather the way we're used to seeing recognizable human behavior portrayed by modern actors in the Western performance tradition, which is the method of performance I - and most of you! - recognize as "realistic" however artificial its tropes actually are.
Dern pulls the disparate strands together, whether she's playing what seems to be her actual character - a somewhat distant actress - or the character that actress plays, or one of the various mirrors and shadows of those women. It's in some ways one of the most impressive performances I've seen because it really has to stand on its own in a way that very performances do. Not to diminish the quality work done by the actors onscreen with her - it's not that her performance needs to stand alone the way a one-woman show/monologue does, it stands alone because it's the only thing we have to hang our hat on, the only thing that reaches out to the audience and says "here, you can use me, use this, as your entrance into this world." And as someone who's a sucker for good acting that's skating on the edge of near over-the top emotionalism, Dern makes a congenial Constant Companion through the impenetrable (to me, certainly) rooms the film travels through.
(Incidentally, since I spoke at some length about Dern's scorching presence in Wild at Heart, this is why it's all about the performance, and what makes it in some ways more impressive: I think Dern is more attractive as a mature woman than she was as a 21-year old or whatever she was back then, but her performance, and her sex scene with Justin Theroux, isn't burning-the-metaphorical-filmstock [Inland Empire was shot on digital video] hot the way almost every scene in Wild at Heart was because it's not that kind of movie and not that kind of character and so it doesn't call for that kind of performance.)
ANYWAY the point being that after Eraserhead, which was at most kind of an oblique film in emotional terms, Lynch went on to make a bunch of movies that, in tension with the received narrative about his work, are very accessible and recognizable emotionally, and actually wear their joy and sorrow and heartbreak and terror on their sleeve in a way that seems inaccessible simply because we're not used to movies where the emotional experience is so unfiltered, especially in an otherwise challenging context. Inland Empire then closes the (artifical, intellectual, critically-imposed) loop by bringing that heavy emotional attitude to the mystery and dreamstate of Eraserhead. That - the unfiltered, whether it be emotional or visual or structural - is really the throughline, I suppose, of what I've had to say about Lynch and what I ripped from David Foster Wallace's "behind-the-scenes" piece on the making of Lost Highway, that what we get in a Lynch film seems like a more or less unprocessed transference from the man's innermost brain to our screens. The structural conceits we're used to - plots, character arcs, orderly and clever structures - are the detritus of the way our brains help us to make sense of the stimulus around us, an often inescapable imposition of the higher consciousness on direct human experience, one that is arguable necessary for us to live the lives we do, but one which arguable shuts off some potentially valuable experiential real estate, if we can let ourselves go and just feel everything without organizing it. That's, from a different angle, what we're getting when we experience ecstasy in whatever form, be it religious, sexual, social, and of course chemical: a reprieve to some greater or lesser degree from the ongoing wear of having an evolved, social, human brain. Thinking becomes tiring without reprieve.
Of course the catch is that no trigger is universal; not every sexual encounter gives you that release, not every art form moves you in that way. I used to find something hair-raising and exuberant about elements of the Catholic mass when I was a boy, and I don't feel that any more. Music can take me there, and sometimes film or even more likely TV (because what's going to push me over that edge is likely to be a built up reaction to a character or an onscreen relationship, and TV gives me more time to build my own relationship with the people on screen, and more time for them to get into the depths of a character if that what they want to do). Most of Lynch's films, for me, miss the mark of pulling my non-cognitive trigger. There are moments, and in the case of Mulholland Drive (admittedly one of the more accessible Lynch films on a moment-to-moment basis) I'm wrapped up in that world with real investment (and again consider how that movie is tied together by a remarkable performance, or really two remarkable performances, by its central actress), but for the most part the presumably unfiltered products of Lynch's brain miss my personal mark.
But there's nobody doing what he does, that I'm aware of, certainly not with American prominence, neither in his most remote and inaccessible or most inviting and intellectually intelligible works, and I'm certainly a bigger Lynch fan than I expected to wind up being. He's a challenging artist, which is in itself something I respond to; I've said that a Spike Lee failure (and in my opinion there's a fair number of them) is more daring and interesting than most other people's successes, and while Lynch can't really be judged in those same terms, he's equally worthy of respect and consideration even at his most questionable moments. I can't think of a good conclusion here so I'm just going to stop.
But not before I leave you with the credits for Inland Empire. Just get up and go and feel something, for your sake and mine.
I run to the river.
Actually, I think I've pretty much sabotaged myself, and probably did so intentionally, by waiting so long to write my reaction to Inland Empire that I'm left without much of anything to say, but in a more justifiable sense than I would've had nothing to say right after seeing it.
I suppose it's convenient at this moment in his career to look at Lynch's oeuvre as a whole and momentarily pretend that he's not going to do anything in the future. I assume that's not the case; in spite of my various misgivings and difficulties with much of his work, I very much hope it's not the case. But what you get by pretending that Inland Empire is Lynch's farewell work is that it's very much a return to the beginning of his career, as though he'd been following a long creative loop away from the example of Eraserhead and finally made his way back to the beginning; back to home. Like Eraserhead, Inland Empire begins with what appears to be an intelligible plot and then dives headlong, deeper and deeper, into a pool of Lynchian filmic dreamspace. It's as difficult to grapple with as every intervening Lynch film combined, and it's twice the length of Eraserhead. (Also, both films took literally years to make, unlike the rest of his works; the ever-unfolding production schedule undoubtedly both stems from and feeds the dreamlike, elusive relationship with normal cinematic storytelling that binds these movies.)
