David Lynch owes me £10.99! August 20, 2007
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , trackbackI’ll be the first person to cut David Lynch some slack. BLUE VELVET is a classic, I loved TWIN PEAKS, and I believe that DUNE is one of the most frustratingly flawed films that was ever made. MULHOLLAND DRIVE is, I believe, his masterpiece and one of my favourite films. I thought with that last film that Lycnch had finally cracked it- how to make a strange, mysterious Lynchian film but also cross into the mainstream. But last night I sat through his latest film, INLAND EMPIRE… and Mr Lynch, sir, I may have lost three hours that I’ll never see again, but at the very least, I want my money back.
Now defenders of David Lynch -and in the case of TWIN PEAKS, I was one of them- like to stress that the man is a genius, a cinematic daredevil who breaks conventional boundaries, but here I’d like to accuse him of ignoring the basic cardinal rule of moviemaking. Call it plot, story, narrative- a film surely should have one, no matter how convoluted or weird it is?
I dare say fans wll decry my heresy and state that INLAND EMPIRE isn’t a film at all, its a work of art. Well, silly me for buying a DVD expecting to enjoy three hours of storytelling in which, no matter how weird it got, I could have fun attempting to unravel the mystery/plot.
In hindsight, well, yeah, even with my affection for some of his past films, I really should have known better- I guess I’m not the first or last to be burnt by loving MULHOLLAND DRIVE and hoping for more of same. At least MULHOLLAND DRIVE had a genuine plot and mystery that a viewer could attempt to solve. INLAND EMPIRE is, frankly, a sprawling mess, an assault on any goodwill that his previous film may have gained him. Throughout this turd of a movie I could feel Lynch sticking two fingers up at me thoroughout. I just don’t think he cares about his audience. INLAND EMPIRE is a confusing mess, a trainwreck of a film. Fans can cry that his adoption of Digital Video is another of his bold moves but shooting this thing on video doesn’t even work- it just sends Lynch flying off the rails shooting so much footage that it seems he doesn’t know where to stop, and frankly it just looks plain ugly. Perhaps the point of the film is to send movie fans screaming from Hi DEf and DVD back to the sanctuary of good old blurry VHS, because thats what this film cries for.
The film is ugly, noisy, pointless, far too long and good lord I bet my DVD player felt dirty after playing it, hell, I almost apologised to the poor thing. There’s no saving graces for this awful assault on moviemaking. Mr Lynch, sir, I expect the cheque with heartfelt apology in the mail… after MULHOLLAND DRIVE, I could forgive you so much, but INLAND EMPIRE… no, sorry, INLAND EMPIRE is, frankly, unforgivable.
Comments»
I quite agree. However, I thought the same of Mulholland Drive; after a repeat viewing I thawed a little on that one, but I still think it’s severely over-rated.
I would really like it if Lynch stopped making movies about LA and the movie business. His strongest films, for me, are the ones where he has to stretch himself and find something of himself in unfamiliar surroundings [Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Elephant Man, Straight Story, Twin Peaks].
I know this is pretty loose logic, as Blue Velvet and Eraserhead were born of personal experiences and elements of his background, but his take on fried, wacky LA isn’t very interesting, and I feel he totally perfected his current set of tropes with the first half of Lost Highway [ominous supernatural forces, moody Lynchian interiors, women with dual identities in trouble, interior psychosis spilling over into “reality”, gorgeous ambient droning soundtracks, bloody violence etc etc], and he’s just recycling himself now. For three hours. On DVCam.
I’m very happy that he’s found himself in the self-sufficient position that he’s in right now [think how much worse it could be], but I hope Inland Empire isn’t the shape of things to come.
Sorry, mate. You’re wrong. Give it time. Your reaction sounds a little like the reactions of incomprehension that greeted Eraserhead in 1976, a film regarded 30 years later as a bona fide classic.
You’re either up for art that challenges you to find a personal meaning in it or you prefer to have everything handed to you on a plate. What David Lynch is doing is holding a plate of food which he won’t allow you to eat and asking you to imagine what it tastes like.
And that isn’t for everybody.
I’m quite happy for Lynch to mystify/confuse me and indeed I do think that the best films often require ‘work’ by the viewer, but in the case of INLAND EMPIRE I honestly think that Lynch has taken it to too far. There is room for ambiguity in films but surely there is a requirement for self-restraint and control and just good basic storytelling?
I agree with Matthew; the whole Hollywood-theme thing is so tired now in Lynch’s cannon. The best parts for me of INLAND EMPIRE were the Polish sequences. There was a good film in there in those parts, I think, but the rest was simply awful, tiresome, self-indulgent nonsense.
Thanks for the comments, both of you- Robert if you could educate me with what your ideas regards the ‘meaning’ or plot of INLAND EMPIRE are, please do, I’m quite willing to give it another go. I know that no-ones interpretation is really definitive but if it would improve the film for me then I’m game for another attempt.
“There is room for ambiguity in films but surely there is a requirement for self-restraint and control and just good basic storytelling?”
There’s not a REQUIREMENT for anything at all. Or at least not a general requirement: what you’re saying is that you personally require those things (which is fair enough: it’s a matter of taste), and you don’t like what Lynch has done because it doesn’t conform to your own notion of “the rules”.
There are any number of films that will satisfy your urge for “good basic storytelling” - what’s so compelling (to me, anyway) about Lynch’s films in general and this one in particular is that they deliberately break every convention going and still manage to be weirdly riveting. I was absolutely gripped by INLAND EMPIRE, though I couldn’t even begin to tell you why - and I doubt Lynch could either: like most surrealists, he thrives on the irrational and inexplicable.
In other words, it’s a waste of time looking for “plot” or “meaning”, especially as Lynch deliberately ensures that his films don’t make logical sense to discourage people from coming up with pat explanations. It sounds evasive to say that they’re films to be experienced rather than explained (which, as it happens, is a direct quote from the ‘Monthly Film Bulletin’ review of ‘Eraserhead’, one of the first pieces of positive Lynch criticism to be published in Britain), but that’s no more than the truth.
I’m also quite genuinely baffled by the comment that “the whole Hollywood-theme thing is so tired now”. I can think of just two Lynch films that deal with Hollywood (this and ‘Mulholland Drive’), and their treatments of the subject are radically different. You might as well accuse Sergio Leone of tiring out “the whole Western-theme thing”!
As it happens, I did think that Lynch was starting to fall prey to self-parody round about 1990-92 (with ‘Wild at Heart’ and ‘Twin Peaks’), but he’s been on pretty close to top form ever since. Ironically, the film that made me a fan again was the much-maligned ‘Fire Walk With Me’, possibly his most underrated effort - though, as with INLAND EMPIRE, I think the fact that it so completely undermined audience expectations was at the root of the problem. (Conversely, when I saw it I was so sick and tired of the whole ‘Twin Peaks’ thing that I expected to loathe it!)