By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Advanced cricketeering: Andrews on Inland Empire
Another writer makes beautiful sentences out of mad artifact: “How many countries are there in the human mind?” asks the FT’s Nigel Andrews of David Lynch‘s Inland Empire. What does the title mean? “It means the mind. That continent. That imperium. That expanse of broad-flung colonies, most of them at war with most of the others. How do you make a film about such multitudinousness? …After half an hour you may be climbing up the wall. An hour, and you may be applying for admission to a mental clinic. (Not another scene in which Laura Dern, a film actress playing a film actress, spooks herself by exploring the “inland empire” that lies behind the soundstage housefronts, an empire apparently including Poland.) Two hours and you will, if you have a soul, fall violently in love with this film’s psychedelic implacability, its lyrical madness.” …[W]here what used to be central-eastern Europe seems now to be part of unmapped LA. It is surely clear that the secondary meaning of “inland empire” is the blazing foundry of European folklore that lies inside Hollywood itself, that “outer” empire founded by transatlantic Jews and gypsies… But that is show business, isn’t it? Lynch is on the money, with both his questions and his hinted answers. For who ever thought Hollywood and the dream life of cinema were innocent? Who ever believed they were not created by a long-term arrangement, at once damning and Faustianly aspirational, between the devil and the deep human mind?” [More at the link; the Inland Empire site is here.]