Manohla Dargis: The Trippy Dream Factory of David Lynch

The Trippy Dream Factory of David Lynch
By MANOHLA DARGIS
New York Times

There are, in the movies, few places creepier to spend time than in David Lynch’s head. It is a head where the wild things grow, twisting and spreading like vines, like fingers, and taking us in their captive embrace. Over the last three decades these wild things have laid siege to us even as they have mutated: the deformed baby of “Eraserhead” evolving into the anguished distortions of “The Elephant Man,” the Reagan-era surrealism of “Blue Velvet,” the serial home invasion in “Twin Peaks” and the meta-cinematic masterpiece “Mulholland Drive,” a dispatch from that smog-choked boulevard of broken dreams called Hollywood.

Mr. Lynch revisits that bewitched boulevard in the extraordinary, savagely uncompromised “Inland Empire,” his first feature in five years, his first shot in video and one of the few films I’ve seen this year that deserves to be called art. Dark as pitch, as noir, as hate, by turns beautiful and ugly, funny and horrifying, the film is also as cracked as Mad magazine, though generally more difficult to parse. I’m still trying to figure out what the giant talking rabbits — which seem to be living in Ralph Kramden’s apartment, as redesigned by Edward Hopper — have to do with the weepy Polish woman who may be a whore or merely lost or, because this is a David Lynch film (after all), probably both.

As the Good Witch of the North says, it’s always best to start at the beginning and, so, once upon a time, an actress, Nikki Grace (a dazzling, fearless Laura Dern), receives a stranger (Grace Zabriskie, hilarious, unsettling) into her home. The unnamed visitor, a new neighbor with bulging eyes and an East European accent, engages in some gossip (“I hear you have a new role”) before delivering two brief parables that hint at the weirdness to follow. When the boy went out into the world to play, the stranger says, evil was born and followed the boy. When the girl went out to play, though, she got lost in the marketplace, which pretty much sums up what happens to most pretty actresses in Hollywood.

Like “Mulholland Drive,” which this new film resembles like an evil twin, “Inland Empire” involves an attractive blond actress who tumbles down rabbit holes inside rabbit holes inside rabbit holes. In “Mulholland Drive,” the actress finally chokes on the acrid smoke that billows out of the dream factory, imagining herself in a starring role before gasping her last breath in what looks like a Nathanael West rooming house of horrors. They shoot actresses, don’t they? Yes, they do, and usually before the clincher. Mostly, though, actresses just fade away, undone by wrinkles and the industry’s lack of interest in anything female that doesn’t jiggle. By contrast, in his strange way, Mr. Lynch loves women, or at least their representations. And he gives them terribly tasty roles.

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Also:

The House Next Door provides 5 essential Lynch links

Varied responses to the film archived at Green Cine