David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006) is a contender for the most dense film I’ve ever seen. Soon after watching it, my friend (who’s a massive Twin Peaks (1990-1991) and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) fan, but has yet to see any of David Lynch’s other films) asked me what Inland Empire was about, and warned me not to spoil it in my description. I told him that I don’t know what it’s about, and that I couldn’t spoil Inland Empire if my life depended on it.
This encounter, I think, encapsulates at least one of the “meanings,” if I could go as far as to call it that, of David Lynch’s most recent feature film. In his analysis of Inland Empire, Justus Nieland goes into depth about many aspects of the film, but one that stands out among the rest involves Lynch’s inclusion of Rabbits (2002), a nine-part video series originally distributed on the Internet. Nieland suggests that Inland Empire’s inclusion of Rabbits is the fact that the “rabbits are, interpretively speaking, productive fuckers. They spawn situations. The could mean, virtually, anything” (p. 147). This claim is particularly powerful due to the nature of how Inland Empire came into being (an eighteen-page monologue recorded over a seventy-minute long-take), and also the medium on which it was shot (low-fidelity digital video). Inland Empire is a film of seemingly disjunctive situations connected by threads of both narrative and formative similarities, thereby allowing for near endless readings of the film.
In this way, I see Inland Empire as a very surrealist experience, as I’m sure many people do. It harkens back to the way in which surrealists viewed films: arriving at a random film, at no particular time, leaving at the first sign of boredom, and popping into another film, repeating the process and creating their own films within their heads. In a way, Inland Empire does this in a single film. The narrative switches between multiple storylines, often blurring the audience’s conception of which plot they’re following, and if it’s even possible to follow the plot at all. This type of viewing experience might be seen as “democratic,” to use Fred Turner’s language, as the audience is invited to derive their own meanings from the film. And even more compelling is the fact that Inland Empire was filmed on digital video, and outdated, low-quality digital video to boot. The film has an almost ametuer quality about it, giving the impression that possibly anyone with a camera could have made it.
The idea that Inland Empire is a film composed of situations that could mean virtually anything is a compelling one, but one that seems to problematize film, the medium, as an ideological tool. If, for instance, someone claims that Inland Empire means nothing, how can someone possibly refute their claim? If there are limitless possibilities to the film’s meaning, then surely “nothing” is one of those possibilities. This, however, implies that films are intrinsically meaningful beyond the human scale. Needless to say, I’m not sure what Inland Empire “means,” or if it means anything at all, and whether or not its meaningfulness or meaninglessness is relevant to anything outside of human consciousness. At the very least, Lynch succeeded in making a thought-provoking film.
Work Cited
Nieland, Justus. David Lynch. Urbana: U of Illinois, 2012. Print.
Film and Architecture 
I love this candid post, which seems at once exasperated and exhilarated by the range of interpretive possibilities that open up when watching a film like this. As we discussed in class, to say that the film is polysemous, non-dogmatic, or even “democratic” in his handling of meaning is not the same thing as saying the film means “nothing,” or that once can say anything about the film. Well…I suppose one could say “anything” about the film, but not all claims about what the film means, or how we arrive at those claims about meaning through an analysis of style and content would be equally persuasive, or compelling. This is true of all films, and indeed all works of art, I think. And yes, while INLAND EMPIRE is open to a range of interpretations, it is also kinda obsessive about its images and concerns, many of which are repeating with an almost incantatory intensity. Certainly, for example, the film is interested in female victimization and abuse, and in the conditions of Hollywood stardom. But what it might be saying about those conditions requires our thought, careful reading, and meaning making.
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