Inland Empire · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A face too close to the lens. Laura Dern's, swelling at the edges where the cheap wide-angle bends it, carved out of the dark by a single lamp. She is weeping, or about to, and you cannot say where she is or which woman she has become. Lynch shot most of this himself, holding a Sony camcorder you could buy at a mall, and that fact is not trivia — it is the whole aesthetic. The image is grainy, smeared, dim. It looks like something recorded by accident and watched alone at night. Start there, because INLAND EMPIRE teaches you how to watch it only by taking away every handhold you brought.

Deleuze had a name for what happens when a person can no longer act on what she sees — when perception stops feeding into a decision and just stalls. He called it a pure optical situation, an opsign, and the person it strands he called a seer rather than a doer. There is a weeping woman in a hotel room here who does nothing but watch a television, and on that television are the events of the film. She cannot intervene. She can only look. She is us. She is also the engine: the film keeps returning to her watching, as if the watching were what generates everything else. That is the deep structure of the movie — not a chain of actions but a held, helpless gaze.

Now the crystal. Deleuze's word is hyalosign, the crystal-image, and it names a moment when you can no longer separate the actual from the virtual: present from memory, woman from her reflection, the real person from her image in the mirror. Two faces of one crystal, trading places. Nikki Grace is an actress cast in a melodrama. The melodrama turns out to be a remake of a cursed Polish production whose leads were murdered. As Nikki rehearses an adulterous role, the role eats her — she becomes Susan Blue, then a battered woman adrift through Los Angeles back lots and a snowbound street in Łódź. Which is the actress and which is the part? The film will not say, because the question has dissolved. That is the crystal: not a confusion to be cleared up but indistinction as the actual subject. Lynch's earlier films kept one foot out of it — MULHOLLAND DRIVE finally hands you a key, a fantasy collapsing into a grim morning. This one throws the key away.

And yet a crack runs through the crystal. Deleuze noticed that some of these enclosed worlds carry a fissure, a thin line of flight toward an outside. Late in the film the woman at the television is finally released — the gaze that endured everything is let out of the room. The totality, for one breath, opens.

The other thing this film does is break cinema's oldest promise. The camera, the contract went, does not lie: what you see happened, at least in front of the lens. Deleuze called the deliberate rupture of that promise the powers of the false — incompatible versions all true at once, and a protagonist who becomes a forger, shedding and assuming selves. Dern is that forger. Confident professional, terrified wife, hardened prostitute — porous, serial, no stable center. The biographical detail matters: Lynch wrote and shot in fragments over more than two years and never told Dern the shape of the whole, so she often played a scene without knowing how it connected to anything. The not-knowing is in her body. It is the truth of the film, and it could not have been faked.

Keep the geography in mind, too. Los Angeles and Poland, Nikki and Susan, the sitcom of humans in rabbit suits — these are not flashbacks arranged on a line. They are contradictory presents coexisting, what Deleuze called peaks of present, each one insisting it is now. The spaces between them are derelict: shabby bungalows, back-alley corners, void rooms warped by the wide lens until a living room feels cavernous. Deleuze's term is the any-space-whatever — a place that has stopped being the setting for an action and become a pure zone of dread. Dern's face, framed in distorting close-up, is the largest of these spaces. Watch the micro-tremors cross it; the intensity builds and never discharges into a decision. The face is the landscape, and the landscape is afraid.

The lineage is exact. The looping woman who keeps meeting versions of herself in recurring rooms comes from Maya Deren's MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON; the two female selves merging while the film's own apparatus ruptures comes from Bergman's PERSONA; the licence to cut by dream-contiguity rather than continuity comes straight from Un Chien Andalou. From his own work Lynch takes the Möbius identity-swap of LOST HIGHWAY and the Hollywood-as-nightmare of MULHOLLAND DRIVE, and pushes both past the point of reconstruction.

What is new is the machine it runs on. Theorists after Deleuze gave it a name he never used — the neuro-image: twenty-first-century digital cinema that moves through a mind, recombinant, database-like, no longer measuring movement but shuffling states. A major filmmaker abandoned celluloid here not for the gloss of high-definition but for the rawness of standard-def video, and proved the time-image could be reborn on a consumer camcorder. Three hours of dread without a plot to carry it. The final image is a release: Nina Simone's "Sinnerman," a room full of dancers, the held gaze finally allowed to exhale. You leave not with the puzzle solved but with new eyes — able to feel a film thinking, in the dark, on cheap tape, about what it costs to lose yourself in a part.