Greetings from the dark side of Neptune...
And the award for best actress goes to Laura Dern!
I didn't even know Jeremy Irons was in this film--he's so perfectly smarmy in the part of the expat Brit film director--an unexpected treat, not unlike Jeffrey Wright showing up in Casino Royale.
Now is as good a time as any to discuss the theory of expectations. The theory of expectations, an idea you may be familiar with, if not by the name I give it, says that if you've heard a film is brilliant, your expectations may be so high that you can come out of it disappointed, wondering what all the fuss was about, even though you might have found it perfectly fine otherwise, i.e., the disappointment has more to do with the expectations than with the quality of the film. Conversely, if you think something's going to be shite [the e is not a typo], you might come out of it pleasantly surprised.
Here's what the local weekly said: "None of which makes Inland Empire a bad movie. It doesn't make it a good movie. It doesn't make it, strictly speaking, a movie." Huh?
And even The Oregonian's Shawn Levy was baffled: "I like to think I'm not easily confused. I have read James Joyce's "Ulysses" and the "Cantos" of Ezra Pound several times each. I find relaxation and pleasure in the densest works of Federico Fellini and Jean-Luc Godard. But I am here to tell you that David Lynch's "Inland Empire" left me grasping for the merest crumbs of comprehension. It's not that I didn't like it. Lynch is so singular a talent and so pure a filmmaker that he almost can't help but produce moments that rattle your preconceptions of what a movie can be, and that's always a treat. But for nearly three hours, "Inland Empire" nagged me with the sense it was designed solely for the purpose of the viewer's stupefaction and was delighting in his success."
So I went into Inland Empire expecting it to be an incomprehensible meaningless mess, and I spent the entire time delightedly wondering what film they were writing about. Of course, it is pretty much on the experimental end of the range, so I would have to say: if you like David Lynch, by all means see this film; if you don't, then you probably shouldn't. Also, if you don't know who David Lynch is, you probably shouldn't, and if you're not sure whether you like him (or know him), you may want to err on the side of caution, however you choose to define that.
Mulholland Drive's evil twin lives at Hollywood and Vine. (For the record, I wrote that in my notes after seeing the film and before I read the "evil twin" phrase in the NYTimes review of Inland--maybe mom was right and I should get a job with the Times, but you just know the reviews wouldn't be nearly as much fun or personal [I believe the technical term is gonzo] as they are here on my blog; besides, like I told her at the time, I think the position's already taken.) I saw Mulholland with the two original film buffs in my family, my mom and her sister Sima, and my ninety year old grandma came too, because what were we going to do, leave her home alone sitting around getting bored. I gotta give props to grandma, as cryptic as that film was, and with her minimal familiarity with the English language, she totally got it. We walked out of the film and she turns to me and says in Farsi, "she killed herself because she felt bad for what she did to her friend." I was all like, grandma, you are so awesome, you so totally nailed it! I was pretty impressed, but she's sharp as a tack, that one. Maybe we'll all just have to sit around and watch Inland next time she and Sima are visiting from Iran just to get some expert analysis.
