INLAND EMPIRE: The First Masterpiece of the Digital Age
"We live as we dream-- alone," Joseph Conrad writes in Heart of Darkness, and it would seem from his highly individualist and surrealistic oeuvre that David Lynch agrees with that Conradian notion. His films-- even his more realistic ones-- flow with the libidinal logic of the dreamtext, eternally hyperlinked and kinetic, down rabbit holes and blue boxes into red rooms and out Venetian blinds. We experience his dreams alone, yet together, the audience eternally linked to one man's unique vision of reality. Despite the stunning orginality and vision of his previous work, nothing that Lynch has done before-- no loglady, no ciphered dwarves withstanding-- could have prepared cinema for the stunning manifesto of a new age in the cinematic arts that is Lynch's Inland Empire. There are, in the history cinema, a priveledged few directors who have evolved their relationship with the medium to a point of total comprehension of the economic, social, political, and libidinal implications of the filmic experience. There names have become synonymous with their works; they are eternally interchangeable and ethereal, becoming studies more in signifiers rather than film form itself. Fellini 81/2, Godard Cotempt, Bergman Persona, Passolini Teorema. These few, these happy few, have bridged the gap between theory and the text and the text and theory. They are films that are simultaenously confesssional and enigmatic, both evocative and indecipherable. They are films, more often than not, about film, about us, about actors, about directors, about what we do and think and feel and see when the lights go down, all except one, that endless flickering phantasm of motion on a screen. They are films that interogate us, that look back towards us, the audience, ever-peering in the omnipresence of our voyeuristic fancy. With Inland Empire, David Lynch has ascended into this happy band of brothers, but what's more, in his mastery of his own medium he has ushered in undeniably and resolutely the dawn of new medium, a digital medium. More a translator than a pioneer, Lynch has taken digital video beyond that binary echo of ones and zeros, of pretense and portention, into the realm of cinema. In short, Inland Empire is the first masterpiece of the digital age.
If we live as we dream, how, then, do we act? That is the question of Inland Empire. And the answer, for Lynch, is different from Conrad's. We do not act alone; we act for an audience. Performance demands a spectator, but more importantly for Lynch, a spectator demands performance. Lynch's performers have always performed to the dalliances of their voyeurs. Think of Isabella Rosellini's naked dance on the suburban lawns of Blue Velvet. Think of Naomi Watts's impassioned masturbation in Mullholland Drive. Think of young Laura Palmer's stripteast at One-Eyed Jack's. Lynch's women know how to perform for their spectators, but even more, they know how to perform for Lynch. Lynch is their audience par excellence, the everlasting monocular gaze, one with the camera, one with the voyeur. But with Inland Empire, he announces something that sets him apart from all the other male directors dictating masochism to their actresses. He says loudly and clearly, "I know what I have been doing." Mr. Lynch knows he has been putting, to take a turn from Inland's tagline, his women in trouble. He knows that he is complicit in their performances, in their masochism, and in Inland Empire he gives us once again a moschistic puppet in the form of Laura Dern. She is both Nikki Grace, the actress, and Susan Blue, the role. They are not separate characters but one who merges seamlessly with Laura Dern, the Actress, who, in turn, moves with imperceptible ease in and out and through each scene that exists autonomously yet homogenously, connected not by a narrative thread but by a thread a signifiers of a cinematic past, each echoing in the minds of the cinema-goer like Proust's tea-soaked madeleine. And yet, this is not a puzzle; we do not attempt to piece together a narrative from what we are given, but rather from what we know already as film goers. We know, for example, what it means for a woman to walk in an alley alone. We know what it means for a woman to cheat on her husband. We know those immutable signs of woman's failure, those foreboding appeals for pity toward the lowly feminine creature before her fall. The poverty, the drugs, the abuse. These are the signifiers of, in short, "a woman in trouble." They are as old and as unwavering as Hollywood itself, and from these bits and peices from that glistening history of movie misogyny, David Lynch constructs a narrative that is as cohesive in its incoherence as the most intricate novels of Joyce and Woolf. We know the story because we know the story.
This is Lynch's confessional for himself and for cinema. He sees, accepts, and asks penance for the misogynist narratives of Hollywood's past, but he does not stop there. Extraordinarily, in the film's final hour, Father Lynch reaches out into the audience and demands our confession for our own complicity in this Hollywood mythos. There is a moment in the film where Niki Grace/Susan Blue/Laura Dern stands in a vacant movie palace and stares in horror, in sadness, in confusion at the image of herself on the screen. It is an image we, too, have seen before, an hour or so earlier, and now we watch it again with her in a deceptively simple shot/reverse shot pattern. We see her watching and then we watch with her in a point-of-view shot. We see watching and watch with her again. We see her watching... but then wait... what is she watching? Not the screen, not her image, not her performance, but rather us-- the audience-- staring on her. She has quite literally entered our space-- our hidden vantage point behind the closet doors. The fourth wall is not destroyed; it simply ceases to exist. She stands in the movie theatre and looks back on us as we have looked on her for the past three hours. We have aided in the construction of the narrative that has imprisoned her on that screen, that has mandated that she must die, that has necessitated her abuse-- but now is her chance to crossover. And it is in this moment that Lynch, himself, fulfills his promise that he is, indeed, an optimist for, as the heavy film cameras move back, as the director stands and praises his actress's performance, we are left then and there in the absence of film and in the all-encompassing freedom of the digital medium. Liberated from the economic restraints of film stock, we can finally move deeper into the theatre, and back and back again behind the screen, into the world that cinema has constructed, penetrating the walls that film has long barricaded. The digital age offers, for Lynch, a promise of liberation from the economic, social, and political constraints of the filmic medium. It offers, in short, the promise of connection-- of permeating the space between the spectator and performer by bringing the performer closer and by offering an intimacy that is simply impossible and potentially undesirable in film. I am, admittedly, skeptical that digital video can fullfil this promise, but Inland Empire is a film so daring and provocative in its audacious ambition to offer up this very possibility, that the reality of a cinematic intimacy as pure as Lynch suggests seems ever-closer.