Inland Empire

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.