Lynch premieres INLAND EMPIRE in Austin w\ Q+A

Director David Lynch (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks) presented his latest film, INLAND EMPIRE (written in all caps), to a wildly appreciative audience last Wednesday at Austin’s sold-out Paramount theater.

The ambitious, three-hour head trip stars Laura Dern in a riveting performance as an actress who takes a role that begins to mirror her own life, until she seems to have passed through the camera lens which, like Alice’s looking glass or Dorothy’s tornado, transports her to a nightmarish alternate reality ruled by its own absurd anti-logic. The remainder of the movie is a fractured tour through the dark recesses of the disturbed character’s inner torment, where her illusions assume sinister guises.

In his first visit to the city, Lynch kicked off the evening in suitably surreal fashion with some haunting live improvisation by Austin vocalist and Alamo Heights graduate Chrysta Bell, whose music appears in the film.

Independently produced and distributed in a limited theatrical release, INLAND EMPIRE’s conception was also unconventional. “I never had a script,” stated Lynch. “I had scenes I would shoot not knowing how one related to another, until I had five or seven scenes, and I could begin to see what they were all about.”

The movie features many Lynchian hallmarks, including atmospheric sound design, spontaneous musical numbers, poetically profane dialogue, low-life melodrama, dream obsession, sexual intrigue, and another relentlessly enigmatic “œnarrative” which drops tantalizing hints about a possible meaning, and then seems to deliberately defy the viewer’s natural attempts to synthesize them. Lynch may be the filmmaker most in touch with his subconscious, and the film excels at capturing an unsettling mood. Claustrophobically shot on consumer-grade digital video, Lynch said he’s so happy with the results that he has given up using film.

Much like his last effort, Mulholland Dr., INLAND EMPIRE is likely to spark plenty of parlor debates over what in the world it was about. Lynch avoids explanations of his often-incomprehensible works, and when asked during the ensuing Q&A about the motivations behind some of his artistic choices, he was characteristically oblique. “To try and find connections between my films, it’s not an intellectual thing,” he told one guy reaching to connect the dots.

As vicarious audience members trying to make sense and find patterns from the clues just as the main character does, we might ultimately convince ourselves we’ve “figured it out” and feel power over it. Perhaps, though, Lynch is communicating that the only connection between life experiences is a personal one we create to comfort ourselves, and random events only take on significance to us because the alternative is too frightening to think about.

Lynch did grant attendees a rare glimpse into his creative process, revealing his daily use of transcendental meditation to achieve inspiration, and went on to liken his method of culling ideas from the underlying “ocean of consciousness” to fishing. “You need patience, desire is the bait, you catch some and those you focus on, and soon other fish swim in.”

When asked if he considered himself more successful as of late, the cult filmmaker answered, “We maybe measure success in terms of money, so in those terms I’m pretty unsuccessful. But if you catch ideas that you fall in love with and are able to translate them and be true to those ideas and get them to feel correct, that’s a beautiful thing human beings can do, and that’s a real measure of success, and so in that way I feel really lucky and successful.”

-andy gately 01/07