Inland Empire (2006) is David Lynch’s tenth feature-length film, and by most accounts, likely his last. The reasons for this revolve around the film’s polarizing effect on its audiences. Inland Empire remains a demanding, unsettling, and mesmerizing three-hour viewing experience, one that divides not only openminded viewers willing to give this strange, labyrinthine work a chance, but also many of Lynch’s devoted fans, who, upon its release, anticipated something closer to its predecessor, the enigmatic but far more comprehensible Mulholland Drive (2001). Inland Empire finds the director at his most liberated—or, for some, in need of restraint. 

The film is an exercise in control: it was shot in fits and starts over a three-year period, made on Lynch’s own terms and timeline, without studio or network interference. Working independently with relatively affordable, consumer-grade digital video technology and nonlinear editing software, Lynch was free to experiment, so he abandoned conventional filmmaking roadmaps and guardrails, such as a finished screenplay, and embraced an improvisational mode of free association. Ideas would arrive sporadically and galvanize a shoot. The lower costs of production and the support of a nimble, modest-sized crew committed to the cause allowed Lynch to follow the unforeseen lead of his incoming mental moving images, developing and occasionally changing things on-the-spot. As if coming full circle, the immersive inner sanctum of creativity and spontaneity amid a stop and start production schedule in Los Angeles and Łódź, Poland summoned the renowned tight-knit conditions and dilated timeline that cultivated Lynch’s first-feature, Eraserhead (1978). Like Eraserhead, the film that many presume to be his final contribution to theatrical or classical moviemaking illustrates that Lynch’s “total control” involves a profound loss of it—for both the filmmaker, who takes dictation from ideas that refuse the logics of calendar time and deadlines, and the viewer who must endure the impression of the artist’s hand in dictation, a signature at once released and realized by the work, now in zeroes and ones. Absent and abstracted coordinates (missing links) outline Lynch’s uninhibited omnipresence throughout Inland Empire. It is a process to be seen; some have suggested that Inland Empire takes us further into his head than any of his other films, providing an experience that might be thrilling or alienating, if not both simultaneously, or neither.

Lynch invites us inside through markers of narrative accessibility and familiar filmic storytelling. Inland Empire follows actor Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) as she lands the leading role in a film called On High in Blue Tomorrows with costar Devon Berk (Justin Theroux). After an ominous visit from an unnamed, accented neighbor (Grace Zabriskie), Nikki soon learns from director Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons) that their project is a remake of an unfinished film based on a Polish folktale in which the two leads were murdered. Setting aside rumors that the film is cursed, Nikki gradually appears to lose herself in her onscreen role as “Susan Blue” opposite Devon’s “Billy Side.” As Nikki’s identity disintegrates and dissolve into other characters and figures, Inland Empire’s world expands and mutates, becoming further entangled with its on-and offscreen representation. Like Nikki, we are lost in this film, and, to a certain extent, that seems to be the point. The personae, locales, and temporalities of the diegetic shoot we thought we had been following, all of which features and transforms this actor (Dern) before us as she moves masterfully, indistinguishably inside and outside of characters while in some character, somewhere—Nikki, Susan, and at least two others, perhaps more or less—brings new meaning to the act of being captured by the camera and enclosed within the filmic frame. Like a webpage whose manifold coded origins and links open at once in a maddening cascade, Inland Empire is perpetually on the verge of transplanting us elsewhere, down depopulated hallways and dimly lit corridors, jumping into other territories, languages, dimensions, ciphers, folktales, realities, and technologies (old and new). It seems that everything has become fodder for this digitalized cinematic machine and its foggy pixelated visuals, distortions of light and perspective, and tight, anxious framing. “In Inland Empire, truly a horror movie for the digital age,” writes Dennis Lim, “it’s not that the ghost is in the machine. The ghost is the machine.”[1] While Lim’s comments address the excavation of video spectrality in the film, they additionally correspond with Justus Nieland’s discussion of Inland Empire as a “charged psycho-technical landscape,” a surrealist restaging of media vitality “through its insistence that the flows of electronic media, information, and consciousness share a basic situational instability”: a disembodied network within this ghost machine, the reign of a dictating emperor-head.[2]