I once read something Robert Altman (God rest his soul in heaven) said about how the first time you see a film it doesn't count, because the first time you're just putting the pieces together and figuring out what's going on, and it's only in repeated viewings, once you know it in its entirety, that you can start thinking about it and appreciating it. This was similar to when a poetry teacher said that if the reading assignment was a couple pages of poetry, it was not his intention that the assignment should take five minutes, and that there was no such thing as reading poetry, there was only re-reading poetry. This goes a long way toward explaining why my blog entries are so frivolous and why I haven't spent much time writing about films despite the encouragement to do so and my obvious interest in them--namely that, for me, if I'm going to write seriously, and on the occasions I have done so when taking classes, it really requires having a copy for home re-viewing and close reading, and I barely manage to find the time to see some of the films I want to see even once. I have to say that watching this film, all I kept thinking was how much I wanted to go into film student mode, go back and watch Lynch's entire oeuvre and take notes on all the motifs and write a really long paper. He just has so much fun with all his little fixations. Wasn't that the robin from Blue Velvet that shows up briefly in a painting on the wall in Inland? Or this random bit from a salon.com analysis of Mulholland: "Also, speaking of "Blue Velvet," Dorothy Vallens lived in the Deep River apartments. Betty is from Deep River, Ontario." Amy Taubin wrote a nice piece on Inland in the new Film Comment (and named it her number two film of the year in the same issue--not sure her number one really counts, since Army of Shadows was made in 1969; Guy Maddin named it his number one--doesn't that just about say it all? ['No, Pardis,' you say 'that says nothing to me because I haven't the faintest idea who Guy Maddin is.' to which I reply, 'Guy Maddin, a Canadian director, and no doubt pride of Winnipeg, is like the biggest freak in the world! But hey, don't take my word for it, get a copy of 'The Saddest Music in the World' or anything else he's done and see for yourself, if you don't believe me. Or not even, just go to imdb and read the titles of his films. Now do you believe me? And when I say freak, of course, I mean that as a compliment of the highest order.]), of course she had the luxury to see it more than once: "I've seen Inland Empire three times, and after every screening, what people seemed most perplexed by are the rabbits."
The NYTimes said Inland was dark, and naturally I thought they were speaking figuratively, but no, it's literally dark, deliciously so--for now we see through a glass darkly, indeed. For all the charges of obscurantism, it's not Joyce's Ulysses you'd want to reference but Finnegans Wake, the book of the night. I kept thinking of what Stuart Gilbert said, here related from The Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce: "During the revision process, Joyce sometimes intentionally complicated individual passages and once added Samoyed words when a passage was 'not obscure enough.'" Inland too seeks the opposite of Goethe's purported last words (Mehr Licht) with its call instead for more dark, for the journey inland, to the interior, the dreamscape, the heart of darkness. I came across this wonderfully apposite passage in Google Book Search from the introduction to the Penguin edition: "It is even possible to argue, with this same logic, that Finnegans Wake may be more accessible to the common reader than Ulysses--or, for that matter, War and Peace or Remembrance of Things Past--since one doesn't need to comprehend it as a totality to profit from it or enjoy it. Students of literature in particular, accustomed as they are to understanding most words in every sentence of every prose work they read, are apt to experience frustration in reading a text constructed along these lines, where it can sometimes seem that one is doing extremely well if one makes sense of only a sentence or two on a single page. If, however, one surrenders the need to be master of everything--or even most things--in this strange and magnificent book, it will pour forth lots of rewards." I imagine that with any book that begins with "riverrun," it would be a good idea not to push the river and just go with the flow, and that's equally good advice for watching this film go upriver.
Shortly before I saw Inland, I had read a two-part piece Zadie Smith wrote in the Guardian about readers and writers ('Fail better' and 'Read better'), which also came to mind as I watched the film. "7. Do writers have duties?...By this measure the duty of writers is to please readers and to be eager to do so, and this duty has various subsets: the duty to be clear; to be interesting and intelligent but never wilfully obscure; to write with the average reader in mind; to be in good taste. Above all, the modern writer has a duty to entertain. Writers who stray from these obligations risk tiny readerships and critical ridicule....Personally, I have no objection to books that entertain and please, that are clear and interesting and intelligent, that are in good taste and are not wilfully obscure - but neither do these qualities seem to me in any way essential to the central experience of fiction, and if they should be missing, this in no way rules out the possibility that the novel I am reading will yet fulfil the only literary duty I care about. For writers have only one duty, as I see it: the duty to express accurately their way of being in the world. If that sounds woolly and imprecise, I apologise. Writing is not a science, and I am speaking to you in the only terms I have to describe what it is I persistently aim for (yet fail to achieve) when I sit in front of my computer." (http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,1989004,00.html) Substitute filmmaker for writer, and Lynch fulfills the only duty that matters with flying colors every time. All I know is I came out of that film and the world seemed a stranger place for it and I was grateful for that. So until such time as I write my uberwork on Lynch, or at least see this one again, that's all I have to say.
