Inland Empire

It comes down to the presumption that words possess some innate ability to convey the totality of human thoughts and feelings. The fact that an artist chooses to paint, play music, dance, or make films is because there are states of mind and emotion that defy verbal expression.

Whereas the written word is, after all, just another medium of expression. No closer to any other at being able to accurately convey the sensation of seeing a sunset, or of the anxiety a man feels when faced with fatherhood-- both of which have as their origin the physical interface between the individual's consciousness and the world. The convention of words is merely a convenience, with merely the hope of approximating, through associations, the raw experience of life.

I agree with you in some respects, and I understand there are elements in film that are there to create just an atmosphere, in all films actually, like architecture and lighting. They may not always be justifiable, although I think they could usually be written off with words regardless, but they're there essentially to create the mood of the film.
I'm not sure I agree that the same principles can be used for plot though. Entire scenes and motivations that seem unjustifiable. I suppose it may just be because I didn't experience the emotion, or intangible message, that it was trying to present. I'm not a father, nor am I married. I also don't have the patience for seven minute walking scenes. I'll admit it. I don’t. I may be jaded by mainstream media, or spoiled, but I got incredibly bored during the film, which in turn, may have affected my inability to absorb it's latent dispositional content. I don't know, but I have no reason to enjoy a film for what someone else felt.
I'd also like to add that I'm not an art major. I don't go to art shows and I don't usually associate with artists, so I wouldn't think an "academic prejudice" would have anything to do with my stance. I am a psychology major though, which entirely might. You say that not all emotions or experiences can be summed up into words, but that's what we do. That's Exactly what we do, and it seems more after then not something can be rationalized if It Is There. But that just may be the practice of psychology, the dehumanizing nature of it, and may be able to account for why I was unable to grasp the unspoken for, and unspeakably deep, I guess, qualities of the films presentation.
Maybe it’s like a MagicEye.
Or maybe it’s like a specter that only some people can see.
Maybe the film superimposes experiences only some of us can identify with.
Or maybe it’s simply a generational gap.
Who knows?!?
I’m sure some time later I’ll watch it again, and maybe then I’ll see it for what it might possibly could be.
Until then, I still though it was pretty bad.
I’ll probably try to watch some of his other films though, I’ll admit he’s at least different.

In the end, no amount of verbal justification by an artist or a critic is going to convince a viewer to feel something which he just doesn't. No art, even very good art, is going to affect all people the same way, and that is as I'd expect. I've listened to people effuse over Richard Linklater, Charlie Kaufman, and Jean-Marie Straub, giving detailed reasons why their films are well made and/or important, relevant, meaningful, moving, etc. Sometimes those appreciations can sound very convincing as rhetoric. All it means is that they've succeeded in constructing reasonable arguments. That has little to do with whether or not the work itself has merit as art.

I just wanted to add that this film was shot on DV, digital video. I just saw an interview with Lynch where he said that he will NEVER use film again. Pretty interesting... since the quality of film itself seems to give his older films especially a very particular look.

Leaving Inland Empire, I felt like I was coming out of a seance. The ritual of watching it releases spirits that will haunt you for days afterward.

People say it's Lynch's most difficult film. It's not difficult, just formally dense. His usual style of expositing through metaphors is in effect. Metaphors that catch, tangle and coil together in a serpents' mating ball, mind you, but metaphors nonetheless.

You have to suspend disbelief. Surrender to its metaphysics. Eventually, I parsed it as a rational, psychological, linear story, but that sure wasn't how I felt in the darkness.

Can this movie be understood? In your dreams...

Interpreted: Who was dreaming and why, the reconstructed flow of events, the space the characters inhabited.

Didn't interpret: the letters on Nikki/Susan's arm (what letters were they, again?), the word "AXXON" painted on a wall (Exxon + axon maybe - oil spill + neurotransmitter?), lots of little details.

Has Peter watched it yet? Anyone else?

P.S.: Barb, Lynch is into transcendental meditation and drinks fifteen cups of coffee a day.

Kaufman's alright. Eternal Sunshine... and Adaptation had a lot of forced humor, which took me out of the experience a little bit. Still, the shot of the waves breaking inside the house, from Eternal Sunshine, is one of my favorite movie moments.

I saw "Inland Empire" tonight. Seeing a new David Lynch film, for me, is like wrestling with something uncomfortable, getting frustrated, but I find something beautiful in the end. At first I was thrown by his use of digital video, yearned for something crisper and cleaner, less shaky, but after awhile I decided it was the perfect medium for him. I never thought of it this way before, but it occurs to me that Lynch manipulates film in the way an animator might.

The story to me is about an actress (or an artist, or any of us) who is horrified to discover that one's own life, unlike the lives that we can inhabit temporarily for creative purposes, cannot be so easily discarded or escaped for another. An actress can take the role of an adulteress or a whore, then drop it and forget about it later; but the real adulteress can't walk off the stage and finish the movie. When the actress becomes the subject herself, flirting with an affair that may as well have been pulled from her script, she becomes trapped in her own film. But none of us writes our own movie, and so her movie is not hers, either. It's frightening and unfamiliar, and the ending is a mystery. She goes through a catharsis; she comes to understand the character she is playing, and all the real people who may have inspired it, because she is one of them. She sees herself on the screen, and then embraces the one who has been watching her there, allowing each other to return to their proper places. Each sees the other through the screen, which is really a mirror.

On a lighter note, I loved the final scene as the credits rolled. I do love movies that end with dance scenes, the music was great, Laura Harring shows up, monkey dances in the strobe light, the red-lit stage curtains (in my very Lynchian theater in Portland, anyhow) close at just the right moment, and I've just had one of those rare, once-every-few-years moments that is a new David Lynch film.