With its seemingly incongruent plotlines and arbitrary leaps, Inland Empire frustrates our efforts to describe it adequately in advance, let alone decipher the film’s meaning as if there was just one that could be set to rest. And yet, while Inland Empire is a radically disjointed outlier even for Lynch and his comparable “puzzle films,” its milieu and identity crises are linked to other notable characters and themes from his cinematic oeuvre, not least the nightmares of the Hollywood dream machine that Lynch explored with Mulholland Drive, and (to a lesser extent) Lost Highway (1997). Spanning nearly ten years, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire are often clumped together as Lynch’s “Los Angeles Trilogy,” a label that speaks to the director’s preoccupation with the place that he has called home since 1970 and his reflections on his adopted hometown that mine the disorientation, treachery, terror, and darkness of Hollywood’s image making industries, the proverbial “city of dreams” underbelly that presumes that these sullying traits are fundamental to its functioning. All three films demonstrate that there is no escaping “L.A.’s Shadowland,” as Melissa Anderson refers to it by way of Kenneth Anger’s infamous double volumed Hollywood Babylon.[3] This tripartite figure represents a kind of L.A. story, a species of the true crime genre about aspiring starlets, moviemaking, and unscrupulous, influential men mad with power, the all too real “continuum of brutalities and humiliations endured by actresses and actress-hopefuls that exploded into wider view after Harvey Weinstein’s downfall in the fall of 2017.” [4] Lynch’s LA story might be told in at least three different ways, but it is hard to ignore that the trilogy could assume Inland Empire’s made-for-melodrama tagline: a woman in trouble.

Lynch’s interest in depicting Hollywood’s shadowy forces reflect his own fraught relationship to the place that made him famous, the industry that manufactured his household name. His meteoric rise from midnight movie eccentric-genius to Oscar-nominee (The Elephant Man [1980]), subsequent commercial and critical misses (such as Dune [1984] and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me [1992]) while flirting with the mainstream, and multiple instances of professional redemption (most notably Blue Velvet (1986), Mulholland Drive, and the 2017 return of Twin Peaks) are well known, and, presumably, these ups and downs found their way onscreen with the Los Angeles Trilogy. The release of Inland Empire suggested that Lynch had finally learned his lesson that his creative vision and professional well-being are better served in the absence of commercial demands. No doubt, this lesson was fresh in his mind following the fallout with ABC over Mulholland Drive, which Lynch initially pitched to the network as a series in 1998, an idea that ABC eagerly supported with substantial funds for a rare two-hour pilot. As production on the Mulholland Drive pilot began, however, Lynch increasingly faced unsolicited criticism from network executives about the story’s open-ended nature, its bizarre, ostensibly unrelated subplots, potentially offensive material, and even his casting decisions. When Lynch submitted his first cut of the pilot to ABC, he received a request for extensive changes that he begrudgingly integrated into a second version. Despite the network’s early enthusiasm and Lynch’s willingness to make changes to the project, ABC passed on Mulholland Drive, a move that ultimately created the conditions for its revitalization as one of Lynch’s cinematic masterpieces. 

In this light, the vastness and abstractions of Inland Empire remark a kind of an ending, or better, the privilege of making such a film after the end; it is the culmination of what had frustratingly accumulated for Lynch, a refusal to roll the dice one more time, or even play the game. One could turn to a variety of instances in or around the film that express this attitude of finality and repudiation, for instance, the cryptic work Rabbits that first appeared on the now defunct website davidlynch.com, along with other self-produced content such as the irreverent animated series DumbLand and Lynch’s daily weather report. Composed of eight episodes, Rabbits featured actors Scott Coffey, Laura Elena Harring, and Naomi Watts in crude, life-sized bunny costumes comingling in a box set living room that is reminiscent of Dorthy Valen’s Deep River apartment in Blue Velvet. Jack, Suzie, and Jane, as they are credited, speak non sequiturs to one another (or perhaps to nobody but always to us) as they robotically go about domestic routines as if held captive by them—entering and exiting the space through a door, sitting on a sofa, ironing, looking at each other, etc. Interspersed canned laughs and applause, combined with Lynch’s signature distant train whistle, intensify both the familiarity and peculiarity of the phrases and habits that compose this familial, televisual scene.

