Inland Empire

Paolo: As an admirer of much of David Lynch's work, I was almost destroyed to find myself sitting through this grinding, interminable mess. I found it cold, willfully alienating and ugly to look at. Perhaps through no fault of the director’s, the Lynchian aesthetic has become tiresome, predictable and unengaging – an exercise in obscurantism that leaves me indifferent. This is frenzied nonsense! Incoherent and outrageously boring – a real problem for a film that is intended for humans. If I had to stare at Laura Dern's look of consternation for a frame longer, I would have befouled myself.

Ethan: Everything you say is completely true, and to it I would only add that, at three hours, Inland Empire is entirely too long. That said, I couldn't disagree more with your conclusions, and not just because I'm not yet ready to join the adult diaper set. I think of Lynch's output since Blue Velvet (with the exception of The Straight Story) as being one movie in many parts, or maybe multiple, failed attempts at making the same movie. It's an experiment he's been at for more than twenty years now, and I am, as ever, a willing participant. (Incidentally, if your recollection is that the movie looks ugly, I highly recommend watching it again, if only for the breathtakingly beautiful scenes that take place on the Polish street.)

Paolo: Not to say that the film isn't filled with brilliant touches. The scene on the Polish street was one such moment and it felt (in an unexpectedly apt kind of way) like Big Bird's nightmare. The Loco Motion scene in the motel and the rabbit sequences are hilarious and disturbing in equal measure but whereas in previous films Lynch has successfully combined such far-ranging madness into the structure of a more compelling story, here he seems to have lost his grip on it. I cannot see how it is interesting to watch failed attempts. They should be the edits he keeps locked under the stairs with his party dress and hairspray. What I want to see are the scenes that work together to form some sort of dynamic. I'm not sure that frustration is a valid ambition. Because Lynch didn't know or care what was to come next, why should we? Whether he can accept it or not, he has some sort of position in the film but rather than manipulate our expectations of 'a David Lynch film' he just kind of burrowed into himself out of comfort in a very unchallenging way.

Ethan: I guess "failed" was the wrong word for me to use, because I include his more traditionally artistically successful movies (Blue Velvet, say) in the same category, as I do certain other movies that Lynch didn't make but is clearly fascinated by, like Sunset Boulevard, Vertigo, and Laura. These movies all, in some ineffable way, are trying to get at the same thing; what, exactly, that is, I don't know, and I don't think the filmmakers know, either. Lynch's part in the experiment is to see if abandoning logic and "sense" helps, which seems to be a good guess, because if we're so in the dark about what we're trying to figure out, maybe we should embrace it. The incoherence you see as frustrating, I see as liberating. As a fan of other of Lynch's work, I'm sure you're aware of the frantic efforts his fans go through to fit his movies to various "theories", a concept I find very puzzling. It seems to involve an unspoken assumption that beyond the images on the screen lies some external reality, that if you can decide that certain sections of the movie are a "dream" while others are "real", you'll figure out what really happened. But of course that's nonsense, because what really happened was that David Lynch pointed a digital camera at his friend Laura Dern and told her to make faces. By making Inland Empire even more illogical and unfathomable than even his most puzzling previous work, Lynch is telling us that logic is a useless tool in his pursuits, and that while something lies on the other side of the image, it isn't reality.

Paolo: The problem is, in the moment of experience, we do not watch films theoretically, we watch them actually and Lynch's latest doesn't work as a feature on a dramatic level. The film is fun to discuss - and I take your point that he is toying with the narrative logic of cinema and in particular the dominance of the formulaic a-b-c narrative we have been weaned on at the swinging cultural tit of Hollywood - but is it in itself a functioning film? I don't think so. I agree that trying to fit his films into neat theories is pointless, but no because it works on some distant illogical level, simply because it's not worthy of it. Trying to apply the credibility of meaning to Inland Empire is like a blind man in a dark room searching for a black hat that isn't there. It's cruelly intriguing to watch him scrabbling around fruitlessly but sooner or later someone should step in and just quietly lead him away.