Inland Empire, or, David Lynch Loses His Marbles
I bow to no man in my avant-gardity. My avant-gardedness? My avant-gardicity? No matter, you get my point.
I’m so avant-garde I once did a performance piece where I played Andy Warhol come back from the dead. (Some of my audience felt I was more life-like than Andy himself had ever been.)
I once directed another piece about a stripper who had an eyeball where her vagina was supposed to be. (And my mother came to see the show.)
I wrote a play about a girl bringing her new young man home to meet her parents and the play ends with the daddy shooting the boy dead. (The shooting took place offstage; one night the sound man was enjoying the show so much he forgot to press the button for the gunshot sound-effect. There was the most god-awful long pause with the daddy actor backstage waiting patiently while I frantically waved at the chuckling sound man. Finally he remembered and pressed the button. Oddly enough the audience thought the ungodly long pause was on purpose; they thought the pause was avant-garde.)
I actually listen to Trout Mask Replica several times a year, and one of my favorite box-sets is John Coltrane Live in Japan, 1965, where he and his band play “My Favorite Things†for, like, a whole day.
Avant-garde movies? Come on, I was watching Kenneth Anger and my pal Andy Warhol’s movies when you punks were in knee-britches, so we’re talking some serious avant-garde cred here, and I haven’t even mentioned the TV show I wrote (oddly short-lived) whose two leads were transsexuals.
And I’ve always dug David Lynch. I even liked Dune, even though it was long and boring. My friend Andy once said that he liked long, boring movies. So do I sometimes, and Dune was one of those long boring movies I liked. When I watched it in the theatre I somehow knew that it was okay to step outside midway and smoke a joint; I knew that when I came back inside I wouldn’t have missed much and I’d still have lots more of the movie to watch.
I’ve liked all of David Lynch’s movies, but what I liked most of his was his one TV series, Twin Peaks, especially the first season. One of the best TV shows ever, it was a stoner show in the tradition of Star Trek or Kung Fu or Murder, She Wrote that you didn’t even have to be stoned to watch.
David Lynch’s latest, Inland Empire, never came to theatres down here in Philly, so I leaped right on it when it came out on DVD, shoving aside a couple of skinny art students to grab the last tag on the display shelf. It’s a two-disc edition, one disc for the three-hour movie, one for special features.
I knew ahead of time that the movie was going to be long, I knew it was going to be weird, I knew that Lynch had shot it on cheap video. None of that bothered me. It was the new Lynch and I was ready to see David just let it rip.
I even asked my friend, the Meeg, to watch the movie with me, knowing that all her favorite movies star Kari Wuhrer. But even the Meeg has watched most of Lynch’s movies, and she was a big fan of Twin Peaks too, so she was willing to give it a shot, even if Kari Wuhrer wasn’t in it.
I hate reviews that just go through the plot of the movie, thereby spoiling half the fun for anyone who might actually go and see the movie, but I’ll slightly break my own rule here by just mentioning that the first scene of Inland Empire begins with a single-set-up scene of three actors dressed as — well, I’m not going to say what animal they’re costumed as, because that would be a spoiler, so I’ll just say it’s a certain small hoppy animal with long ears. So we’re watching this scene, the Meeg and I, and the animal people say some things, nothing worth repeating, and a laugh track comes on now and then, even though nobody says anything funny, which is pretty avant-garde. The whole scene was pretty avant-garde, actually. It was also really long, and not fun-long, it was boring long, like standing in the subway car when the power goes out, and you wait, and wait, and wait. That kind of boring. And definitely no sight of Kari Wuhrer, so I said to the Meeg, “We can put something else on.â€Â
So we put on a re-run of Still Standing.
Later that night though, and the next night, and the night after that, I dove again (alone) into the mysteries of Inland Empire. It actually got better after the (first) animal people scene (which did finally end, or get cut away from, to return, again and again, like that fear of inadequacy that hammers you repeatedly each time you sit down to write your masterpiece). A plot lurches into view with Laura Dern playing some kind of fantastically rich movie star, complete with Jeeves-ish butler. Grace Zabriskie (an actress so avant-garde she was named after an Antonioni movie), who plays weird women in all of David Lynch’s shows, bangs on Laura Dern’s door. Laura lets her in for a chat, and, sure enough, Zabriskie’s character turns out to be a weird woman. This scene wasn’t so boring, and I thought, okay, this movie might be good.
And then you even get more plot. Laura starts making a movie, even though I think the weird woman told her not to, with Justin Theroux playing the guy movie star, and the great Jeremy Irons playing the movie director. I love all these actors, and I even dug it that Jeremy Irons plays the director even though he looks ten times the movie star that poor Justin Theroux will ever look, through no fault at all of Justin Theroux’s. I think Justin Theroux is great, but it’s funny, he’s one of those good actors who can play a movie star really well, but he himself will never actually be a movie star.
Which I guess is Laura Dern’s case, too, She’s never been a star, but you can believe her when she plays a star.
But here I have to say something which is very delicate. Laura Dern is no great beauty, but she’s not ugly, and Lynch makes her look really ugly in this movie. I’m old-school in some forgotten gentlemanly ways, despite my hardened avant-gardism, and I like it when directors make their stars look good. Unless the character is supposed to be plain or ugly or the Elephant man, do the actor or actress and us a favor, make them look good. Poor Laura Dern. I’m sure she loved getting the lead in another David Lynch movie, but, boy, does Lynch make her look rough. She looks like one of the women in the background of an old Spiderman comic back when Steve Ditko drew it, one of the extras who are always screaming, “Look! It’s Dr. Octopus!”
So you have a set-up. An actress and an actor and a director set out to make a movie. There’s this bit of foreboding plot element here that I won’t go into (but I will mention to any of you theatre people out there that it’s just a little like the legend about “the Scottish playâ€Â).
But then after about an hour Lynch seems to dispense with what little plot has been suggested.
The animal people return. More than once.
A band of slutty-looking young women show up. I perked up a bit here, but they were kind of rough-looking too when you got right down to it. They looked a little like those girls who say, “Call now!†on those late-night commercials, except these girls weren’t so funny. None of them were as hot as Kari Wuhrer, either
The slutty girls turn up a few more times and one time one of them lifts her top up and bares her breasts, and this is where I really had to say, “Okay, David, I know what’s going on here. You’re a guy, I’m a guy. And we both know you had that chick flash her breasts just because you wanted to see them yourself and you knew you could get away with it, because everybody will just say it’s David being avant-garde, and not just another old perv with a cheap video camera.â€Â
After about an hour-and-a-half, I really was tempted to switch to the “special features†disc. I loved the special features for Eraserhead, and I would love to see a David Lynch movie which is nothing but special features. And then the DVD release could have a whole extra disc of special features about the movie that was nothing but special features. Somehow I knew that the special features for Inland Empire would be about a dozen times more fun than the movie they were the special features for. But I didn’t switch discs, I hung with it for about another hour.
This was the third night I had been watching, or trying to watch, this movie.
I turned it off and watched some of The Sisters with Bette Davis on TMC, then I finally passed out.
The DVD was due back at the video store today. I took it back. I sort of wanted to try watching the rest of it, and I still would really like to see the special features one day. Just not enough to pay the late fee.
(This has been another Newcritcs exclusive; go to my place for more avant-gardiferousness.)
Great review! This movie shoots like a rocket to the bottom of my list!
No, seriously, I’ll probably give it a shot, and see how it goes.
BTW, wouldn’t it be better if Lynch did as you suggest and released a movie consisting entirely of special features, but on the DVD the extra disc is the actual movie that nobody’s even seen yet? That would be pretty Lynchian.