Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Inland Empire
2006 · David Lynch · Inland Empire on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Look at how close the lens gets to Dern's face. (camera)
Lynch held a consumer camcorder himself and shot with a wide lens from inches away. Cheeks swell at the edges of the frame, the grain crawls, and the face fills the image until the room around it stops mattering.
Payoff: The distortion is the format being used on purpose, and it puts you closer to a person than any polite film would allow.
Notice how one lamp carves a face out of total black. (light)
Lynch lights from a single source and lets everything else drop into murk. Standard definition video smears in low light, so the dark is not clean dark. It swims. Features loom and the surrounding space dissolves.
Payoff: You are given exactly one thing to look at per shot, which is why you cannot ever establish where you are.
Watch the doorways and corridors people step through. (staging)
Bungalows, derelict mansions, back alleys, a snowbound street in Łódź. The wide lens warps these interiors until a living room feels cavernous. Characters keep crossing a threshold and coming out somewhere else entirely.
Payoff: The film's rooms stop being places where things happen and become zones you pass through without a map. In the reading: espace quelconque. A space that has stopped hosting an action and become pure dread is what the reading calls an any-space-whatever.
Listen to the low hum under scenes where nothing is happening. (sound)
Lynch built the sound himself. Drones, room tone, industrial rumble, then a sudden rupture. The track produces fear on its own, ahead of anything the picture shows, and sometimes instead of it.
Payoff: Dread here is carried by what you hear, so the film can hold you still for minutes with no event at all. In the reading: pure optical & sound situations. These held stretches where you can only look and listen are what the reading calls pure optical and sound situations.
Watch Dern's voice and posture change from one scene to the next. (performance)
She plays a confident actress, a terrified woman, a hardened one, sometimes inside the same stretch of film. Lynch wrote and shot over two years and never told her how a scene connected to the whole.
Payoff: The not knowing is in her body, and it is the one thing in the film that could not have been faked.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch Dern's face. Lynch shot it too close on cheap video, and it is the film's main landscape.