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.
Once you have seen it
Track every return to the woman weeping at the hotel television. (structure)
She does nothing but watch, and what she watches is this film. The cut keeps coming back to her looking, as if her looking is what produces everything else you have been shown.
Payoff: She is the film's engine and your seat at once, a person who can only watch what she cannot enter or change.
Watch for the point where Nikki cannot put the part down. (performance)
She is cast in a melodrama that turns out to be a remake of a cursed Polish production. As she rehearses the adulterous role it takes her over, and the film stops distinguishing the woman from the woman she is playing.
Payoff: The question of which one is real dissolves instead of being answered, and that indistinction is the subject rather than a puzzle. In the reading: hyalosign. An actress and her role becoming inseparable is what the reading calls a crystal, two faces of one image trading places.
Notice how one scene ends and a different world simply begins. (cutting)
Lynch cut this himself from fragments shot over years with no master plan. Scenes run past comfort and then snap into Łódź, into the rabbit sitcom, into a Los Angeles street, with nothing bridging them.
Payoff: The assembly works by rhyme and dread instead of cause, which is why the film plays as a night rather than a plot.
Listen to Nina Simone come in over the closing dance. (sound)
After three hours of drones, Penderecki and murk, the film lets a pop record play and fills a room with dancers. The music collage has been refusing to tell you how to feel all night. Here it finally does.
Payoff: The release is emotional rather than logical, and it is the only exit the film offers anyone who has been watching.
Carry this in: Watch Dern's face. Lynch shot it too close on cheap video, and it is the film's main landscape.