EL-P

I won’t recommend David Keith Lynch’s most recent film, Inland Empire, but I need to discuss it. It’s a complicated movie, over three hours of distortions and inner-workings and peculiarities. Hopefully this discussion can staunch my flood of reactions. Mr. Lynch’s mode of story-telling tends to ignite my brain in ways most things don’t. It makes me talkative. I appreciate his art for just that purpose; it’s totally inspirational. It’s also consumptive and, judging by the reactions of the moviegoers around me, not pleasurable for everyone. But I still need to sort it out, to calm my mind so I can let more in. Writing is my taming mechanism; I meditate and move on.

Mr. Lynch made a career of the metaphysical, using mediums as his medium. He began as a student of the arts, interested in painting with Frances Bacon as his beacon. He entered the film industry by making exactly the films he wanted to: dark, mutant experiments. Inland Empire is a grand continuation of these traits: we get a film within the film, as well as many (more than "normal") oblique, nightmarish abstractions. The film within Inland Empire is On High In Blue Tomorrows, a wistful southern-style romance. The leads of the On High are Laura Dern and Justin Theroux, with Mr. Lynch showing the fringes of their characters’ on screen affair. Mr. Lynch then introduces another one of his favorite themes—this one seems to be defining a period in his career—as the filmic world of On High begins to leak into the other realities of Inland Empire.

What remains is a story about character entropy. Ms. Dern’s character in On High begins to possess her character in Inland, which Mr. Lynch manipulates further by creating a reality for the On High character that doesn’t exist in the On High script. Ms. Dern, the blonde stork that she is, seems to discover and command the genes for schizophrenia; I can’t think of another performance by one actor flushing out so many conceptual designs. The first time we meet her she’s a calm, veteran movie star, introduced by her placid Hollywood mansion, the face of success that it is. It’s flamboyantly adorned and palatial. We see her get work and go to work; she’s excited and eager to work hard on the set This is all a part of hour one, the most linear hour. In the second hour the entropy begins as the actors learn that On High was nearly made once before—decades ago in Poland. The Polish actors “found something in the script” and were killed. “Something” is a weak word in the creative world—except in the hands of Mr. Lynch. The “something” discovered by Ms. Dern takes her all the way across her own psyche until she’s traveling across the mind of her character’s character. It’s hard to follow.

Which is why fans of Mr. Lynch are amateur symbologists, hunting for fissures in truth and meaning by pointing to blinking lights, recurring colors, and unusual objects. I can recommend the Inland Empire message boards if this sort of sleuthing is your thing. I like symbols—especially Mr. Lynch's: the nine dancing women, the domestic rabbits, the “unpaid debt”, etc.—but care more for the themes. From my seat, I heard Mr. Lynch asking: “What happens to characters?” It’s an enormous question. It's also savvy question that, on film, can’t be contained by any sort of conventional story telling. It allows Ms. Dern to hear herself inside of the movie set when she hasn't yet seen the set completed. But is that herself? By the third hour—more than 40 minutes after the guys behind me exclaimed “it’s only been two hours!”—it’s hard to tell which of Ms. Dern’s characters is stabbed to death with a screwdriver on Sunset Blvd., but it’s even tougher to know which of her characters gets up off the pavement when Mr. Lynch pulls back the camera to reveal the film crew for On High (who haven’t appeared on screen for two hours).

I have not seen all Mr. Lynch’s movies, but I’ve watched Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and Mulholland Drive at 3 a.m., which is a fine hour to drop into the Lynchian portal. His films are dark, but glossy. In Mr. Lynch’s hands this is not a reassuring combination and his films are nervous because of it. Conventional horror and suspense films are used for other purposes in the Lynchian world: the camera slowly creeping down a dim pink hallway towards an eery green light. These shots will last for minutes, creating real tension. Sometimes Mr. Lynch is kind. In Mulholland, he eased the audience into the darkness, with the help of a shiny, optimistic Naomi Watts. A dominant difference between Mulholland and Inland is the amount of time it takes for the glamor to be overrun by the fear. Inland Empire the takeover is instant; the film begins inside the darkness, in a space with a faceless prostitute, digitally blurred and indecipherable. Mr. Lynch is earnest with fear and he lets it permeate Ms. Dern's unhinging until the penultimate fear becomes the film itself.

Brooklyn, NY MC El-P gets an honorary BRILLIANTMP3 for a couple appropriate reasons. One, he released a solid album called I'll Sleep When You're Dead. Two, the album begins with dialogue sampled from Mr. Lynch's seminally creepy TV show, Twin Peaks. El-P's song is called "Tasmanian Pain Coaster" and features The Mars Volta at their recent best. It's great track with a great hook that's simple, dark, and very Lynchian: "This is the sound of what you don't know killing you." MP3 below. Scout that.

The official Inland Empire trailer.

To promote Laura Dern's performance in Inland Empire, director David Lynch posted up pm Sunset Blvd. with a live dairy cow and a sign that read: "Without cheese there wouldn't be an Inland Empire."


On David Lynch's art.

For good measure, here's El-P's video for the track "Flyentology" featuring Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails. This is a cool video.

Right click-and-save to download an MP3 of “Tasmanian Pain Coaster,” from the album I'll Sleep When You're Dead by El-P.




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