Inland Empire, David Lynch’s epically obtuse melding of sex, dream logic, pop music, Eastern European mythology and the Hollywood nightmare/dream, finally arrives today on DVD. Equal parts confounding and revelatory, unwatchable and transcendent, it’s a total chore to sit through, but for the last forty minutes alone, it’s totally worth it.
When the film premiered last fall at the New York Film Festival and then toured a dozen or so cities in Lynch-sponsored release, it inspired some of the most gloriously schizophrenic reviews in recent memory. J. Hoberman published what many interpreted as a negative review of the film in the Village Voice, only to place it on his Top Ten of 2006 list a couple of weeks later. Hoberman maintains it was all a misunderstanding: “Seems that when I characterized Inland Empire as a miasma (that is, “a thick, vaporous atmosphere”), it was taken as pejorative. Anyone familiar with Lynch knows that there are good miasmas and bad.”
My favorite review of the film, by Ed Gonzalez at Slant, was another rave easily excerpted to look like a pan. It read in part: “Inland Empire is totally fucked up, picking up reception from metaphysical wavelengths past and present and places here and there…Some may call it a toilet, but I like to think of it as a splendiferous whirlpool of wonders.”
The official Inland Empire website has a number of clips from and relating to the film. Most of these are not as good as the GooTube trailer I’ve embedded above, but they’re worth watching for the completely discordant revenue-share ads tacked on by Revver at the end. Click the “Read More” link to see a screenshot of the ad that I got at the end of Laura Dern’s deathly serious monologue.
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