IE has NO UNIFIED STORY WORLD

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Understanding Inland Empire


there is a plot. A rather simple and identifiable plot, actually, told in a reasonably straightforward manner. The plot of the film in the film, On High in Blue Tomorrows, is, in fact, basically the plot of Inland Empire. A woman with a jealous husband gets involved with a man with a jealous wife, and actions do have consequences, and bad actions have bad consequences. That's it -

this plot line is not enacted in anything like a unified story world.

When we first enter STAGE 4 and watch the REHEARSAL for SCENE 35 ...

we are also watching what happens later on IN THE MIDDLE of IE ...

when the other TWIN COPY of DERN ...

who ENTERS the AXXON N DOOR in the BACK ALLEY of STAGE 4 ...


FINDS the OTHER COPY of herself sitting at the REHEARSAL TABLE doing the REHEARSAL for SCENE 35 on PAGE 57 ...

which also means the MIDDLE part of IE is also near the beginning of IE.


Since KINGSLEY also DESCRIBES what happens in this SCENE:

Lets take, for instance,
scene 35...

196
00:26:19,119 --> 00:26:25,166
... the scene where Devon...
you arrive,

197
00:26:25,166 --> 00:26:32,569
... Billy, at Smithie's house to find Sue,
--Nikki-- looking out the window.

DERN ENTERING the AXXON N DOOR in the BACK ALLEY of STAGE 4 ...


where she finds herself at an EARLIER TIME REHEARSING for SCENE 35 ...

before she RUNS AWAY from DEVON and into SMITHY'S HOUSE ...

this REHEARSAL SCENE is obviously also a PART of the MOVIE SCRIPT.

In other words, this is also the FIRST TIME in IE that we JUMP BACK in TIME instead of JUMP UP ahead in TIME the way we've been doing up until this POINT in TIME.

Or as the RABBITS say:

IT HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE TELLING of TIME ...

Because TIME doesn't FLOW the right way in this AXXON N TALE.

After DERN ENTERS the AXXON N DOOR in BACK of STAGE 4 SOMETHING HAPPENS ...

and TIME gets all MIXED UP ...

or as she explains to MR. K:

I don't know....

913
02:15:27,105 --> 02:15:30,748
... what was before or after.

914
02:15:35,969 --> 02:15:38,576
I don't know what's happened first...

LIKE the case with THE NEW NEIGHBOR, who doesn't know if it's today or yesterday and thinks 9:45 means it's AFTER MIDNIGHT:

I.. I can't seem to remember if it's
today, two days from now, or yesterday!

91
00:17:05,224 --> 00:17:10,542
I suppose that if it was 9:45...

92
00:17:10,542 --> 00:17:14,087
I'd think it was after midnight!

DERN is also just as confused:

It's a story that
happened yesterday.

535
00:58:18,980 --> 00:58:21,586
But I know that it's tomorrow

SO WHAT probably HAPPENS in the MIDDLE of the story is DERN ENTERS the AXXON N DOOR ...

and after that TIME gets all MIXED UP to the point where she doesn't know what comes FIRST or afterwards after that anymore.


So whereas other posters (and some CRITICS) claim this is a FRACTURED STORY ...

or a story about a WOMAN in TROUBLE ...

because she's Lost her MIND from having been UNFAITHFUL and is feeling GUILTY about it ...

this is actually a UNIFIED story ...

about a WOMAN in TROUBLE because she ENTERS the AXXON N DOOR ...


which is also a SITUATION that is CORRECTED by the END of IE ...

when we see by the CLOCK on the WALL ...

above the ZIG ZAGGY WAVY FLOOR PATTERN ...

that TIME FLOWS in the RIGHT DIRECTION again ...

12:13

12:22

12:25


before she SHOOTS the PHANTOM.

And we also see on the MOVIE SCREEN how TIME is also BACK IN SYNC again ...

with THE SCENE in the MOVIE MATCHING PERFECTLY in TIME with what MR. K and DERN are doing.

Then we also see TIME is back in SYNC inside of ROOM 205 as well ... on the MONITOR inside of that room ... which also MATCHES PERFECTLY with what DERN does before she DISAPPEARS into THIN AIR ... and then ends up sitting inside of the RABBIT ROOM.

