David Lynch’s filmography made a significant transition with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), his prequel to the television series, first by centering the narrative on a woman, then by embodying the subjectivity of the woman in the form of the film, and resulting, finally, in a fragmented and expressionist narrative used for exploring the story of a severely damaged woman. Although the director returned to a male protagonist in his next film, Lost Highway (1997), it further pushed the degree to which a conventional protagonist-centered storyline could be warped by the psychic pressures on its hero, and Mulholland Dr. (2001) picked this thread back up and returned to the female subject that first so fascinated and challenged Lynch’s style. This trajectory reaches its apex in Inland Empire, a work that integrates Lynch’s direction of increased narrative subservience to the impulses of an unsure consciousness and his emotionally wrought and far more personal films centered on disturbed female subjects with the director’s original—and still thriving, albeit on the internet—predilection for experimental cinema. Inland Empire finds a perfect match in harkening back to the avant-garde aesthetics of Eraserhead and Lynch’s student short films at the same time it embraces the director’s contemporary explorations of subjective storytelling.

This storytelling, as inscrutable and impenetrable as it often may be, is supremely rooted in the fractured psyches of Lynch’s protagonists. Like Laura Palmer before her, Laura Dern’s Sue of Inland Empire is introduced to us as a woman already existing between the line of life and death, one both in the process of death and of seeing a rupture between herself and the world around her that displaces and destabilizes her sense of her place in the world. Although Fire Walk With Me was rooted in the after-effects of a victim of rape and incest, and Betty/Diane in Mulholland Dr. in traumatic gap between expectation and reality, in Inland Empire, more than any other Lynch feature, the sources of the woman’s trauma is obscured. But for what it loses in its lack of specificity, it gains in its empathetic abstraction, its emphasis on barely-defined terror. It seems to have something to do with the burdens of roles places on Sue, who starts the film out as a married, once-famous actress about to make her comeback directed by a notable filmmaker (Jeremy Irons) and starring Billy (Justin Theroux) as the man with whom she cheats on her husband. But almost immediately the roles cross over: Sue is both the woman, married and perhaps in love with Billy, and the actress playing the married woman and in love with the role Billy plays. Her husband speaks ominously to Billy that his wife Sue is “bound” by her marriage to both him and some mysterious outside power, and Sue seems trapped by the roles that are continually assigned to her, be they reality, acted out, or fantasy. The location and reasoning behind the various shifting spaces and roles that swirl around Sue at the film’s center are as bizarre as they are disturbing: there is a sitcom parody starring bunnies (that has been a feature of Lynch’s website for some time) on Polish television, a lower-class suburban family unhappily married (in which Sue is the wife), and a group of girlfriends who later double as street hookers.* This, and the production of the film itself, are cross-cut with images supposedly, and very loosely, based on a previous production of the film, made in Poland and cursed from the start, but at a certain point Lynch’s manner of slipping between story lines and disparate spaces soon escapes rational logic and moves in supremely intuitive flourishes of Sue’s rapidly displaced subjectivity.

The number of digressions in the film is continually startling, but there is a total unity to the work and that is due not just to Lynch but to the outrageously powerful and courageous performance by Laura Dern. Her character, like the film at times, displays a remarkable self-awareness, as if she is not only shocked, traumatized and baffled by her splintering grip on herself, but that Dern the actress too cannot believe what she is seeing and what is happening to her in the process of filming. The feeling is supremely heightened by Lynch’s use of video technology instead of film, which not only allowed him to construct the film in disparate pieces over the years, but also allowed him to embrace the peculiarities of the video aesthetic. He is the first major feature filmmaker in my memory to completely successfully use digital as a medium unto itself, reveling in the murk and gloom of jumping pixels and odd lighting, the eerily stutter-flicker of the slower refresh of the video catching the pulse from lights, the Godard-like overlap and uncanny slow motion of the saturated images, the strange focal effects of intense close ups that warp the space behind the face, and the sometimes faux-documentary banality of natural digital space, hanging there with utmost unreality. While Lynch’s films are often praised (or condemned) for his dream imagery and logic, the ragged rawness of Inland Empire’s look is channeled through a narrative that more than any of the director’s before it embraces the form of a fevered dream. It is one, long, disjunctive cry of agony from Sue, who laments the fragmentation of her consciousness as the instability of her place in the world collapses and confuses so much around and inside her. The film is ashen in color, and mournful in tone; it is Lynch’s most poetic film, an elegy to a woman lost amongst the binding rules both of the world she lives in and of the filmic medium (and Lynch-history) she exists in. Sue’s lost exploration of the stages and planes of her identity are structured around a brutal, stream of conscious monologue in which she tells of her violent past history with men, and the film likewise takes upon itself a visual stream of consciousness, moving at the skipping whims of a frenzied mind and a soul trying to grab a hold of itself amidst nothing but shifting roles, dark corridors, doubles, and horror-film versions of herself. The movie is brutal, uncompromising, and brilliant, and it marks a delirious step forward for its filmmaker and a landmark performance from its actress.


Upon a re-viewing of this film, this theme now appears as only one of many possibilities. More prevalent, or at least more clearly put forth in the film is not the idea of role-dependency but rather of infidelity. This links Inland Empire both thematically and formally with Lost Highway, where a married man cannot handle the idea of his wife cheating on him, goes insane, kills his wife, and then escapes into a kind of fantasy/fragmented-consciousness, and with Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, whose narrative also hinges on the effects of the revelation of possible infidelity on the psyche, self-image, and desires of its protagonist. The infidelity of Inland Empire is that inside the plot of Nikki’s film-within-the-film which then leaks outside, causing her to confuse her character’s attraction to cheating to her own attraction. This links up with the end of the movie, where the Polish woman who apparently has been watching almost the entirety of Inland Empire’s multi-discursive narrative from a television in a hotel room is obliquely revealed to be a married woman waiting in the hotel to have sex with a man who is not her husband. Nikki somehow escapes out of the diegetic world of the television and blesses, inspires, or merges with this woman, causing her to return home. Thus the following scene of the woman being reunited with her son and her husband (who is played by the same actor who is Nikki’s rich husband and her suburban, deadbeat husband).