
By Ryan Thomas
Seeing Inland Empire for the first time is like watching a nightmare unfurl in real time. That’s not just because of Lynchian dream-logic or the juxtaposition of its disparate, otherworldly parts. No other film I know bottles the texture and rhythm of a bad dream, the way it looks, the way it feels and the way it moves. Genuinely, there’s nothing like it.
I say this having seen the movie only once, in a now-closed theater in Raleigh on the occasion of its 2022 rerelease. I saw it with a few friends who 1) are not cinephiles and 2) were not sober. We sat cramped in rickety seats for three hours, totally quiet, and said maybe 12 words on the ride home. They didn’t understand a thing, they told me, but they “were never bored.” I thought that was as good a description of Inland Empire as any.
They say that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and writing about the films of David Lynch — probably more than any other filmmaker — fits that description too. Inland is one of my two or three favorites of his, again with the caveat that I’ve only seen it once. I love the lo-fi rough-and-tumble standard-def video photography; I love movies about moviemaking; I love the soundtrack, from Lynch himself; I love the figurative rabbit holes and the literal rabbits; I love Laura Dern.
And I love unedited, uncensored epics from master filmmakers, of which Inland Empire definitely is one. The working title for the movie could have been Mulholland Drive (David’s Version); he is again working through ideas about Hollywood and its discontents, along with love, fear, death, dreams and “a woman in trouble” (the tagline for Inland). His LA triptych – Inland, Mulholland Drive (2001) and Lost Highway (1997) — all feature doubles, split personalities or parallel-universe doppelgängers, either women who want to be someone else or men who can’t stand to be themselves.
In Inland, Dern plays both “Nikki Grace” and “Sue Blue,” the former a Hollywood actress and the latter a character she plays. There’s also Justin Theroux as her costar, Jeremy Irons as her director, Harry Dean Stanton as “Freddie Howard,” Mary Steenburgen as “Visitor #2,” Nastassja Kinski as “The Lady,” William H. Macy as “The Announcer,” Naomi Watts as a rabbit, Terry Crews as a homeless man and Grace Zabriskie as probably the most terrifying movie character of all time.
As for narrative, I intentionally avoided the Wikipedia plot summary for this piece. But I do remember a soapy, supposedly “cursed” film-within-the-film. And infidelity. And pimps and prostitutes, and Poland. And a barbecue of some sort, maybe? And the talking rabbits. And Laura Dern’s face.
I remember the feeling Inland Empire gave me, which hasn’t left. And the excitement (and terror and dread) I feel about seeing it again, at IPH, in a dark dream palace where someone like David Lynch can grab hold of your subconscious and, if you’re lucky, never really let go.