Sunday, May 27, 2007

Inland Empire

This is David Lynch's latest totally mental film. Scott made a heroic attempt to analyse it in the last issue of Frank's APA, but I find that it defies any kind of reading and is instead better appreciated in the moment. There are definitely strands to the film that unwind through it, and at any given moment whatever you see on the screen kind of makes sense (but bears a questionable relationship to what has gone before or will come after). Overall though, the film is not really about the making of sense and instead goes straight to the subconscious.

It is, of course, very unnerving. No one does that kind of existential dread like Lynch. The haunted film idea is great too, partly because it is spooky and partly because you can have fun spotting when they switch into the earlier version of the film. The music and sound design was also very impressive; must check if there is a soundtrack album available.

I thought the rabbits were great. I wish there was an actual TV programme like that – I would watch it all the time. It reminded me a bit of some TV series called Heil Honey, I'm Home! that Kealo was telling me about once, this being a 1990s sitcom done in the style of a 1950s American sitcom, about Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun's roffletastic home life. The rabbits programme had the same kind of dissonance going with it, in that the strangely detached and alienated comments of the rabbits were being reacted to by the studio audience as though this was I Love Lucy.

3 comments:

Ammonite said...

There is no chance in hell this movie will come to theatres here. For once, this is a Good Thing, as just looking at picture still give me The Fear.

tmnqd: er, I'm stumped here. Anyone?

ian said...

The Mongol practice of castrating every second son?

ian said...

It surprises me, though, that a college town would not show this kind of film.