Inland Empire plot analysis

I saw Inland Empire (2006, David Lynch) at the Paramount Theater in Austin, TX twenty years ago. And have rewatched it quite often. Even posted a piece here last year. After each and every time I watched Inland Empire I have never got it. Until now. Also proud if not smug claim here I snooped around online and don’t think anyone else has tried this interpretation. And not that it matters but I have been obsessively rewatching it and taking notes and thinking about it these past couple weeks. 

All of the scenes in Poland with LOST GIRL and PHANTOM are Vier Sieben. Scenes I been calling the Sepia Polish Narrative. And as I’m sure you know Vier Sieben is the film based on a gypsy cursed Polish folk tale where both of the leads were killed which had to do with something in the script. The same script being filmed as On High in Blue Tomorrows. In Vier Sieben Lost Girl plays a character having an affair behind her husband’s back with her lover played by SMITHY. Lost Girl and her lover both intend to leave their respective spouses for each other in the film.
     Vier Sieben Lost Girl also eventually becomes a prostitute on the street. Her husband Phantom beats her up because of this. Her lover ends up killed on the street. And her lover’s wife is stabbed in the stomach murdered too. Some intriguing bits along the way are that her lover’s wife earlier says I won’t let you have her. And she mentions that she can’t have kids. All of this either can be found in the same screenplay filmed as On High in Blue Tomorrows or manifested as effects of the cursed old Polish folk tale.
     In On High in Blue Tomorrows NIKKI GRACE and DEVON BERK likewise play an adulterous couple. And Nikki’s character SUE BLUE will similarly work the street as a prostitute. Up to this point I’ve been using character names as they’re listed in the credits but me diverging from that here I’m making up my own names and want to refer to the character Julia Ormond plays instead of DORIS SIDE from here on as ORMOND.
     In both Vier Sieben and On High in Blue Tomorrows the female lead has an affair with a male character whose wife is played by ORMOND. I posit that the interrogation scene with white tee and jean shorts ORMOND with a screwdriver sticking out of her gut is in between the films Vier Sieben and On High in Blue Tomorrows. She has the gut wound she got in Vier Sieben and when she stabs street prostitute Sue it’s a scene that’s part of On High in Blue Tomorrows enacting her character’s revenge for committing adultery with her husband BILLY SIDE.
 
Another big mystery occurs when the two leads are reading the script of On High in Blue Tomorrows what happens when they see someone watching them from then disappearing inside the Smithy’s House set on their soundstage. Later revealed it was another Nikki. I see the Smithy’s House set as a locus where the curse shifts the leads between worlds.
     Nikki Grace is a rich movie star. Her husband PIOTREK is protective jealous possessive Polish. When Nikki shifts to what I like calling her Mumblecore Narrative this starts with the scene she’s cooking scrambled eggs on the stove. The beautiful thing about Inland Empire and David Lynch for that matter is that the divisions between these worlds aren’t clear cut. They’re blurry. Intuitive. Cinematic. Dreamy. I think white trash Sue Blue Axxon N monologues to the guy behind the desk is On High in Blue Tomorrows whereas Mumblecore Narrative Nikki is at the barbecue in the backyard and the guy who has the ketchup accident all over his white tee is Smithy.
     As in Smithy is married to Lost Girl and neither of them are characters in either Vier Sieben or On High in Blue Tomorrows. This couple lives in Southern California. Sometime during or after filming her role as the lead in Vier Sieben Lost Girl got trapped in that room where she has to watch tv and cry. That is until her husband Smithy finds the old Polish people with some kind of metaphysical supernatural or otherwise abstract cinematic capacity who’ve summoned him to reunite them with their son à la Blue Velvet once he delivers the pistol they give him to Mumblecore Narrative Nikki so she can kill the Phantom.
     Yet another crucial link is Lynchian violence. Lynch is a master of sound design. Consider how in Vier Sieben when the character Lost Girl plays is severely beaten by her cuck husband and when Mumblecore Narrative Smithy assaults his wife both instances take on this unsettling jarring abrasive violent static sound design that links them. This link is how the curse works. Like déjà vu or some force beyond your control pulling you into shifting you into another reality. But again speaking of sound design what happens when Nikki kills the Phantom? Peaceful. Soft.
 
