The Emperor Of Ice And Screams

[January 10th, 2007] Somewhere in the obfuscating mists of David Lynch's Inland Empire, Laura Dern sits in a cramped room to share her troubles. In the first two hours of the movie she's appeared as an unsettled actress and an adulterous Southern belle, and in the third hour she'll moonlight as a murder victim and a distended death's head, but for now her persona is a wronged woman—Quentin Tarantino's bride by way of a rural honky-tonk. "I can't remember what came first," Dern tells a sweaty, porcine private eye. "It's really dropped a mind-fuck on me."

Listen, honey, we understand. David Lynch specializes in screwing with heads—literally, on occasion: One of his favorite images is one actor's cranium on another's body. Lynch is capable of restraining his surrealism long enough to complete a masterpiece or two (The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet) but then he's off again down the lost highway. You can't stop David Lynch; you can only hope to contain him.

The producers of Inland Empire (a number that includes Dern) didn't hope to contain him. They've given Lynch his freest rein yet—and he has returned to them a 172-minute psychological epic about...well, I don't have the first clue what it's about. It definitely has something to do with the feminine consciousness, and the perils of acting, and a sitcom starring a family of talking rabbits. There's also a good bit of attention paid to the snow-swollen streets of Poland, a group of prostitutes who look like Suicide Girls, and Little Eva's version of "The Locomotion." And hallways. David Lynch loves him some hallways. At a conservative estimate, 20 minutes of Inland Empire consist of people walking silently through hallways.

None of which makes Inland Empire a bad movie. It doesn't make it a good movie. It doesn't make it, strictly speaking, a movie. It's more of an art installation, with Dern contributing a dedicated performance and allowing her face to be contorted into a screaming clown mask. A cursory stab is made at a plot—something about a haunted Hollywood set—but that effort at rationality is abandoned in the second reel, as Lynch explores his random obsessions.

The movie's title is, naturally, never explained, but the phrase is telling nonetheless. David Lynch has slipped free from studio control and become emperor of his own interior universe, a place where he can gratify any whim he pleases. The result is three hours of self-pleasuring. In fact, sitting through Inland Empire is less like a mind-fuck and more like watching a masturbating monkey: It's sort of amusing, more than a little disturbing, and as much as you'd like to, you can't look away. But three hours of that sight is a bit much.