What is David Lynch's Inland Empire about?

Down the rabbit hole... Inland Empire

So, it's finally here - the British release of David Lynch's mesmeric Inland Empire, a film I and other contributors to this blog have been over-excitedly discussing for what seems several years now.

By this stage, most people even halfway interested in Lynch will probably be familiar with the movie's skeletal set-up, wherein a vanilla-wholesome actress (played by Laura Dern) is cast in and then begins shooting a remake of an unfinished Polish melodrama, one apparently stricken by some kind of gypsy curse. What follows (to reduce a three-hour slab of experimenta to a sentence) is a dizzying welter of rabbit sitcoms, addled hookers, Polish killers, ominous spaces, unseen observers, and dual, triple and finally ever-more-multiple identities, a miasma of scenes and motifs that on paper sound self-parodic, but which prove hypnotic and almost physically overwhelming.

Or they were for me, at least. Thus far, the response to the film has been distinctly divided - if Lynch's last feature Mulholland Drive seemed to restore the warm consensus that surrounded him during the first series of Twin Peaks, Inland Empire has shattered it anew. (After the recent NFT screening of the film, an event you might imagine to have been filled with happy-clappy Lynch devotees, there were as many sceptics as zealots. My colleague Xan Brooks summed up the un-wowed school of thought when he told me he thought the movie resembled "the work of an old genius with Alzheimer's").

But if levels of admiration have varied wildly, the desire to explain whatever it was that just happened on screen seems to have remained near-universal. So, the talking rabbits and The Locomotion, we ask - what's all that about then?

There is a precedent here - at least some of the success of Mulholland Drive stemmed from its artful spin on the whodunit, the film itself becoming a richly yielding whatwasit that observant viewers could dissect and reassemble into something close to a proper story. A doubtless wryly-smirking Lynch even entered the debate himself with a series of "clues" released to the press ("Notice appearances of the red lampshade"), as media outlets including the Guardian and Salon ran extensive explainers/sounding boards devoted to the movie's tantalising nooks and crannies.

So perhaps it's not surprising - particularly given the sibling resemblance between the two films - that the world has been seeking the same again.

Anyone planning on seeing the movie this weekend should look away now. But for anyone still here, or who might have now seen the film and come back...

The theories are legion. Among the critics, industry totem Variety had one of the most hopeful sallies. To their Jay Weissberg, not only did the film's rabbit sitcom represent an overt link to Alice In Wonderland, the relentless blurring of Dern's identities suggested Lynch, with his devotion to transcendental meditation, was actually expounding on reincarnation. For the Boston Globe's Ty Burr, the film should be understood as a treatise on (to paraphrase its own tagline) all "women in trouble". The film's litany of flickering screens meant to Slant's Ed Gonzalez that it was clearly about "the ecstasy and healing power of watching movies", while for others the cursed production framing the rest of the movie constituted a poisoned valentine to old Hollywood and/or the modern film industry.

But predictably, the most inventive ideas have appeared on forums, in particular that of Lynch's own Inland Empire site. There, posters have mused at length on what the director was intending the film to signify. The permanence of memory? The future of eastern Europe? His own body of work? Telepathy? The natures of men and animals? The terror of one woman (but not Dern) at the loss of her husband and child?

All as valid, or not, as the next. Personally, though (and this comes from someone who wholly bought into the deconstruction of Mulholland Drive), I think Lynch's newest head trip is probably best understood as not understood at all. Instead, it should just be experienced - a jolt of pure cinema full of revelations about the power of film, but only because of what it is rather than what it says. Closer on many levels to a gallery installation than a Friday night at the movies, it often reminded me of Matthew Barney's epic Cremaster 3 (which, in a typically uncanny feedback loop, originally reminded me of Lynch) - and, much as the factual details of masonic ritual portrayed in Barney's film didn't seem especially relevant to how you responded to it, neither should any of the conjecture about Inland Empire.

Who knows, if it's about anything other than its director's unconscious, it might best be read as a fractured ghost story: a celebration of relics and absences, where even the Lynch staple of the heartbroken diva is heard but unseen, replaced by a grinning lip-syncher. But that could just be so much baloney too. Almost uniquely among any film of any era, Inland Empire is, very genuinely, about whatever you come away thinking it's about - a movie to be processed and digested in the hours, days, and weeks to follow. In short, even if you hate it, your subconscious will thank you for it.

On the other hand, you could always go see Outlaw.