So whereas this other CRITIC CLAIMS this AXXON N STORY has what they describe as being:

A rather simple and identifiable plot, actually, told in a reasonably straightforward manner.

With the TIME DISTORTION caused by ENTERING the AXXON N DOOR, we obviously DO NOT have a SIMPLE PLOT told to us in a STRAIGHFORWARD MANNER.

What we have instead is a STORY being told to us in a SCRAMBLED UP and JUMBLED UP manner ...

where TIME JUMPS UP and JUMPS BACK so much ...

that sometimes the VIEWER also becomes DISORIENTED ...

and begins to think they've also LOST their mind as well ...

especially after the END of DERN'S DEATH Scene on the FAKE TWIN COPY of the WALK of FAME ...

when we also discover we've been INSIDE of STAGE 4 the ENTIRE TIME ...

instead of our being inside of ONE MIND ...

like other CONFUSED posters here at this board also try to claim that's where we've been the ENTIRE TIME.

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In this link it talks about META FICTION and the HISTORY of the use of it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafiction

Metafiction, also known as Romantic irony in the context of Romantic works of literature, uses literary techniques to draw attention to itself as a work of art, while exposing the "truth" of a story.

"Metafiction" is the literary term describing fictional writing that self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in posing questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, usually using irony and self-reflection. It can be compared to presentational theatre, which does not let the audience forget it is viewing a play; metafiction does not let the reader forget he or she is reading a fictional work.

Metafiction is primarily associated with Modernist literature and Postmodernist literature, but is found at least as early as Homer's Odyssey and Chaucer's 14th century Canterbury Tales.

In the 1950s several French novelists published works whose styles were collectively dubbed "nouveau roman". These "new novels" were characterized by the bending of genre and style and often included elements of metafiction. It became prominent in the 1960s, with authors and works such as John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, Robert Coover's "The Babysitter" and "The Magic Poker",
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five,

metafiction is specifically fiction about fiction,

i.e. fiction which self-consciously reflects upon itself.[1]

It has been suggested that the Epic of Gilgamesh (the story where the BOOK of GENESIS gets its stories from) as the first metafiction in that it, at the end, described its own writing and effect through the ages.[2]

Some common metafictive devices in literature include:

A story about a writer creating a story
A story containing another work of fiction within itself
A story in which the characters are aware that they are in a story


{Hence: When the situation where DERN says:

DAMN. THAT SOUNDS LIKE DIALOUGE FROM OUR SCRIPT.}
[green]
Some episodes of the Star Trek series use the holodeck (or its Ferengi equivalent, a "holosuite") to tell a "story-within-a-story".

Rubber (2010) includes an audience with binoculars who watch the movie as a live performance. The sheriff character knows he is in a movie, and there is a monologue in the beginning about how many elements in movies are for no reason and that their film will be a tribute to this. There is a subplot about the sheriff working with the audience's host to poison and kill them, and when he thinks the audience is dead, he tries to convince the other characters in the movie that nothing is real and they can stop now.

This RUBBER story sounds like an interesting TALE.



And there's also the GEORGE BURNS and GRACIE ALLEN show ...

where GEORGE has a ROOM with a TV SET ...

where he WATCHES his his OWN TV SHOW on TV ...

and whatever his WIFE and his NEXT DOOR NEIGHBORS and some of the rest of the CAST members on his show are doing ...

so that he also already KNOWS what's happening ...

like whenever they make plans to plot against him ...

or whenever something goes wrong and he's got to figure out how to fix it, etc.

In One scene for instance, George and Gracie watch themselves DANGING on the TV SET of their next door neighbors ...

then the George and Gracie ...

who watch themselves dancing on TV ...

also TAKE A BOW in front of their Neighbors ...

after they've seen themselves DANCING on their TV SET.




READING about THIS RUBBER PLOT also LEAVES ME LMAO:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_(2010_film)

A group of people in a California desert are gathered to watch a "film". A sheriff, Chad, points out that many moments in cinema happen for "no reason", that life is full of this "no reason", and that this film (both the "film" to be watched by the assembled group and presumablyose watching Rubber) is a homage to "no reason".

