David Lynch's Inland Empire amazes, confuses

Imagine a long, narrow room in complete darkness. A faint, red light glows from a small lamp at the opposite end of the room, revealing a tall, thinly-framed doorway. You run quickly towards the door, but when you get there, the doorway has disappeared.

Turning around, you see the door, bathed in pulsing red light, at the other end of the room. You rocket down the room reaching for the doorknob. And just as you've almost clutched it in your grasp, the door flies off its hinges and swings, as if lifted by a massive invisible arm, and cracks you across the head. Five more doorways appear, and you dazedly reach for the closest one. It disappears and the one on the opposite side of you crashes down on your head. More doors appear and they begin revolving around the walls with red light reflecting off the opaque surfaces.

You stand there with a horrified look on your face as three human-sized rabbits glide down the room towards you and violently stab you in the chest with rusty screwdrivers.

Welcome to the world of David Lynch.

And welcome to Inland Empire, David Lynch's new foray into the world of layered worlds. Of layered imaginations. Of narratives folded on top of, in between, and exorbitantly, within each other. This film requires heavy thought and perception, in addition to a large dismissal of relative reasoning that evaporates the necessity or value of plot.

There's absolutely no point in discussing plot because it's so confounding and bemusing that it certainly becomes clear that the essence of the film lies far removed from it. And anyone familiar with David Lynch's previous work can attest to that.

Inland Empire flows through a similar vein as two of Lynch's previous works, Mulholland Dr. and Lost Highway, yet this film takes his warped vision of layered narrative to new experimental heights.

Mulholland and Highway both concern themselves with a structured duality, a major shift in narrative direction halfway through both films, throwing the audience into a tailspin precipitated by his practice of upending the seemingly real world he created in the first half of the film. Both worlds are loosely connected through shared characters (though often playing different people), with the shift coming to reveal a dream world and a real world.

The trouble comes when you must decipher what is real and what is not. In Inland Empire, Lynch often makes this incredibly difficult. You accept the necessity to discard reason in the pursuit of how the film feels. Lynch is all about the feel of the film, the intuition of the audience and, therefore, the film's characters who represent pieces of the viewer.

Unlike his previous films, here he interweaves the imagined dream world within the real without the huge shift in narrative voice employed in the other two films.

Often, Lynch's dreamworld is more developed and real-like than the actual real world, creating an audience comprehension lag that is so prominent in all of Lynch's films (I do not consider Dune or Elephant Man true Lynch films due to heavy studio involvement and the lack of "final cut" say that Lynch was denied.)

Lynch loves yanking the audience around and around in circles, and no film is more prominent, in this respect, than Inland Empire.

We always remain at least two steps behind Lynch's comprehension and direction of the film, which gives him free rein to throw in bits of newly-created worlds just while we're trying to catch up with him in the last scene.

The first concrete narrative sprouts from the movie set, a device of otherworldliness that was explored in Mulholland Dr. as well.

Living in Hollywood, Lynch has come to enjoy the exploration of imagination through film: the act of one character creating a new world or life for themselves within the realm of Hollywood, or imagining who the actors are, what they do and how the narrator's world would be different if transfigured through their eyes.

Here we have that, but he takes it a step further. He makes the film that our audience surrogate character, actress Nikki Grace (Laura Dern, also a co-producer of the film), is participating in indistinguishable from the actress's real life.

And in fact, at one point, Lynch attempts to convince the audience that this other world, where the actress is actually a poor, battered homemaker-turned-whore, is reality. Then he flips you over.

Incorporated into the film is a short film Lynch made in 2002 called Rabbits, so-called for the family of human-like rabbits that play on a very off-kilter sitcom. This is a device used to introduce the world of television and film to another character, one who becomes our second narrator.

So the question becomes, "Who can we trust?" Laura Dern's actress/homemaker or our Polish girl that infiltrates our film with her imagination?

And it slowly becomes increasingly apparent that Dern is extremely unreliable as a trustworthy surrogate.

Indeed, one scene where the eye of the camera pulls out and reveals another camera on the film set confirms a suppressed suspicion.

Finally, large gaps in understanding are reasonably filled, owing to Lynch finally allowing a catch-up for the audience's comprehension.

Of course, that's two hours and 30 minutes through this two hour and 50 minute film.

The patience of the audience is rewarded by finally coming to a realization that both narratives, including the multiple ones within Dern's world, reveal: what we have here is a Lynch film about the making of a Lynch film and the use of imagination through which the film within the film is created, what it draws from and ultimately, its influence on the actors and the imagination of the audience.

Inland Empire is shot on a simple digital camera, giving the film an even greater surrealistic quality with Lynch's signature use of extreme close-ups and warped imagery.

His exploration into his own world through this intimate imaging technique gives us a glimpse into how he feels about his own work-what he calls his babies.

Lynch claims that he draws his inspiration from his daily meditations and a certain indescribable feeling in the air.

With Inland Empire exploring that very feeling that inspires him to create, now we can all revel in an intimate look into the mind and, more importantly, the feelings of David Lynch.