I'm Inlanding your Empire, Lynching your David

One of the pleasant trade offs to sucking down pollution everyday is you get to shout "I know where that is!" When David Lynch makes a film about your city.

The movie started at 8 and we didn't walk out of the theater till 11:15. That might be one of the reasons Lynch couldn't find a distributer and had to pay out of pocket to get it in a few theaters. Well that, and the movie makes NO SENSE. But that's our man, the king of disconnected thoughts. For how obtuse and impossible it is to understand, there's always the nagging fact that there is actually meaning behind it all.

I'd dare to say this is probably his least accessible film. While Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive were strange, there was a semblance of plot that moved them forward. Not so much here. It was as if every scene was irrelevant to the scene before it. And the scene after it. And every other scene in the movie.

Though, I did sit patiently through it. Because David Lynch has a knack for tapping into deep emotional responses. Like when you have a nightmare - it's not always what happens that is scary, but the wrenching sensation deep in your chest that tells you something horrifying is about to happen. I don't know how, but for some reason Lynch has been able to recreate the sensation of dread in quite a few of his works. Unfortunately, that tension was only half built up once in the entirety of Inland Empire.

All this conspires to rank it pretty low on my list of his films.