An accountant then passes out binoculars to the group and rides off on a bicycle. The spectators then start looking through their binoculars into the distance, waiting for the "film" to start. Throughout the film, this group of people is returned to in order to gauge their reactions to what has taken place so far.

In the late 90's, somewhere in the California desert, a tire suddenly comes to life and embarks on a killing spree. At first, it learns how to stand upright and then how to roll. It comes across a plastic water bottle and, after hesitating, crushes it. It then comes across a scorpion and crushes it. It then comes across a glass beer bottle, but is unable to crush it by rolling over it. It then starts to vibrate intensely and psychokinetically causes the bottle to fracture. It then induces a tin can and a rabbit to explode.


The tire (billed as "Robert" in the credits) then sees a woman drive by and attempts to use its powers on her. However, it only succeeds in making her car stall. As the tire begins to roll towards her stalled car, a truck comes by and runs the tire over. This breaks the connection, allowing the woman's car to start again, and she continues on her way. The tire explodes a crow, then finds the man driving the truck which ran him over. Using its psychokinetic powers, the tire blows up the man's head.

Settling into an obscure desert town, the tire comes across the woman in the car. She is staying in a motel and, after watching her shower through an open door, the tire goes into the room next to hers. After the motel maid finds the tire showering and throws it out of the room, the tire blows up her head. Chad, the sheriff from the opening of the movie, shows up to investigate the murders. Chad is both inside and outside the diegesis, sometimes participating in the narrative action and sometimes commenting on it.

The accountant tries to end the movie early by feeding the audience a poisoned turkey, but one of them, a man in a wheelchair, does not partake and survives. Chad witnesses the tire kill the motel owner (who has mistreated it) and leads the cops on a "tire-hunt". Meanwhile, the accountant tries to poison the man in the wheelchair with more food, but ends up eating it himself and dying.

As the tire is running from the police, it comes across a group of people burning a large pile of tires. As a result of this, the tire embarks on a large killing spree. The cops find the tire watching an auto racing program in a house, having killed the occupants. Chad rigs a mannequin (resembling the woman the tire is interested in) with dynamite, intending for the tire to blow the mannequin's head up, thereby detonating the dynamite and destroying itself.

However, when the tire destroys the mannequin's head, the dynamite does not explode. Enraged, Chad shoots and kills the tire with a shotgun. After Chad leaves, the tire is suddenly reincarnated as a small tricycle. After killing the last audience member (the man in the wheelchair), the tricycle recruits several tires and rolls to Hollywood, where the film concludes.

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Here's another amusing link where it talks about LYNCH and what it calls his BONDAGE to CONTRADICTIONS:

http://pluribusone.wordpress.com/2011/04/25/analysis-lynch%E2%80%99s-% E2%80%9Cinland-empire%E2%80%9D/

contrasts appear to reflect Lynch’s bondage to contradiction, to irreconcilable yet inescapable opposites. Lynch is a man who says FU*CK and “O my golly,” in the same sentence, who smokes cigarettes while cooking organic health food, a man who barks orders like a general one moment and washes dishes in the next, who displays great respect for elements of conventional moral character and yet seems to glorify infidelity, prostitution, self-mutilation, and murder.



He publicly unveils conversations with his actors, yet whispers to them in front of the same camera. The movie can, therefore, easily be accepted as an examination of the way untamed “love” turns into something grotesque. Seen one after another, three movie trailers reveal this as the film’s purpose: to show that it is “strange what love does,” to show how beauty becomes so beastly.

This paragraph talks about how IE has what it calls an UN-TETHERED SENSE of TIME and SPACE:

Inland Empire (IE), named after a region of Los Angeles, appears to also be an “in-other-words” experiment in visually telling an untellable story that has an un-tethered sense of Time and—necessarily, then—of Space. Lynch has explored this “lost soul” state of consciousness before. His films: Mulholland Drive (2001) and Lost Highway (1997), also set in Los Angeles, dissect the inner lives of two other archetypal creative performers who are better at living in their art than in their lives—a common dilemma for highly creative minds

In this paragraph LYNCH SOUNDS like THE NEW NEIGHBOR:

The looseness of Lynch’s mooring in ordinary Time while immersed in his work is revealed backstage where we see him speak “out of time” to one of his people. He asks: “…what did we shoot tonight?” and recalls several shots but is puzzled about a certain shot—the most memorable—and when informed that it was among them, he says: “I remember it now, like as if it was yesterday.”