Loose ends. What has to be my wildest take the way ORMOND in Vier Sieben tells her husband I’m not who you think I am. And one of the LA girls breaks the fourth wall and reiterates Who is she? Later when Mumblecore Narrative Nikki is getting attacked the aggressor says I’m not who you think I am is the result of the curse taking the linking connective possession of him. The ORMOND character in Vier Sieben curse is she is doomed to shift between Vier Sieben and On High in Blue Tomorrows. In the Smithy’s House set Piotrek is cursed to shift identities between Nikki Graces’s rich husband and Smithy the husband of Lost Girl. 
     What about that black and white scene in the beginning when the man and woman with blurred out faces go into that room with the couch and he uses her as his whore? This feels like Lost Girl submitting to sexual harassment casting couch to get a role in Vier Sieben. And this has been said before online I didn’t come up with it. A lot of people read into Mulholland Drive (2001, Lynch) a whole plethora of blue color-coded vast conspiracy systemic sexual assault quid pro quo Hollywood predator behavior and I’ve long asked myself how does this relate to the overall experience of deciphering meaning from the narrative of that film and now to an extent Inland Empire.
     I’m starting to lean a little more into it. Say Lost Girl had been taken advantage of by some predator producer is part of the curse. Say she’s trapped in that room because she’s captive held against her will forced to have sex with other men there. Say she shows this to Nikki through the silk hole. And the Lynchian exchange say Nikki Grace has distanced herself from corrupt Hollywood but gets this role even though she’s washed up has-been and Lost Girl in return experiences this as evidenced by that shot of her quoting dialogue from Sunset Boulevard (1950, Billy Wilder).
     And cringey notice those lines of dialogue when the LA girls at Smithey’s House say they let the Phantom do whatever he wants and eagerly spread their legs wide for him. This I will concede could serve dual purpose of reflecting him being a predator producer. Say the curse the VISITOR #1 tells Nikki a little boy went out to play and caused a reflection then evil was born could be read as the predator producer of Vier Sieben saw his opposite in that film. Namely him being married to Lost Girl and her cucking him. Say the Phantom’s hypnotizing manipulations is cinematic symbolism for coercing women into something they do against their will? This also presents a troubling interpretation of Smithy’s offhand remarks that he works for Phantom. But all the better to be used by the old Polacks to lure the horse to the well. I have a hunch Vier Sieben didn’t happen so long before On High in Blue Tomorrows as we may have thought.
     So ok Nikki probably drapes her blue silk robe over the chair in the theater at the end to symbolize her shedding the cloak of denial feigned ignorance of predator producer. Similarly at the end when Nikki sees rich Nikki wearing blue this could symbolize her remaining naïve in another sense. It seems too easy the way Nikki shoots Phantom. It can’t be that easy.
     But why we get an insert of Smithy taking off his green silk robe or pajama top I dare not venture to guess. I know what your thinking. But could it be that obvious? It’s not about the bunny. 
 
Closing. Ever notice how often the visual motif of movie lights occur? The title card I used to think was a lighthouse spot now makes more sense. Marilyn Levens’ Starlight Celebrity Show sequence opens with a Klieg light. The David Lynch voice cameo as BUCKY JAY that causes Irons to break character laughing all revolves around adjusting a light. You want the 2K lower boss? Try to find some more on your own have fun.

Little earthquakes

Tender heartwrenching nihilism tragedy. Mark Retribution (2006, Kiyoshi Kurosawa) slowburn burntout police procedural that turns out to be a ghost story whose thesis is boomer deranged psychopath mental asylum patient as the result of gentrification enacts full scale mass murder serial killer plot against the entire city.

     Such desperation is to be found in the source of the murder impulse here. Specifically the way Psychoghost is prisoner by her own decision in the liminal black soot sanitarium and each of her proxies were passengers on the Bayside Ferry commuters the only albeit distant contact with life outside. And if you put on your thinking cap this is a big outside motif here. As in outside of the awareness of abuse. Outside of mental illness. Outside of social interpersonal connection. You know stuff like that. Yet through a glass darkly in the blink of an eye we see her.

