I Would Like to See It: Inland Empire

Were one to map film as a medium, Lynch’s Inland Empire might fall somewhere along the border between soap opera and found footage horror. Its shaky handheld camerawork and the raw, exposed visual quality of its digital footage makes it feel at times like a home movie shot by someone in the midst of a psychotic break, a narrative of the self and its fictionalization smashed to pieces and haphazardly reassembled into something equal parts alienating and uncomfortably intimate. Structured as a television show and radio play unfolding within the life of a young prostitute (Karolina Gruszka) alone in a hotel room, Inland Empire continually splices new fictions into itself, its film-within-a-film-within-a-show-within-a-play-within-a-film morphing and mutating without warning.

Lynch, who set horror’s standard for images of hostile sterility with the eternally burning and reassembling desert shack in 1997’s Lost Highway, here captures some of film’s coldest and most impersonal interior shots. The vast mansion of actress Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) and her husband Piotrek (Peter J. Lucas) is at once lavish and sparse, its furniture lost in vast seas of Oriental carpeting, its walls oddly bare of decoration. The smaller house in which Nikki’s alter ego/dramatic role Sue Blue resides scales this effect down to project a darker, more sexually menacing shade of suburban dessication. No space reflects the people who inhabit it. Locations are neglected just short of decay, too dry and spare to truly succumb to rot.

Dern’s performance in such a demanding and wide-ranging role is astonishing without exception, her long, lanky frame and mobile features arresting in quieter moments and able to project in turns a desperate sexual vulnerability, manic terror, and sullen, simmering rage with equal skill. Like all of Lynch’s work, whatever story one cares to assemble from Inland Empire’s sprawling mess of somber Polish melodrama, domestic tension, cursed screenplays, and cryptic anthropomorphic rabbits is entirely beside the point. It’s the raw sensual impact of the film that matters, the act of falling into and becoming absorbed by its fragmentary fictions. Not why Nikki screams, but that she is screaming. Not why the lost girl cries in her empty hotel room, but that she is crying. The horror, the grief, the loss and aching emptiness; this is the point.