So, not like anyone has the time to read my blog, but I'm trying to be a little more disciplined, and thus merciful to the hypothetical reader, by saving totally random digressions for the end of the entry, instead of trying said reader's patience by erratically inserting them in the text at such point as they appear in my head.
Random digression #1: When I went back to read the salon.com article on Mulholland, I spotted this link to a Neil Gaiman interview on the Well, which seemed so random because I had just mentioned him in the random digression at the end of the Casino Royale entry: http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/292/Neil-Gaiman-Fragile-Things-page01.html. More fun Gaimania can be found in his wikipedia entry.
Random digression #2: Talk about random? Ever browse random passages in the middle of books using Google Book Search? It's way wicked fun. I know you're thinking: "Pardis, I don't even have the time to read your blog, where would I find the time to play with Google Book Search? Only people like you with no lives spend all their time sitting around watching shadows on a screen and websurfing obscurantia." So I found the coolest book in Google Book Search! It's called "Alchemy and Finnegans Wake" by Barbara DiBernard. You will recall [yes, that's an instruction, not an invitation] we began our discussion of alchemy in the Perfume entry, and discussed the subject of referring to the Perfume entry in the Casino Royale entry.
I love this book already; here are the names of the chapters:
The Excremental Vision: Spiritual and Physical Alchemy
"As Above, So Below," and Death and Rebirth
Number Symbolism
Colors and Forgery
Ingredients and Equipment
Shem the "Alshemist"
and how could you possibly resist a book that begins:
"Finnegans Wake" is a rubbish heap. In spite of all the controversy and confusion concerning this book, that fact at least remains muddily clear. It is "the muddest thick that was ever heard dump."
Forget about the $700 coffret (see [what else?] Perfume blog entry), for less than a tenth of that, someone just get me this book for my birthday! Please? More mud!
And the award for best actress goes to Laura Dern!
I didn't even know Jeremy Irons was in this film--he's so perfectly smarmy in the part of the expat Brit film director--an unexpected treat, not unlike Jeffrey Wright showing up in Casino Royale.
Now is as good a time as any to discuss the theory of expectations. The theory of expectations, an idea you may be familiar with, if not by the name I give it, says that if you've heard a film is brilliant, your expectations may be so high that you can come out of it disappointed, wondering what all the fuss was about, even though you might have found it perfectly fine otherwise, i.e., the disappointment has more to do with the expectations than with the quality of the film. Conversely, if you think something's going to be shite [the e is not a typo], you might come out of it pleasantly surprised.
Here's what the local weekly said: "None of which makes Inland Empire a bad movie. It doesn't make it a good movie. It doesn't make it, strictly speaking, a movie." Huh?
And even The Oregonian's Shawn Levy was baffled: "I like to think I'm not easily confused. I have read James Joyce's "Ulysses" and the "Cantos" of Ezra Pound several times each. I find relaxation and pleasure in the densest works of Federico Fellini and Jean-Luc Godard. But I am here to tell you that David Lynch's "Inland Empire" left me grasping for the merest crumbs of comprehension. It's not that I didn't like it. Lynch is so singular a talent and so pure a filmmaker that he almost can't help but produce moments that rattle your preconceptions of what a movie can be, and that's always a treat. But for nearly three hours, "Inland Empire" nagged me with the sense it was designed solely for the purpose of the viewer's stupefaction and was delighting in his success."
So I went into Inland Empire expecting it to be an incomprehensible meaningless mess, and I spent the entire time delightedly wondering what film they were writing about. Of course, it is pretty much on the experimental end of the range, so I would have to say: if you like David Lynch, by all means see this film; if you don't, then you probably shouldn't. Also, if you don't know who David Lynch is, you probably shouldn't, and if you're not sure whether you like him (or know him), you may want to err on the side of caution, however you choose to define that.
