Crumbling Empire

I watched David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE yesterday. Or better, I tried to watch.

I have long been a Lynch fan, but I think this is where I start to consider if I need to see anymore of his work. The Lynch of the last decade has been far less linear and comprehensibly arranged than his past work, and for an auteur who deals in surrealism, it's frighteningly easy to completely go off the rails. Both Lost Highway and Mullholland Dr. dealt with identity and reality, as does INLAND EMPIRE, and like Mullholland Dr. there is a firm focus on stars, fame, and the filmmaking process.

The film itself is situated around the premise of an actress who gets a part in a film and starts loosing touch with what is and isn't real life. Is her romance with her co-star part of the film with a film or reality? If I was able to sit through the almost three hours of disjointed, fragmented film I could tell you. To get a synopsis, you're better off going here. I made it only through the first hour and by then I was too bored by the sluggish pace and bothered by the technical aspects of the movie.

The film, shot entirely in digital video, and often handheld, makes the movie look like a student production, which given Lynch's ability to compose and create a shot is tragic. Sadly, Lynch says he will continue to shoot exclusively in DV. Like a student production, the scenes were often poorly and unevenly lit, which did little to help the visual quality. And then there was the sound. If somebody actually did the sound recording, they should be barred from the industry. Half the time the dialogue was too soft to hear, cauing me to have to back the DVD up several times to try and hear what was said, only to move on after determining the inaudibility. The extra 10 dB I had to listen to the movie at didn't help at all -- and that's 10 dBs louder than where I listen to well mixed films with explosions and music going on with dialogue still clearly distinguishable.

In a 2005 interview, Lynch spoke about the shooting process of INLAND EMPIRE, saying that, "I’ve never worked on a project in this way before. I don’t know exactly how this thing will finally unfold... This film is very different because I don’t have a script. I write the thing scene by scene and much of it is shot and I don’t have much of a clue where it will end. " Big mistake. While we now know what happens when Lynch gets a DV and just starts shooting, it is not anywhere near the caliber of his skill or credits.

Isolating any moment of film will get you a image that is very Lynch in composition and color, but string them all together and run it at 24 fps and you lose much of that art, which is the only positive technical aspect of the film. The actors are fantastic, but with such weak material and plot, it's no more than a series of exercises testing their emotional range like a set of audition pieces. There have been less and less moments of greatness from Lynch, starting with Lost Highway and continuing through Mullholland Dr. to this current disaster, which when held up against Wild At Heart or Twin Peaks or even the "mainstream" Dune, is harder to take as a fan.

INLAND EMPIRE was so bad an experience I was forced to watch Blue Velvet just to forget what I had seen.