Inland Empire + Outer Space Analysis

Inland Empire is a 2006 postmodern experimental feature length film and the latest by David Lynch. The film is nightmarish and a challenging to understand. The film follows Nikki Grace (Laura Dern), an actress who wins a part in a cursed film that consumes her as she becomes immersed in it. The film is about cinema, in particular Hollywood. The creation of a film is a creation of a different world with its own laws and possibilities. Inland Empire is a psychological exploration of the surreal constructed world by the actress starring in it. Nikki Grace's entrapment mirrors the viewers own unconscious immersion in the film.

The film opens with a projector light, moving onto a needle playing a record, introducing the video and sound as elements of the film, being self reflective of itself as a construction of the two. This black and white opening is extremely similar to the black and white projector opening from Persona (Bergman, 1966), a film Lynch has stated inspired him, and that mirrors many of the themes of Inland Empire such as film-within-film, the fourth wall and mental health.
The simple, claustrophobic sets and sickly colour scheme causes the film world to seem unreal, suggesting a psychological space which the actress inhabits, and reminding us constantly that the film world is fake. The falseness of film and film sets becomes her real world as she becomes immersed in the character and tackles her subconscious.

The film repeatedly crosses into a film within a film without the audience, nor the protagonist being aware ("Damn, this sounds like dialogue from our script"). By doing this Lynch allows us to view the film's broken and elliptical non-linear structure as a reflection of Nikki Grace's mind, as she, like the viewer was unaware of the illusion, whereas the other actors and crew can see what is real and what is false. She both falls in love and is killed within the film, but in reality is unaffected physically but still mentally.
The film is at times structured in layers like a dream, through which Nikki passes. Upon seemingly escaping the film and returning to the realistic studio setting, we believe she has returned to reality. However as she walks out of the studio door, she walks off screen left to reveal that too was just a set.

The raw, often handheld camerawork and low quality DV aesthetic moves away from traditional cinematography. Rather than looking like a high budget film, the DV gives it a low budget documentary/home movie style, adding a realistic aesthetic that is subverted by the surrealism. Lynch uses poorly edited effects such as superimposing faces that seem much more unnerving due to their clear falseness. 

What makes the worlds Lynch creates so chilling is the deviations from our own world that the characters in Lynch's world accept as reality. In doing this, his world seems not less real for it's clear falseness but more so, as an alternate, nightmarish subconscious world that we can witness through Lynch's lens. Unlike other Lynch protagonists (such as Sailor Ripley or Henry Spencer) however, Nikki Grace is far less synchronised with her world, instead feeling lost and isolated in it. This could suggest whilst other characters in Lynch films are inhabitants of their world, Nikki Grace is perhaps not an inhabitant, instead passing into the Lynchian world as an actress in one. The DV realistic aesthetic could further suggest a passing of the fourth wall from our world into the Lynchian filmic world.

The film makes it unclear what appears real and isn't, and what doesn't appear real but is. For example at the beginning, a visiting neighbour tells Nikki she is wrong about assuming there is not a murder in her film. Later in the film, at perhaps it's most unrealistic, Nikki shoots a man but he doesn't die, instead lighting up and becoming a projection of her fears. However as it cuts back to her face she looks down to the floor. At a different part of the film, Nikki is stabbed and dies on a street, but it is later revealed that she wasn't stabbed and the wound was just fake and part of the film. By doing this Lynch reminds us to see through the illusion, that what we see on screen is not real. But by making the shooting seem extremely unreal, Lynch could be suggesting that this could have happened, but we witness it through the protagonists unreliable subjective view.

 The film is very relevant to our own project, as is most of Lynch's work. Lynchian has been defined as referring to "a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter." (Wallace, D.F 1996). By this he means that Lynch uses predetermined, personal readings of familiar, mundane, recognisable images to augment the darkness and absurdity of his films, which exists in the recognisable. In our one minute project, we plan to anthropomorphise a lamp, a regular, recognisable object, turning him into a man through the medium of film. We also hope to shoot in an abandoned location (housing or a hotel to give it a recognisable appearance) to show what was once familiar and occupied made unfamiliar and empty. The mysterious Lampshade man was inspired by the Rabbits, their inhuman heads making it inexplicit whether they are human or something else. In relation to the definition of Lynchian, our one minute could be seen as a reversal. Rather than the uncanny and macabre manifesting in the mundane world, our film would be the mundane manifesting in the macabre. The lifeless, plain lamp and empty hotel space become nightmarish and surreal, as the lamp forms a body. We aim to further explore similar ideas and styles with the 5-10 minute film. 

I also watched Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassky, 1999), an experimental short shot on black and white film. The film warps the image and sound through heavy editing, making any narrative unfollowable. Presented as a traditional horror, the performance of the actress in fear with no physical threat shown suggests the threat comes not from the physical but from the medium itself. This could convey a more psychological, internal conflict, rather than external. I love the film’s aesthetic and want to try something similar in my 5-10 minute, perhaps using tape and film, manipulating time and the image to warp the communication of information from the footage to the viewer.