Mulholland Drive's evil twin lives at Hollywood and Vine. (For the record, I wrote that in my notes after seeing the film and before I read the "evil twin" phrase in the NYTimes review of Inland--maybe mom was right and I should get a job with the Times, but you just know the reviews wouldn't be nearly as much fun or personal [I believe the technical term is gonzo] as they are here on my blog; besides, like I told her at the time, I think the position's already taken.) I saw Mulholland with the two original film buffs in my family, my mom and her sister Sima, and my ninety year old grandma came too, because what were we going to do, leave her home alone sitting around getting bored. I gotta give props to grandma, as cryptic as that film was, and with her minimal familiarity with the English language, she totally got it. We walked out of the film and she turns to me and says in Farsi, "she killed herself because she felt bad for what she did to her friend." I was all like, grandma, you are so awesome, you so totally nailed it! I was pretty impressed, but she's sharp as a tack, that one. Maybe we'll all just have to sit around and watch Inland next time she and Sima are visiting from Iran just to get some expert analysis.
I once read something Robert Altman (God rest his soul in heaven) said about how the first time you see a film it doesn't count, because the first time you're just putting the pieces together and figuring out what's going on, and it's only in repeated viewings, once you know it in its entirety, that you can start thinking about it and appreciating it. This was similar to when a poetry teacher said that if the reading assignment was a couple pages of poetry, it was not his intention that the assignment should take five minutes, and that there was no such thing as reading poetry, there was only re-reading poetry. This goes a long way toward explaining why my blog entries are so frivolous and why I haven't spent much time writing about films despite the encouragement to do so and my obvious interest in them--namely that, for me, if I'm going to write seriously, and on the occasions I have done so when taking classes, it really requires having a copy for home re-viewing and close reading, and I barely manage to find the time to see some of the films I want to see even once. I have to say that watching this film, all I kept thinking was how much I wanted to go into film student mode, go back and watch Lynch's entire oeuvre and take notes on all the motifs and write a really long paper. He just has so much fun with all his little fixations. Wasn't that the robin from Blue Velvet that shows up briefly in a painting on the wall in Inland? Or this random bit from a salon.com analysis of Mulholland: "Also, speaking of "Blue Velvet," Dorothy Vallens lived in the Deep River apartments. Betty is from Deep River, Ontario." Amy Taubin wrote a nice piece on Inland in the new Film Comment (and named it her number two film of the year in the same issue--not sure her number one really counts, since Army of Shadows was made in 1969; Guy Maddin named it his number one--doesn't that just about say it all? ['No, Pardis,' you say 'that says nothing to me because I haven't the faintest idea who Guy Maddin is.' to which I reply, 'Guy Maddin, a Canadian director, and no doubt pride of Winnipeg, is like the biggest freak in the world! But hey, don't take my word for it, get a copy of 'The Saddest Music in the World' or anything else he's done and see for yourself, if you don't believe me. Or not even, just go to imdb and read the titles of his films. Now do you believe me? And when I say freak, of course, I mean that as a compliment of the highest order.]), of course she had the luxury to see it more than once: "I've seen Inland Empire three times, and after every screening, what people seemed most perplexed by are the rabbits."