 
The homicidal cue that plagues the instruments of Psychoghost’s homicidal wrath stems from the vulnerability through which it’s channeled. Nobody notices me. So the variety of unsettling Kiyoshi Kurosawa conjures in Retribution is unreliable morality. And the ending is a knockout.
     Psychoghost’s spirit control killings are breadcrumbs to lead detective YOSHIOKA Kôji Yashuko to her. Most J-horror ghost stories much like our modern age of social media just want their voices to be heard. And the resolution we seem to get is that Psychoghost chose the detective because he probably something like morbidly refused to let go of his wife HARUE who as it turns out we didn’t know the whole time was also a ghost. So the super messed up ending is really Harue has to accept that although the detective has finally moved on which means she will no longer have to be his ghostwife he will most definitely be helping with Psychoghost’s killing spree.
     Yet most unsettling of all is we are never told what happened to Harue. That’s a choice. It’s intentional. It’s beyond ambiguous. It’s withheld. The floral dress print remains figure lying face down on the floor of the detective’s flat with the braided hair is most definitely the body of a child. I love that a dark secret can be a dark secret. It doesn’t matter what happened to Harue what matters is what it’s done to the detective. Except something else crazy to think about is Psychoghost probably knows and might even have added to her reasons for choosing him.
 
The other homicides are crucial. To repeat myself yet again it’s to Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s strengths of somehow granting importance lived in character dynamic verisimilitude everyday relatability to all of his however small of their role supporting characters. Even though we know the impulse driving them is misguided rantings of a psychopath I still empathize if not condone at least what SAKUMA does.
     The doctor whose kid bullies him how can you not? When that snotty punk rudely asks his doctor dad for a hundred used syringes to pay off an upperclassman at the high school brings the gentrification angle into a parallel for degradation of society class family values. And I feel for the schlub. When schlub dad rams the plunger of anesthetics into the kid I swear the emotional underscoring facilitates relief disavowal approval resolution Retribution.

5. Women in Trouble—David Lynch’s two Hollywood pictures

The difference between Mulholland Drive (2001, David Lynch) and the rest of the films Lynch made is that it takes us to a place where we get to experience all of the bliss exhilaration joy sweet wonder promise of everything. Particularly our first love and a creative passion we love both so intensely as if to make our lives perfectly realized. Emotional paradise. 

     And by this I mean the BETTY world. The bulk of the film. When was the last time this kind of plucky G-rated schmaltz camp was so gratifying? It’s never too much. The wide-eyed naïve excessive enthusiasm is me. An involuntary tendency I have that’s been pointed out to me. And I’m pretty sure I got it from this movie. The most exemplary instance of this has probably always been this line when Betty leaves for her audition and says And don’t drink all the Coke which I’ve always matched to an identical scene from Showgirls (1995, Paul Verhoeven) when Showgirl tells her roommate And don’t eat all the chips.
     I’d say the point in Mulholland Drive that causes me to exclaim I cannot believe how perfect amazing awesome this movie is is when Betty and RITA go to those apartments and Betty decides to break into Diane Selwyn’s apartment by climbing in through that back window. Aside from the kind of mystery we work out with our intellect this is the kind of beat in a mystery yarn that on some primal level is just so rad fun on its own. But then throw in our intellects working and we get the girl who was lured betrayed whored out ridiculed punished and humiliated by the love of her life on a dream Hardy Boys adventure with the idealized version of said love in the most romantic amateur sleuth scenario to find out the identity of a woman who we know is her and is also the one dreaming the dream we are in and at the same time has already committed suicide because of it and we have to ask ourselves when has any other movie taken us anywhere like this before?
     When cinema evokes establishes encodes and exchanges a meaning with us that is impossible to put into words we get Club Silencio. Ever since the first time I saw this when Rebekah Del Rio sings Llorando and Betty convulses in her seat I’ve always immediately recognized as getting your heart broken for the first time the hardest the most painful that moment right before the end when you realize it was all an illusion that is about to irrevocably vanish from reality and you’ll pumpkin back into life without her and I cry every time the most cathartic scary happy vulnerable messy invigorating sobs you’ll ever know. The No hay banda illusion is infatuation cinema and dreams. It’s no less than our very existence.
     But what about all of the other trauma dark abuse hidden meanings in Mulholland Drive you ask? I mean they’re there yeah. But acknowledging most of them never really seemed to add anything that significant to the whole viewing experience for me. The Lynch clues. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to answer that last one Where is Aunt Ruth? I mean all I’ve got is that after Rita drops the blue cube and we shift to what I presume is Diane Selwyn’s real world then Aunt Ruth enters her bedroom and doesn’t notice the cube on the ground yet later at the dinner party Diane says she had an aunt that died and left her some money so? Where is Aunt Ruth? I wanna say Aunt Ruth is this like fulcrum of verisimilitude in the sense she was a source for Diane Selwyn to base her fantasy Aunt Ruth on but in the real world of Mulholland Drive she has nothing to do with her. But the cube is in her room. As in this uncanny Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974, Jacques Rivette) moment with a remnant of a reality beyond our own that shows up in our real world. Cinema is candy. Cinema is a mystery box.