While I wasn't in the best frame of mind to watch it, I was in a more receptive mood than I was for Eraserhead, which is part of why - despite the aformentioned length - I drew more from it and had a better experience. But perhaps more importantly, and if I were going to pretend that Lynch specifically learned something from his sojourn in the relatively more accessible territories he mined for the 25 years between his first film and his most recent one it would be this, Inland Empire presents us with an inscrutable structure and story but marries it to a very scrutable emotional core, based in Laura Dern's astounding performance. The performances in Eraserhead are effective, but they're as inscrutable and outside the waking experience of life as everything else in the movie; we can reconstruct what the main character is going through emotionally - the film is, after all, more or less a dramatization of what's in his head and his heart - but the performances aren't so viscerally engaging because the emotional experience is presented in a way that's detatched from metaphorical viscera (though not literal, gastrointestinal viscera, of course). Whatever Laura Dern's character (characters?) is going through during Inland Empire, she puts that emotional experience onscreen through her own work as much as the film around her dramatizes it; though, as in Wild at Heart, her performance is by the necessity of Lynch's script and his world somewhat off-kilter, it's off-kilter in a way that ties directly back to recognizable human behavior, or rather the way we're used to seeing recognizable human behavior portrayed by modern actors in the Western performance tradition, which is the method of performance I - and most of you! - recognize as "realistic" however artificial its tropes actually are.
Dern pulls the disparate strands together, whether she's playing what seems to be her actual character - a somewhat distant actress - or the character that actress plays, or one of the various mirrors and shadows of those women. It's in some ways one of the most impressive performances I've seen because it really has to stand on its own in a way that very performances do. Not to diminish the quality work done by the actors onscreen with her - it's not that her performance needs to stand alone the way a one-woman show/monologue does, it stands alone because it's the only thing we have to hang our hat on, the only thing that reaches out to the audience and says "here, you can use me, use this, as your entrance into this world." And as someone who's a sucker for good acting that's skating on the edge of near over-the top emotionalism, Dern makes a congenial Constant Companion through the impenetrable (to me, certainly) rooms the film travels through.
(Incidentally, since I spoke at some length about Dern's scorching presence in Wild at Heart, this is why it's all about the performance, and what makes it in some ways more impressive: I think Dern is more attractive as a mature woman than she was as a 21-year old or whatever she was back then, but her performance, and her sex scene with Justin Theroux, isn't burning-the-metaphorical-filmstock [Inland Empire was shot on digital video] hot the way almost every scene in Wild at Heart was because it's not that kind of movie and not that kind of character and so it doesn't call for that kind of performance.)
ANYWAY the point being that after Eraserhead, which was at most kind of an oblique film in emotional terms, Lynch went on to make a bunch of movies that, in tension with the received narrative about his work, are very accessible and recognizable emotionally, and actually wear their joy and sorrow and heartbreak and terror on their sleeve in a way that seems inaccessible simply because we're not used to movies where the emotional experience is so unfiltered, especially in an otherwise challenging context. Inland Empire then closes the (artifical, intellectual, critically-imposed) loop by bringing that heavy emotional attitude to the mystery and dreamstate of Eraserhead. That - the unfiltered, whether it be emotional or visual or structural - is really the throughline, I suppose, of what I've had to say about Lynch and what I ripped from David Foster Wallace's "behind-the-scenes" piece on the making of Lost Highway, that what we get in a Lynch film seems like a more or less unprocessed transference from the man's innermost brain to our screens. The structural conceits we're used to - plots, character arcs, orderly and clever structures - are the detritus of the way our brains help us to make sense of the stimulus around us, an often inescapable imposition of the higher consciousness on direct human experience, one that is arguable necessary for us to live the lives we do, but one which arguable shuts off some potentially valuable experiential real estate, if we can let ourselves go and just feel everything without organizing it. That's, from a different angle, what we're getting when we experience ecstasy in whatever form, be it religious, sexual, social, and of course chemical: a reprieve to some greater or lesser degree from the ongoing wear of having an evolved, social, human brain. Thinking becomes tiring without reprieve.
Of course the catch is that no trigger is universal; not every sexual encounter gives you that release, not every art form moves you in that way. I used to find something hair-raising and exuberant about elements of the Catholic mass when I was a boy, and I don't feel that any more. Music can take me there, and sometimes film or even more likely TV (because what's going to push me over that edge is likely to be a built up reaction to a character or an onscreen relationship, and TV gives me more time to build my own relationship with the people on screen, and more time for them to get into the depths of a character if that what they want to do). Most of Lynch's films, for me, miss the mark of pulling my non-cognitive trigger. There are moments, and in the case of Mulholland Drive (admittedly one of the more accessible Lynch films on a moment-to-moment basis) I'm wrapped up in that world with real investment (and again consider how that movie is tied together by a remarkable performance, or really two remarkable performances, by its central actress), but for the most part the presumably unfiltered products of Lynch's brain miss my personal mark.
But there's nobody doing what he does, that I'm aware of, certainly not with American prominence, neither in his most remote and inaccessible or most inviting and intellectually intelligible works, and I'm certainly a bigger Lynch fan than I expected to wind up being. He's a challenging artist, which is in itself something I respond to; I've said that a Spike Lee failure (and in my opinion there's a fair number of them) is more daring and interesting than most other people's successes, and while Lynch can't really be judged in those same terms, he's equally worthy of respect and consideration even at his most questionable moments. I can't think of a good conclusion here so I'm just going to stop.
But not before I leave you with the credits for Inland Empire. Just get up and go and feel something, for your sake and mine.
I run to the river.
Labels: Film, Lynchathon
posted by medrawt at
23:47