And this part describes LYNCH as having the FOOTPRINT of a RABBIT:

One can interpret the statement as merely expressing sardonic humor, self-mocking and pretending to have lost a sense of linearity, but we see it as a rabbit’s-footprint just outside the portal into nonlinearity from within which he projects his inner movie out to where his mob can capture it on film.

And this part talks about SURREALITY also CONCLUDES with an interesting description of THE RABBIT ROOM:

To fully grasp this indelible film, the viewer’s mind must cross-connect with Lynch within the realm of, to coin a term:

surreality,

which has the feel of a parallel universe but is actually the first dimension of Time,

the astral plane of mysticism,

the bottom of the rabbit hole

where Lynch’s dark Saturnian humanoid hares reside in the state of pre-birthed non-being and not-doing, the place wherefrom Polish folktales sprout, the waiting room wherein the making of ordinary reality also has its origin.

A clue to having successfully experienced making the link is to wake up from a nap with white paint (is it paint?) on your palm, then watch the “Lynch 2” material on disk two of the IE DVD where Lynch is smearing white paint (!) on a board with his bare hand (!!), and suddenly realize the force of Omniversal Oneness. Only with much soap and scrubbing was I able to wash it off.

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Here's still another interesting review of IE where they describe the DEMONS of LYNCH LURKING in the OPEN:

this is a filmmaker who probably doesn’t need to tap his unconscious to let loose his demons;

one suspects they are lurking right there in the open.


Even when his images are flooded with bright Southern California light, danger hovers, suggestively buzzing.

No one makes that caressing light seem so dark, so frightening, perhaps because

few American filmmakers dare to peel back the surface of things to show us what squirms beneath.

The HOT DOG PARTY seems like a good example to illustrate such a situation ...

where

even though it's 3 PM in the AFTERNOON ...

we've still got this CREEPY VIBE going on ...

where the T SHIRT looks like it has BLOOD on it ...

and FORESHADOWS what happens to DERN later on ...

in her DEATH SCENE on the Walk of FAME ...

when her shirt also gets SOAKED with BLOOD.

And we also have those other Carnies fighting over the HAMMER, which was probably also what someone used to kill the MUSTASH MAN in POLAND.

Because when we see his CORPSE, it also looks like he has 2 LITTLE HAMMER SIZED HOLES in the top part of his HEAD.

So the HOT DOG PARTY also seems to FORESHADOW both the DEATHS of both DERN and LUCAS (as the MUSTASH MAN).

And we also have the GHOSTLY figure of LOST GIRL showing up in this SCENE ...

in what looks like the MIDDLE of the STAINED T SHIRT as DERN STARES at it.

So where do these DEMONS originate from that enable LYNCH to create scenes like this one at the HOT DOG PARTY ...

or like the other one in MD ...

where Joe kills his friend ED at his office ...

before he also kills the other 2 people who work in the same building ...

(along with the VACCUM CLEANER).

Wonder how many murders there have been in his films???

Has anyone ever tried to count all of them???

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Here's some parts of another interesting online CONVERSTATION about IE:

http://www.out1filmjournal.com/2009/01/lynch-week-inland-empire-discus sion.html

There's such a palpable dread hanging over most of the film. Even if the "story" stops making sense, the tone is always there to guide the viewer further into the darkness.

What makes INLAND EMPIRE wonderful, whatever it is, is that it dares to be as expansive as it is. I know this probably causes a lot of frustration for viewers who aren™t into the aesthetic or don™t give themselves to the experience. This isn™t a hit at those viewers, or the movie even, but its something that makes the movie constantly challenging and difficult to get a complete grasp on.

