Internal emperor

David Lynch draws fresh inspiration from his TV, DV, TM and his subconscious for meta-melodrama Inland Empire
By Adam Nayman
Inland Empire ****

Starring Laura Dern, Justin Theroux. Written and directed by David Lynch. 172 min. (14A) Opens May 4 at the Royal, 608 College.

As the phone rings, I decide: I'm going to ask David Lynch to tell me about the rabbits.

The rabbits in question are six feet tall and given to sitting around their dim apartment, exchanging staccato non sequiturs in between mysterious knocks at the door. It wouldn't be quite right to say that the rabbits figure prominently in Lynch's new film Inland Empire – their appearances comprise barely 10 minutes of its three-hour running time. And, anyway, to focus on any single aspect of Lynch's films is to close the doors of perception that they endeavour to blow open.

But given that these bunnies are carried over from one of the director's long-running internet serials (called, appropriately enough, “Rabbits” ) and are played by Mulholland Dr. stars Justin Theroux and Naomi Watts, it seems worth it to violate the cardinal rule of interviewing David Lynch: don't ask him what his films are about. Better to tease out a response by suggesting an interpretation of your own.

So, here goes. Do these rabbits, whose glum, hermetically sealed universe is punctuated by inexplicable bursts of sitcom-style canned laughter, comprise a commentary on the general lousiness of television, a medium the director has both conquered (with Twin Peaks) and failed at (the original Mulholland Dr. pilot for ABC)?

Surely, Lynch, who is speaking with Eye Weekly from his offices in Los Angeles, has been subjected to far loopier analyses of his work.

“That's very interesting,” he says, seemingly sincere as always. “With sitcoms, you do have one set, with people just coming and going. There are some sitcoms that are probably very well written. You also have to have the laugh track to tell you something's funny. Of course, that's because sometimes it isn't funny. But you know, there's something else about rabbits for me....”

And that's all we're going to get there.

For the record, the 61-year-old director – the pride of Missoula, Montana and one of the greatest living American filmmakers – says he enjoys hearing what other people think about his films. “Nobody has ever said anything that's made me angry,” he says. “Sometimes it's my films that make people angry, or make them frustrated. Some of the interpretations people have made out of my films are very, very beautiful. Some are things I haven't thought of. But you know, nobody's ever said or figured out what Eraserhead means to me.”

It's probably right to invoke Lynch's trippy 1977 labour-of-love debut here, since Inland Empire is the most challenging and inscrutably beautiful film he's made in the 30 years since. A lot of people said the same thing about Inland Empire's predecessor, Mulholland Dr. (2001), but multiple viewings confirm that film as a decodable story about an impressionable actress chewed up and spit out by sinister Hollywood machinery – an empathetic nightmare about the Dream Factory. Inland Empire doesn't scan so neatly. It also centres on an actress, Nikki Grace (Laura Dern, in an amazingly malleable turn), a movie star who wins a role in a refried Southern melodrama, On High in Blue Tomorrows, opposite a Lothario co-star (Justin Theroux, sans rabbit garb). She then learns that the film is actually a remake of a troubled Polish production whose stars were murdered during the shoot.

From there, the film slips into a reverie that can be accurately (if lazily) described as Lynchian, a spooky fugue of shifting locations and headspaces that plays like a dive into two murky subconsciousnesses: Nikki Grace's and David Lynch's. Both are disorienting places to be, although Lynch cautions that audiences shouldn't confuse the psychological torment of his characters – and Nikki is perhaps his most tortured heroine yet – with his own.

“You don't have to suffer to put suffering onscreen,” he offers brightly, restating one of the mantras of his new book Catching the Big Fish, a typically folksy account of his experiences with transcendental meditation. “Movies are a reflection of the world. And obviously, there are problems in the world.”

At times, Inland Empire feels more like a distended reflection of Lynch's filmography, from the presence of his long-time muse Dern (“The first idea I had for this film came when I saw [her] standing across the street from my house” ) to the horrendous physical violence to the aforementioned incorporation of the “Rabbits” material. Lynch freely acknowledges the convergences with Mulholland Dr., explaining that he's become “very interested in actors, and what goes into a performance.” When it's suggested that this quality might link Inland Empire to the thespian fixations of the French master Jacques Rivette – whose sexy-scary Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) would make a great mindfuck double bill with Mulholland Dr. – Lynch is taken aback: “I don't know him. I should probably check [his movies] out.”

Inland Empire also continues Lynch's ambivalent fascination with Hollywood itself. Any film in which the main character vomits blood on the Walk of Fame – right on poor Dorothy Lamour's plaque, in fact – is going to open itself up to certain interpretations. “What does that word mean, ambivalent?” asks Lynch, again sincere. When I explain my meaning – that Inland Empire seems too complex to read simply as an anti-Hollywood screed – he assumes a “gotcha!” tone. “Exactly. It's never just one thing. The only way you can look at Hollywood, or anything else, is from a lot of small angles. There is always a bigger picture. So Mulholland Dr. is one angle, and Inland Empire is another.”

This mention of angles and vantage points segues into a discussion of the film's by-now notorious digital-video aesthetic. When Inland Empire showed last fall at the New York Film Festival, much of the critical discussion centered on its “ugliness,” and, indeed, the visual textures are much rougher than what audiences are used to from Lynch (or, really, anybody else outside of the experimental filmmaking realm). But “ugly” is not a versatile enough word to describe the look of Inland Empire. The images are meticulously mottled, and sometimes lovely, as with one sun-dappled interlude between Dern and Theroux.

The move to DV constitutes something of a mission statement on Lynch's part. “The digital world is rushing up to us,” he says. “I can't go back to film. It's too heavy, and it's too slow.”

Certainly, a throwaway moment – where the director of the film-within-a-film, played to persnickety perfection by Jeremy Irons, struggles with a cumbersome lighting set-up – gains weight in light of Lynch's stylistic concerns. It's a combative stance, yet the filmmaker contends that it's borne of passion, rather than fashion. “If you just try to do things differently to do them differently,” he says, “it's not real. That would just be a surface thing.”

Rejecting change for its own sake is crucial to Lynch, who faced similar charges when critics decided that his G-rated back-roads odyssey The Straight Story (1999) was a wilful detour from his usual lost highways. When pressed, he will simply repeat that his creative process is as it always has been. “My ideas are things that have always just kind of been there [in my mind] and I've had to just sort of pick them out.” Asked if his ability to realize these synaptic flashes – to catch the big fish, as it were – has improved with time, Lynch is non-committal, though he does admit that he thinks about it all the time. “It's all about conjuring,” he says. “I think that I conjure things.”

It would be glib, however, to call this latest effort a neat trick and leave it at that. Sleight-of-hand depends on hiding something from the audience, and Inland Empire, which goes from surpassingly unpleasant to strangely affirmative over its gruelling duration, is as plaintive and communicative as anything in the Lynch canon.

“What I like about cinema is that it's a way to say things without words,” says the director. And yet the last word in Inland Empire should also be the last word on it. It is unexpectedly, and absolutely, “sweet.”