Saw David Lynch’s latest 2 days ago. The thing is still playing fitfully in my head. I sort of loved it, hated it and was profoundly confused by it all at once. For 3 hours.
My reaction to it reminds me of Dune, funnily. What, exactly, is so damn arresting about this thing that for the most part smacks of indulgent rubbish?
Is Lynch just ahead of his time, or has he misfired? I really can’t tell. Maybe I need to see it again?
Can anybody else find the words?
Still on my Must See list. I’m not sure how much longer it’ll be around, so I may have to fit it in the next couple of days.
I had the same reaction as you. Loved it a little, hated it a little, frustrated a LOT, need to see it again. Laura Dern was amazing.
Thanks for remembering, Equipose. To the OP - I cannot stress enough: see it at least twice. It’s rare that I say this, but it was a completely different experience the second time around. My friend managed to catch it about 8 times while it was in town, and he’s pretty much figured the whole thing out. He also wrote 20+ pages of notes on it.
I’m just kind of waiting until more people see it, because I want to get into some hardcore discussion about it. Too few people have seen it so far for there to be any decent discussion.
8 Times? Good God, man.
Also, ‘pretty much figured out’?
Can it fit in a spoiler box?!?
The Rabbits? Room 47? AxxonN? The Circus? The Detective? The freaking Lumberjack?
I can’t wait to hear the grand unifying theory on this one.
Ok, the MAJORLY CONDENSED version is
The vast majority of the film is a deathbed hallucination by Susan Blue, who is stabbed and lies dying in the gutter. As she bleeds to death, she concocts a vast fantasy where she was a movie star named Nikki Grace, and so on. Many details of the hallucination are provided by the ramblings of the Japanese woman next to her in the gutter. Toward the end, she realizes that the Nikki Grace story/character is a facade, which is when she shrugs off the attentions of the director and handlers and walks off the set, into the movie theater, where she sees the whole thing playing out on the screen. At that point, she realizes what’s happening and gracefully dies, thus reaching a sort of “heaven” or nirvana - “sweeeeeeet.”
Let me see if I can copy and paste some of what he wrote over here.
“The vast majority of the film is a deathbed hallucination”
Isn’t this basically what’s supposedly happening in both Lost Highway and Mullholland Drive?
Interesting…it may actually make sense the second time.
I’m glad that I saw it at the cinema - visually the film is very interesting and artistic.
Laura Dern does a good job of being a game old thing faced with the usual barrage of non sequiturs and wry looks from the usual parade of weirdos.
I was thankful for the occasional sudden horror moment to wake me up a bit.
Great for Lynch fans who enjoy this sort of esoteric whimsy.
Isn’t the incidental music during the stabbing scene taken directly from The Shining? I found it distractingly similar…
Maybe. It’s Penderecki, a longtime film favorite for suspensful moments.
What does all this have to do with San Bernardino?
Really, the more times you see it the clearer it becomes, yet paradoxically the more questions it raises in your mind. Seven times for me so far, I can’t get it out of my head. I see it as part of a trilogy, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. Identities shift, realities melt, yet still debts must be paid.
Look at me, and tell me if you’ve known me before. That line, repeated often, is one of the keys to the movie.
Magnificent. David Lynch is a true cinematic genius.
The first two hours of this movie, I was freaked out. Nearly crawling out of my skin with the unlikely conviction that someone was going to come up behind me in the theater and stab me to death.
And then round about the third hour, I realized that there was never going to be a release for my discomfort and I started getting pretty angry.
But that level of audience manipulation… that’s pretty impressive in and of itself.
The IFC Center was offering a deal for this movie: See it 10 times and you get your eleventh visit for free. I was not one of the takers, but I do know people who took advantage.
Inland Empire was so amazing it actually got me down - I haven’t been in the cinema since I saw it (about four months back) prior to this weekend, when I saw the Bourne film. You just can’t watch something like Inland Empire and go back to the regular bullshit films without a break.
I got the feeling it may have been Lynch’s apotheosis - I hope that he hasn’t painted himself into a corner with it, I mean, where do you go from there? Maybe another ‘straight story’ to re-equilibrate.
I love Lynch films, just love 'em.
I think a lot of people are vexed by his films because they don’t realize that they don’t necessarily have a tight meaning, or message, or beginning or end, really. They just are. It sounds like a “cop out” to say that, but I equate his films to the work of abstract artists: You view their painting and then you ask, “What is it?” And the artist answers, “I really have no idea.” And then you say, “Well, I love it!” and the artist says, “Thanks.”
I remember the first time I saw “Eraserhead”. It was so, so awesome. I was agog. The film made no sense, but who cared? Perhaps that was the point: to not make sense. In the end, it was simply a device designed to evoke emotion and response, and that is all any film is in the end anyway. Is it important that we understand the delivery?
Hell, the guy sitting by the window and pulling levers was worth the price of admission by itself…
Ok maybe someone can help me out here. Mullholland Drive was my first David Lynch film I saw and I loved it. So I rent Lost Highway… and now from what I’ve read Inland Empire is the same theme. So to me it just seems like he has the same plot in all 3 movies, just with different characters/settings - which to me is kind of lame and almost a cop-out.
Please don’t reply to this with a “You don’t understand David Lynch film” thing - I get them, but it just seems to me he is getting lazy with the whole faux-reality-imagination thing.
Saw this over the weekend. Watched it twice. After the first viewing, I wasn’t sure if I even liked it or not. (I love Mulholland Drive, but haven’t seen much more Lynch…I hated Blue Velvet [too brutal], and was “meh” about Dune and Fire Walk With Me.) I felt reluctant to go through it again, because it’s just so slow. All those 30-second scenes of Laura Dern staring wordlessly with a baffled expression fixed on her face. Waiting for the damn rabbits to say something. But the second time through I found I related to it a bit better, it even seemed to go faster, but I still didn’t get much more out of it. One probably pretty obscure detail I caught the second time through: the last thing Crooked-Glasses-Guy says on the phone is “czerwony,” the Polish word for red. But even though I caught on the first time through that the color red was supposed to be somehow significant, I didn’t get anything new by watching for red things on second viewing.
I think the lumberjack is a simple visual pun. He’s sawing wood. Sawing wood=snoring=sleeping. It’s the dream world.
Any more thoughts?