I tend to decide for myself what I think the movie is, and then love hearing other theories, but its never a point of annoyance. Just part of the fun. I actually disagree with Jacob that its all about tone though and that there isnt real narrative. For me, its just as invested in narrative as any of Lynch™s film works. There are more narrative threads here (its like a 3 hour version of the last 30 minutes of Mulholland Drive, in many ways) but I think there is plenty to follow, buy into, and become invested in outside of the demonstrative tone.

The movie presents a sort of narratological ouroboros in which every subplot contains strains of other subplots and in which the distinction between one subplot and another is a matter of leaning to one side or squinting harder“ the plot doubles over on itself, examining itself, undoing itself, like the mythological serpent. INLAND EMPIRE is in constant rotation and the only way to pin it down is for the viewer to stabilize him/herself, creating a sort of North Star by which to navigate. However, the tricky part is that there are just as many versions of INLAND EMPIRE as there are places to stand still; from every vantage point, the film is altered, different, enriched or refocused or skewed.

This viewer describes feeling LOST like LOST GIRL while watching IE:

I did indeed purposefully take naps during the second part of a back-to-back screening at the Belcourt. I remember hearing the film vividly throughout my slumber, in fact, the intensity of the sound design awoke me multiple times during my experiment. As my eyes would open slightly and I would drift in and out of attentiveness, the movie, which was fresh in my mind, would bleed into my subconscious's permutations of its moods and plotlines. I awoke several times in a dazed stupor, having to re-acclimate myself to the dark and the screen. It was a lot like being lost and then passing into and out of different realities. The whole thing was a lot like how I would imagine it might be to actually exist in the INLAND EMPIRE universe.

I would argue that the film™s deconstructive, cyclical, self-reflexive structure meshes well with its investigations of cinema, performance, and spectatorship. Even when the film fails to cohere to the plot-logic causality of classical cinema, it does so not as an aesthetic extravagance but as a means of critique. The film dismantles classical diegesis and the structure of narrative cinema in order to make the seams and sutures of the medium more visible. The film also accomplishes this by breaking down many of the binary structures of cinema and Hollywood:

spectator/spectacle,

performance/reality,

authentic/inauthentic, etc.

In this way, the movie matches medium with message. As in Ingmar Bergman™s PERSONA, INLAND EMPIRE uses these metatextual tactics for an explicit purpose is ”not just for shock value.

IE as another film like ERASERHEAD where the GRIME of the CITY is EXPOSED"

Inland Empire shows us a more raw and fragmentary representation of Los Angeles ”a city full of the grunge and grime and darkness shined over with the false narratives of Hollywood cinema. Filled with murky, hazy, dirty nightmare images, IE goes beneath the surface of Hollywood glitz and glamour, presenting an image of L.A. as a near-apocalyptic wasteland.

If MD visualizes Hollywood as both mythic and artificial, then IE explores the sordid, decayed underbelly of Hollywood”the dirty world that exists outside the motion pictures and is often hidden away from us. Both films attempt to dismantle the myth of Hollywood, but they do so very differently.

It is so much about the grunge, interiority, and darkness of the spaces and places that it seems totally disparate from the purposefully sunny view of LA in the first two-thirds of MD. That world (and view on life and Hollywood) has no place in IE so why would it be shown that way


In many ways, IE reminds me of Burroughs™ cut-up method, where textual fragments are arranged randomly in order to create a new, unexpected, usually anti-rational creation. While I don™t think IE should be seen as pure œcut up”it is far more unified and cohesive than those experiments ”the way Lynch splices his central narrative(s) with images culled from his digital experiments does summon up the same illucid, extemporaneous spirit of a surrealist cut up.

xxpo's COMMENT:

Here's where it seems LYNCH SWITCHED from sitting inside of DINERS where he got some of his IDEAS to finding some of them ONLINE:

the website work served more as a sort of brainstorming, preliminary dabbling which online subscribers were privy to and which enabled Lynch to receive feedback on his efforts. More than anything, it seems that Lynch was giving greater access to his creative process by utilizing enhanced technology and online tools.

on a meta-textual level, the previous existence of Rabbits online links INLAND EMPIRE to a narrative structure that is web-like and associative, playing out like a joyride down the rabbit hole of internet search engines and clickable hyperlinks, weaving in and out of the story.

