Inland Empire Says Goodbye to the Blues
That’s right! As the housewife who is bored with her husband in Inland Empire, Dern looks on with a mix of bewilderment and amusement as a group of prostitutes do “The Locomotion,” and she is whisked away to snowy Poland, where the plot sporadically diverts, focusing on a wealthy john and the prostitute he torments. At times, the characters are overlaid with a close-up of a needle against a record, suggesting a “cycle” that returns us to the Lost Girl. When Nikki finds herself on a set that resembles a starter home on the soundstage (at the end of a long, dark corridor), she enters a seedy world of hookers and violence.
But back up a second: near the beginning, Doris (Julia Ormond) is seated in an interrogation room, telling an impassive detective that she’d like to report a stabbing, to which she lifts up her shirt to reveal a screwdriver lodged in her side; she frantically claims to have been put under hypnosis. Later in the film, Doris is re-introduced as wife to Billy (also Theroux), with whom Nikki has been having an affair (or are they just having an affair in the movie?). And, near the end, Doris is presented as the assailant who stabs Susanin the side with a screwdriver. And, just when Lynch has lulled us into the notion that we’ve abandoned the movie set for some cruel reality, where washed-up Nikki has assumed the persona of hard-bitten Susan, he pulls back the curtain to reveal yet another possible deception!
Par for the course with Lynch, Inland Empire is a world of dreams within dreams, realities within realities, and the metaphysical intersections at which they cross. Despite an experimental approach that consisted of giving actors new script pages each day, the film rarely hints at its off-the-cuff nature. Perhaps that is what Lynch is getting at with his commentary on marriage, infidelity, and paying someone for “love” – that “dishonoring a sacred bond” (per Nikki’s husband) fractures the fabric of morality and personality, creating alternate universes populated by warped versions of our own selves.
And hey: maybe it takes impassioned, free-association monologues from homeless people (including Terry Crews!) to reacquaint ourselves with what is true and good, and bring us back to a shared “reality.” But the paraphrased Brian O’Blivion conundrum remains: “reality is film, and film is less than reality.” If there’s an O’Blivion surrogate in Inland Empire, it’s “Visitor #1,” a dubious Polish “neighbor” to Nikki who outlines the plot in the prolonged, uncomfortable opening scene. She foretells Nikki acquiring the lead role in Stewart’s On High in Blue Tomorrows, inquires about the story, and anticipates future events in an unsettlingly sage way. As played by Lynch veteran Grace Zabriskie, the character is a bipolar enigma, not unlike Nikki and Susan (or Doris, for that matter).
As with Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, it’s possible that all of the women in Inland Empire are intertwined within the wiring of Nikki’s mind. Still, it seems like a cop-out to use that deus ex machina of an explanation, “it’s all in her head,” even if the circular nature of the story insists on it.
The film is packed with invasive close-ups of Dern – in happiness; in distress; in madness – that leave no expression or tic obscured. The notion of the handheld-or-hidden camera as an unwelcome eye into a person’s private affairs – regardless of social or economic class – is given credence here through its pervasive omniscience. Lynch is the governor of this world (and whatever it may mean), and Dern is – to quote Juno – “a planet.” The psychological heft her characters convey is stunning, and her physical acting is a catalog of idiosyncrasies running concurrently with Lynch’s oblique, enigmatic dialog.
Yes, Inland Empire requires a decade-long gap between viewings. That much time is needed for it to settle and separate in the mind’s eye.
If we’re still around, expect a fresh batch of questions in 2028!
The Plot Sickens: Don’t miss Jonny Numb’s interview with TraCee of SCRM Radio!
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Jonny Numb
The reviewer known as Jonny Numb is also known as Jonathan Weidler. His personae can be found discussing the hidden meaning of horror cinema on #TheLastKnock podcast, or writing reviews for Loud Green Bird. He often appears to be in multiple social-media locations at one time, including Twitter and Letterboxd @JonnyNumb, and has never danced The Locomotion.
(Still from Inland Empire via Jonathan Rosenbaum.)