Inland Empire
Mr. Lynch, go fuck yourself.
Yes, you guessed it. I belong to the guild of Filmaffinity users who, on a lucid day, can even manage to tie our own shoelaces and draw our own portrait if you hand us a six and a four. That’s what happens to simpletons like us who love cinema when we stumble into an intellectual abomination like the one at hand: our face goes completely blank. Doesn’t matter if you hold a postgraduate degree or if the neighbors call you “the weird one who stares at lightbulbs.” It doesn’t matter how crazy you are, or whether your coworkers point at you as that guy who didn’t like Torrente. You’ll always have Lynch.
Thanks to him, you can descend several rungs down the cultural pyramid and fully embrace the vestige of innate animality that lives inside each of us — the one you thought would dissolve with time. Things must be called by their name, and shit must be called shit. Sleeping at the antipodes is the director who made my all-time favorite television series. The human mind plays with our ego far too often, and apparently printing a unique style isn’t enough for him — he unravels the skein chasing the most brutal act of self-indulgence instead of perfecting a cinematic current unprecedented among his contemporaries. No, no — he has to be the most unhinged member of the brotherhood, certifying for posterity his place removed from the common herd, where the praises of his admirers won’t stumble into similar proposals, and this becomes a journey toward the different, the hidden, the transgressive. Yes, and also the pitiful.
The truth is I envy my friend Tomine, who gives the film a ten and writes one of the best reviews I’ve read on this site, which encouraged me to rent this three-hour monstrosity I sat through without a murmur. One of the paid critics cited by FA argues that Inland Empire is “the first masterpiece of post-cinema.” You know how it goes… when someone gets paid to fill column inches without having the faintest clue about cinema, they justify their salary with pretensions like “post-cinema” — meaning futuristic cinema with prospects of becoming an ideological movement led by this gentleman — while throwing in the word surrealism so that whatever drivel they write doesn’t lack gravitas, securing the perfect alibi for their pppprrrrffffffff… mental gymnastics.
Cinema within cinema, lives within lives, events overlapping across different timelines, propped up by hundreds of extreme close-ups that quite plainly aim to accentuate the bewilderment of Neanderthal viewers like myself. The screenplay plays no part in the production, and if there is one, it’s written on the nearest McDonald’s napkin. It is rejected as archaic in favor of a new era of manufacturing images without the burden of the written word, giving birth to “surrealist” abominations like this one — an unjust and disproportionate penance that those of us who don’t swallow things whole have unfortunately had to digest.
I’m bumping up the score by one point, obviously, for the pair of pears David puts on screen in his film — not so much for their geometric perfection and sophisticated styling, but for the praise they receive from the stunning women accompanying the monument that carries them.
One final note, for lack of space:
“To speak of plot in ‘Inland Empire’ is almost a vulgarity. (…) Totum revolutum? Sancta sanctorum? Without a doubt. Everything, except a con. (…) What’s wrong with playing a little game and waking that fossil known as the Seventh Art from its slumber?” (Javier Cortijo, Diario ABC)
This is the kind of dead man with a pen I was referring to in the third paragraph of my review. I’m not sure which of the three lines irritates me most, though I have a strong suspicion it’s the last one.
You’re right, Javier — talking about plot is a vulgarity. Disgusting, really. Much better to have improvised imagery as the doctrinal vehicle. Not knowing what we’re going to make because something will come out of it, and we can’t allow something as fatuous as a screenplay or a plot to defenestrate a pretentious exercise like this one — one we can use to piss béchamel from the pages of our newspaper.
Then we appeal to a sort of revolution empty of content but transgressive in its forms, climb aboard the bandwagon of snobbery and stupidity, pronouncing in the Latin manner that you loved it — because it has always been fashionable that transgression must be good — while treating the masses with condescension. Can’t leave that out, maestro; it’s a very important pillar.
And we cap off the three-line paragraph by suggesting that this kind of product revalues a Cinema in a comatose state — when two years earlier, friend Clint Eastwood demonstrated to all the fucking trendsetters and pretentious critics in general what someone with talent can create from a short screenplay of barely 30 pages, enlarging the History of Cinema by making Million Dollar Baby: a film strict in its formal parameters of the Seventh Art, brimming with vitality using the old rules that compose the narration of events. He showed what one can achieve by adhering to dogmas older than he is, and by extension, far more demanding and difficult than the cinematic turd called Inland Empire.
But don’t be offended — I have my opinion too, you know, and I write for free…