Jim Emerson describes this aspect of the film, writing:

the smeary, malleable and unstable texture of digital video (where the brightest Los Angeles sunlight can be as void and terrifying as the darkest shadow)

events really do transpire in multiple locations at the same time (or multiple times at the same place), observers are anywhere and everywhere at once, and realities are endlessly duplicable, repeatable and tweakable. This is a digital dimension where, to paraphrase Jean-Luc Godard, there's no difference between ketchup and paint and light and blood: On the screen, it's red.

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http://listeningear.blogspot.com/2007/05/understanding-inland-empire.html

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Understanding Inland Empire

there is a plot. A rather simple and identifiable plot, actually, told in a reasonably straightforward manner. The plot of the film in the film, On High in Blue Tomorrows, is, in fact, basically the plot of Inland Empire.

A woman with a jealous husband gets involved with a man with a jealous wife

,

and actions do have consequences, and bad actions have bad consequences.

That's it - and what happens in the film fits the plot line consistently.

I suspect, further, that the plot has a fairly standard structure - rising action, turning points, the subplots and parallels that go into making a good story are all there, more or less in their proper places. I think you can trace the plot's structure through what happens in the film without much difficulty.

What makes this film Strange, though, is that this plot line is not enacted in anything like a unified story world.

Instead, characters change, actors sometimes change, settings change, the ontological status of what we see changes

(as we move from the Hollywood frame story, to the film within the film, to the world of the film in the film,

to the flashbacks

or scenes from 4-7

or a radio play

or whatever the Polish scenes are meant to be),

the ontological relationship between different scenes change (as we move from seeing actors playing in On High in Blue Tomorrows to following the story "directly" to scenes like Laura Dern watching herself on a movie screen, as she lives the story), with all of it filtered through unspecified layers of subjectivity - dreams, visions, memories, thoughts, etc....

Lynch does not stabilize these different worlds. He does not maintain stable levels of reality.

Nikki and Devon are not more real than Billy and Sue

-

Lynch moves back and forth between the different worlds,

an uncertainty the characters share - they often seem unsure of which world they are in at any given moment.

Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway both received a good deal of attention on that question - critics made claims about what was real, who was real, they tried to stabilize the ontological relationships between Diane and Betty or Fred and Pete.

It didn't really add anything to those films,

and

it would truly be a fool's errand with Inland Empire

.

It probably can't be done,

and

spending time on it tends to obscure the formal systems actually at work in the film.

that this film is basically about Lynch's obsession with lamps isn't so far off.


it is possible to interpret Lynch's films - they are, usually, grounded in fairly clear emotional and moral positions

Any thoughts?

This opinion seems to state most posters here are on the WRONG TRACK.




So Whereas IE has a UNIFIED STORY ...

one where the CURSE finds it's way OUTSIDE of the FILM ...

and into the REAL LIFE of the ACTRESS who plays LOST GIRL ...

and into the the REAL LIFE of the ACTOR who plays the 4 DIFFERENT ROLES of:

PIOTREK (2000 WORLD)

SMITHY ( 1960 WORLD)

MUSTASH MAN (1930 WORLD)

and MAN in the GREEN COAT

(This is probably also The COAT that he wears during his CIRCUS performance with the HORSE ... like the HORSE that we see him working with in MTTH)

THE DIFFERENT WORLDS we see inside of the AXXON N STORY are also NOT UNIFIED ...

due to the way the 47 FILM was NEVER FINISHED ...

thus leaving that VERSION of it with NO UNITY.

SINCE LYNCH also corrects DERN during an interview to tell her she'd PLAYED

4 DIFFERENT ROLES

in IE ...

and her 4 DIFFERENT ROLES also PARALLEL the 4 DIFFERENT ROLES that LUCAS PORTRAYS ...

perhaps the SECRET to UNDERSTANDING IE is to try and MATCH UP the 4 DIFFERENT PARTS of LUCAS with the 4 DIFFERENT PARTS that LYNCH says DERN has portrayed in IE???

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