Mumblecore folk tale collective unconscious recognition repetition. You know I’d never thought of Inland Empire (2006, David Lynch) as mumblecore before but it’s shot on prosumer MiniDV lacks a conventional narrative and the definitive proof according to my definition a scene where Laura Dern’s character makes scrambled eggs the telltale mumblecore trope. If Mulholland Drive is all about what if feels like to have your heart broken for the first time then Inland Empire is about how fun it is to play make believe.
     Also of primary importance is how David Lynch’s final film feels the most DIY creative indie low budget artistic freedom art film meta distillation culmination of his life’s work. Ironic to consider his big Hollywood film is both narratively and aesthetically in its execution anything but. And like Mulholland Drive I personally don’t go for trying too hard to figure out what all of it means more like I just know how it makes me feel and that’s enough. Come to think of it the only David Lynch film I think I really infer something significantly within its subtext is Lost Highway. 
     Inland Empire then is NIKKI GRACE entering into the folklore of Old Hollywood but at the same time her character exists in a state where time does not exist. Everything’s already happened and the past and future occur interchangeably throughout the film’s narrative. Reflection is an elastic motif that encompasses meta devices such as watching yourself in a movie watching yourself prostitute versions of actresses wives mothers and domestic triangles where someone invariably ends up getting stabbed in the stomach with an old screwdriver. Oh and probably most of it has to do with the PHANTOM. Pretty straightforward.
 
The vibe of Inland Empire is like Axxon N the longest running radio play in history most enjoyable through its serialized continuously unexpected curse it charts. Yes I said curse that isn’t a typo. I’ve always above all loved more than anything the scene with PIOTREK accidentally squirting that entire plastic squeeze bottle of Heinz ketchup all over the white t shirt his stomach he’s wearing then when he asks his wife so calmly where are the paper towels and she says right behind you on the table. And such a cool backyard then all his Polish circus friends show up ominous and that Stanley Kamel dude with the watchmen cap intensity asking where his hammer is. This is the kinda thing in general cinema is lacking in. 

     It’s the subtle little things. Like how KINGSLEY and FREDDIE after we are told they had lousy tea from the commissary when they show up on stage and have a seat look how long of a beat they hold just projecting their distaste that stuff is hilarious. And my obsessive need to match and connect is given full reign with this material like the look at me and tell me if you’ve known me before line. And the manifestations of the visitor’s vague elliptical foreboding fairy tales.
     Inland Empire is also such a fascinating incantation of make believe and how we construct our own meanings because of how it was not only Lynch’s final film but the final and grandest achievement in that short lived little trend of MiniDV features. Remember that? Shot so wonderfully by the likes of Anthony Dod Mantle and Robby Müller movies like The Celebration (1998, Thomas Vinterberg) Julien Donkey-Boy (1999, Harmony Korine) Dancer in the Dark (2000, Lars von Trier) Chuck & Buck (2000, Miguel Arteta) The Original Kings of Comedy and Bamboozled (2000, Spike Lee) 28 Days Later (2002, Danny Boyle) Personal Velocity (2002, Rebecca Miller) 24 Hour Party People (2002, Micheal Winterbottom) Visitor Q (2002, Takashi Miike) and The Girl from Monday (2003, Hal Hartley). These were a time of going back to our roots trying to reclaim the excitement of spontaneity the whole independent craze promised. The MiniDV era was a bridge between Dogma 95 and mumblecore that Lynch was at the forefront of because of not only Inland Empire but a series of content and shorts he was uploading to his website davidlynch.com at a time when the internet wasn’t near as big a thing as it became. This stuff was lo fi raw rough and amateur and Lynch was one of the proponents of embracing this kind of aesthetic as an alternative means to stale bloated mass product Hollywood brainrot garbage. And that time is gone now. And so is he. One awaits the next time we’ll see that kind of spirit make its return. It’s only a matter of time.