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Inland Empire


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🎙️ EPISODE 150: 01.18.19

Inland Empire is, technically speaking, the final film of David Lynch’s career. Released almost thirteen years ago in 2006, it’s certainly the most confounding. Three hours of lo-fi footage, welded together by a director whose contempt for the industry he was a part of had reached a boiling point. And that boiling point is INLAND EMPIRE.

For years, I attempted to watch this film in stops and starts. That, for quite a long time, I never got past the relatively straight, narrative-driven first hour is probably telling. Outside of a classic Grace Zabriskie appearance as Laura Dern’s crazy Polish neighbor, not much really happens.
But it isn’t so much that nothing is happening that’s the issue. It’s that nothing interesting is happening. An actress gets a role. Her co-star is a womanizer. Her husband might be jealous. There’s some mystery concerning the development of the project. They have an affair. After a burst of imagery at the start, this all unfolds in a fairly normal fashion. The most noteworthy thing about it is how it looks. Lynch used a digital camera to film some ideas with Laura Dern one day and then decided to make a feature film out of it. He’s stated that he had to keep using the same camera out of necessity. That he had to make it look this way, is a very Lynchian answer to the question “Why does Inland Empire look like garbage?” Because it does truly look like trash. You can get better video fidelity from any cheap Android phone nowadays. It has not aged well in that regard, though I suppose there is a charm in that.

In fact, some might point to exactly this and say that’s why it’s genius, why it’s underrated… but I ain’t buying that line of thinking, either. It’s a misstep, in my opinion. The film is a bloated experimentation of a script written on the fly. It has only one true saving grace… Laura Dern.

Even if they hadn’t reunited for the successful collaboration that was Twin Peaks: The Return, I think I’d be OK with this being the pair’s final work together. The film only works because of Dern. The entire thing is a testament to her ability and it transcends the hardware that was used to capture it. When I finally got around to completing this watch, I was struck by how weird it got. Which is saying something about a David Lynch film! Without Dern this might play like someone’s forgotten student project of the early-mid 2000s. With her, it’s a strange bookend to an amazing career.

One that I have no other choice but to start, and stop, and start again. Someday.

Listen to my 90-minute feature podcast: RANKING DAVID LYNCH.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 149 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 150B ⫸

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