The NYTimes said Inland was dark, and naturally I thought they were speaking figuratively, but no, it's literally dark, deliciously so--for now we see through a glass darkly, indeed. For all the charges of obscurantism, it's not Joyce's Ulysses you'd want to reference but Finnegans Wake, the book of the night. I kept thinking of what Stuart Gilbert said, here related from The Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce: "During the revision process, Joyce sometimes intentionally complicated individual passages and once added Samoyed words when a passage was 'not obscure enough.'" Inland too seeks the opposite of Goethe's purported last words (Mehr Licht) with its call instead for more dark, for the journey inland, to the interior, the dreamscape, the heart of darkness. I came across this wonderfully apposite passage in Google Book Search from the introduction to the Penguin edition: "It is even possible to argue, with this same logic, that Finnegans Wake may be more accessible to the common reader than Ulysses--or, for that matter, War and Peace or Remembrance of Things Past--since one doesn't need to comprehend it as a totality to profit from it or enjoy it. Students of literature in particular, accustomed as they are to understanding most words in every sentence of every prose work they read, are apt to experience frustration in reading a text constructed along these lines, where it can sometimes seem that one is doing extremely well if one makes sense of only a sentence or two on a single page. If, however, one surrenders the need to be master of everything--or even most things--in this strange and magnificent book, it will pour forth lots of rewards." I imagine that with any book that begins with "riverrun," it would be a good idea not to push the river and just go with the flow, and that's equally good advice for watching this film go upriver.
Shortly before I saw Inland, I had read a two-part piece Zadie Smith wrote in the Guardian about readers and writers ('Fail better' and 'Read better'), which also came to mind as I watched the film. "7. Do writers have duties?...By this measure the duty of writers is to please readers and to be eager to do so, and this duty has various subsets: the duty to be clear; to be interesting and intelligent but never wilfully obscure; to write with the average reader in mind; to be in good taste. Above all, the modern writer has a duty to entertain. Writers who stray from these obligations risk tiny readerships and critical ridicule....Personally, I have no objection to books that entertain and please, that are clear and interesting and intelligent, that are in good taste and are not wilfully obscure - but neither do these qualities seem to me in any way essential to the central experience of fiction, and if they should be missing, this in no way rules out the possibility that the novel I am reading will yet fulfil the only literary duty I care about. For writers have only one duty, as I see it: the duty to express accurately their way of being in the world. If that sounds woolly and imprecise, I apologise. Writing is not a science, and I am speaking to you in the only terms I have to describe what it is I persistently aim for (yet fail to achieve) when I sit in front of my computer." (http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,1989004,00.html) Substitute filmmaker for writer, and Lynch fulfills the only duty that matters with flying colors every time. All I know is I came out of that film and the world seemed a stranger place for it and I was grateful for that. So until such time as I write my uberwork on Lynch, or at least see this one again, that's all I have to say.
So, not like anyone has the time to read my blog, but I'm trying to be a little more disciplined, and thus merciful to the hypothetical reader, by saving totally random digressions for the end of the entry, instead of trying said reader's patience by erratically inserting them in the text at such point as they appear in my head.
Random digression #1: When I went back to read the salon.com article on Mulholland, I spotted this link to a Neil Gaiman interview on the Well, which seemed so random because I had just mentioned him in the random digression at the end of the Casino Royale entry: http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/292/Neil-Gaiman-Fragile-Things-page01.html. More fun Gaimania can be found in his wikipedia entry.
Random digression #2: Talk about random? Ever browse random passages in the middle of books using Google Book Search? It's way wicked fun. I know you're thinking: "Pardis, I don't even have the time to read your blog, where would I find the time to play with Google Book Search? Only people like you with no lives spend all their time sitting around watching shadows on a screen and websurfing obscurantia." So I found the coolest book in Google Book Search! It's called "Alchemy and Finnegans Wake" by Barbara DiBernard. You will recall [yes, that's an instruction, not an invitation] we began our discussion of alchemy in the Perfume entry, and discussed the subject of referring to the Perfume entry in the Casino Royale entry.
I love this book already; here are the names of the chapters:
The Excremental Vision: Spiritual and Physical Alchemy
"As Above, So Below," and Death and Rebirth
Number Symbolism
Colors and Forgery
Ingredients and Equipment
Shem the "Alshemist"
and how could you possibly resist a book that begins:
"Finnegans Wake" is a rubbish heap. In spite of all the controversy and confusion concerning this book, that fact at least remains muddily clear. It is "the muddest thick that was ever heard dump."
Forget about the $700 coffret (see [what else?] Perfume blog entry), for less than a tenth of that, someone just get me this book for my birthday! Please? More mud!
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