Put differently, Rabbits communicates through words and actions that register but do not follow, to recall not only the etymology of “non-sequitur,” but also the Lynchian logic or aesthetic deployed here and later in Inland Empire, in which the footage from the web series reappears. By casting and crediting a disguised Watts and Harring in Rabbits, Lynch pins the world of Mulholland Drive to Inland Empire’s via the web, while citing the lack of follow through that occurred with ABC on the former, and more generally, network TV’s reliance on the series format and the sitcom. Rabbits restages the main ingredients of the sitcom without sealing things together or rendering a coherent (followable) throughline, offering us instead evacuated movements and verbal cliffhangers that keep us coming back for more, that, when further sealed, “succeed” thanks to what George Toles calls in reference to Watts’ performance in Mulholland Drive “a sincerity hatched at the core of artifice.”[5] Evoking the acts of watching television and the broadcasted programs that are often seen being watched throughout Lynch’s films, Rabbits emerges during the opening minutes of Inland Empire when the weeping “Lost Girl” gazes into its emission on a snowy television monitor; apparently, she is moved by what she sees.

One could also turn to the film’s actual ending: an upbeat and cathartic farewell that runs into the final credits. Taking place in an adorned parlour or lobby, the last moments of Inland Empire feature a woman with a prosthetic leg who utters a prolonged and genuine “Sweeeeet”; Dern (as Nikki?) sitting on a sofa with Nastassja Kinski while exchanging glances with Laura Elena Harring’s character (Camilla/Rita) from Mulholland Drive; a jumpy capuchin monkey that conjures the primate cameo in Fire Walk with Me and the singing simian to come in Lynch’s 2017 short film What Did Jack Do?; a lumberjack sawing wood, evidently uprooted from the environs of Twin Peaks; the group of young women that had previously performed a choreographed routine to Little Eva’s “Loco-Motion” in the film; and, assuming center stage, a second dancing ensemble of women, whose leader lip-synchs Nina Simone’s shimmering version of “Sinnerman” that has engulfed the soundtrack. Like the diegetic incorporation of Rabbits referencing the acts of television watching in Lynch’s films, Inland Empire’s closing performance converses with other notable instances of lip-synching, playback singing, and staged theatrics in his cinematic worlds. The figurative curtain closes on Inland Empire—and perhaps Lynch’s feature-film corpus—with an anomalous collective tenor of reprieve, a departing self-referential gesture that seems total, hopeful, and perhaps vengeful given Simone’s rendition of this spiritual about divine punishment. Who or what is running from the inescapable promise that they will pay for their sins? Who or what is called to this power? And who or what is empowered by the assurance of this impending reparation, the coming event that drives the neglectful to need the neglected?

Despite Inland Empire’s limited release and mixed reviews, Laura Dern’s performance was universally acclaimed, and Lynch personally saw to mounting an Oscar campaign for her. As he tells it, his team could not afford the typical media blitz to advertise for Dern, so he decided to set up camp on the corner of Hollywood Blvd and La Brea Ave with not just a “For Your Consideration” poster advocating for the actress, but also a live cow and a sign that read “Without Cheese There Wouldn’t be an Inland Empire.” Asked by a Variety reporter about his offbeat and ultimately unsuccessful promotion of Dern’s nomination he said, “I think the Academy members love showbusiness—and this is the showbusiness.”[6] Regarding the cheese reference, Lynch explained in expected fashion: “I ate a lot of cheese during the making of Inland Empire.”[7] Kidding aside (or not), we might wonder about what else fueled the director’s most uncompromising film, what was and remains “in the tank” so to speak, powering Lynch’s refusal of 20^th century filmmaking norms while allowing him to thrive after the purported end.