So David Lynch's Inland Empire came to the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor for one week only, and I was fortunate to see it with my good friend Stephen Manning, from the Political Science department at the University of Detroit Mercy. Watching the film was like remembering a nightmare, frame by frame. And I mean that as a compliment. What is sometimes lost in discussions of David Lynch's films is the deep menace of the editing. His films--especially Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Fire Walk With Me, and Inland Empire--know that the suture that binds scenes together is not merely a transition, but a moment of panic. Lynch treats cuts in his films as if they were the rough transitions between sleeping and waking. You realize they have happened, but you are not sure quite how they have happened, as in this short sequence from Inland Empire, where we secretly shift perspectives during the song, and are suddenly watching what is happening from a more elevated point of view. The shifts happen at the :24 and :21 marks:
The film itself begins rationally enough, but after about one hour unspools into a sort of feedback loop of repeated ideas, images, and scenes. It's almost as if the film's scenes were a deck of cards, endlessly re-shuffled: we see the same moments, but played out in different sequences. I can think of no other American film that organizes disorder as relentlessly as Inland Empire. Of course that organization must necessarily be achieved through violence. In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Marlow says that what redeemed the brutality of colonialism was that it had an idea behind it. The force of an idea.
A movie like Inland Empire is nothing but an idea. And thus nothing but redeemed.
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