You can read below my opinion about David Lynch films that especially grabbed my attention (I'll add more eventually). It's nothing more (or less) than what I think and feel about these films, and how I discovered them : I'm not really reviewing them, I'm not making up complicated explanations to explain their plot (actually, I believe David Lynch's films are quite straightforward, psychotic in most cases, but straightforward) ; I'm not trying to rate them, or to make a nice list saying which is better or worse than the other. In fact, I think most of David Lynch's films can touch you, or not, depending mostly on your past, your psychology, your way of life, your character. They're great, but simply not for everyone.

There are many SPOILERS below. In general, the beginning of each text is a spoiler-free presentation of the movie, but I quickly go into many aspects of the film supposing you've already seen it. A film by David Lynch is a personal experience that has to be discovered for yourself, anyway : don't read or listen to others before you've actually seen it.

"INLAND EMPIRE" makes me sad on so many levels.

Mostly, what saddens me is that for the first time, a David Lynch film is exactly what Lynch detractors accuse Lynch (and Lynch fans) of doing :

For the first time, David Lynch has shot a movie with absolutely no script. This is not an exaggeration, he said so himself : "this film is very different because I don’t have a script, I write the thing scene by scene and much of it is shot and I don’t have much of a clue where it will end".

For the first time, a David Lynch film has basically no structure. There's about half an hour early in the film that may look like a beginning, and there's something shortly before the end credits that may look like a conclusion, but everything in between is totally random. We're very far from the dream/sad reality structure of "Mulholland Drive", or the reality/alternate identity/closure and escape structure of "Lost Highway". Not to mention "Eraserhead" and its linear narration. Yet, those three movies were Lynch's strangest, most surreal movies yet.

For the first time, the characters in a David Lynch film have no personality whatsoever. Before all Hell breaks loose and she gets "in trouble", the only thing we know about Laura Dern's character is that she's an actress, about to be the female lead of a film. That's it. We don't know if she's famous or starting her career, if it's really her profession or something she just wanted to do at that part of her life. We don't know what her hopes are, of anything about her past. In fact, we don't have the chance of seeing her doing or saying anything special before the (now typical) lynchian "reality shift" ; after which time, location and personalities change every two minutes. No character has ever the chance to be developed under such circumstances.

This is unfortunate.

I'll stop a bit on that point because it's especially important : what Lynch's most surreal movies have always been about is character exploration. "Lost Highway" is about seeing the world from Fred Madison's schizophrenic and paranoid point of view. "Mulholland Drive" is about Diane Selwyn's hopes, her love for Camilla, and the sad contrast with her actual life. "Eraserhead" is about a lonely, odd man, trapped with a baby that invades his mental intimacy. "Fire Walk with Me" is about Laura Palmer's denial and madness, coming from years of repeated abuse. Here, since we don't learn anything on Laura Dern's character, there is simply no relevance to what she goes through. Not only there is no way to understand anything, but there is no point trying to do so. The characters are simply not interesting, be it Laura Dern's or secondary characters : there is no Frank or Ben from "Blue Velvet", no Lucy or Pete from "Twin Peaks", no Adam Kesher from "Mulholland Drive".

Actually, for the first time, a David Lynch film is nothing more but a collection of recycled, old David Lynch clichés. With no plot, no structure, no character development, all that is left to the film is "lynchian moments". Time loops ? Check. Shifting personalities ? Check. Red drapes ? Check. Blinking lights ? Check. Dark stairways and hallways ? Check. Old telephones ringing ? Check. Gruesome deaths ? Check. Zigzag pattern on floor ? Check... Whole sequences of the film copy earlier David Lynch films, except here they're totally put out of any context, and therefore deprived of all their narrative and emotional impact.

At this point, though, you can ask : is it all that bad ? Wasn't Lynch's goal to precisely make something new and totally abstract ? To leave narration behind and make something much closer to pure visual art ? Judged strictly as a piece of art, isn't this film well done and interesting ?

Sadly, no.

First, because even abstract art has some structure to it. Even a book as crazy as William Burroughs's "Naked Lunch" has lots of narrative parts that, while insane, are easy to follow. Ironically, even Matthew Barney's "Cremaster 3", which is pure visual art (or filmed performance art), has a clear structure, a progression, some suspense, an introduction and a conclusion - and even character exposition. "INLAND EMPIRE" hasn't.

And then, because to be visual art, you have to be at least a bit beautiful. "INLAND EMPIRE" isn't. The choice of digital camera, to me, is a disaster, or simply hasn't been done right. You can see digital movie compression and pixel aliasing on screen... the camera constantly changes its focus, making the image a blurry mess... the colors are all washed out, perspective is deformed... like every other aspect of the movie, the cinematography is completely self-indulgent.

And it's three hours long.

And Roger Ebert, who spent most of his career hating Lynch and lobbying against his work, gave it four stars.

I'm so sad...

"Fire Walk with Me" is the movie that got me into David Lynch. I've seen "Elephant Man", "Dune", and parts of "Blue Velvet" before (and liked them all), but didn't think of them as anything special. I cried at the end of "Elephant Man" like anybody, but quickly forgot about it afterwards.

I had heard about the "Twin Peaks" series and how it was strange and great, but it had been aired in France in weird time slots and out of order, so I missed it. I liked very much experimental works then (and I still do), like what David Cronenberg or Peter Greenaway do, so I was interested into catching this series one day or another. One evening, I saw that Canal + (the French network company that produced the "Mulholland Drive" movie) was airing "Fire Walk with Me", so I watched it, and recorded it on tape.

I was blown away. First, the photography is gorgeous, with dreamlike visuals, atmospheric lightings, and shooting angles making the plainest things (rotating fans, power plugs) surreal, menacing and artistic. The 1950 style was moody and very pleasant. The way the movie is structured, with an introduction giving a wider background to what Laura Palmer is about to go through, then her last seven days, was also very original. But what I liked the most about it was how the story is told with perfect ambiguity between genuine supernatural events and subjective delusion.

Usually, in a movie, something seemingly impossible happening (such as a monster) is either supernatural (or science-fiction, which is more or less the same thing), or a hallucination. Not both. In "Fire Walk with Me" (and later, in "Lost Highway"), it *is* both : it's as if the madness of the main character was going from the inside of his/her mind to the outside, or (and this is the way "Fire Walk with Me" works) as if the inside illusory forces tormenting a character, because they've been shared before by other victims and abusers (the movie is about the chain of violence), had started having an outside life of their own.

It is very much the way Gods worked in polytheist religions : human emotions or traits were embodied into supernatural characters, with a God of war, a God of love, a God of wisdom, etc. Here, the pantheon is a pantheon of madness, of denial, of fear and delusion.

So : is BOB a supernatural being that feeds on despair and fear, and is abusing Laura Palmer through the body of her father (who, the series suggest, has himself been abused as a teenager) to eventually use her as a new host ; or is BOB a character that Laura (and maybe Leland) Palmer made up because the truth would be unbearable ? The meaning of the movie is clearly more about the latter : it's about rape and incest, and how it affects the victims - David Lynch himself said BOB was an abstraction, an embodiment of a human emotion or pathology.

Yet, showing BOB and other abstract characters like real beings able to act physically does totally change the impact of the movie. If they'd been shown as illusions, we wouldn't feel as concerned by what Laura Palmer is going through, the Hell that's her life, her constant fear, despair, and confusion. We wouldn't be so touched. It's a very moving film, and a very smart one.

I didn't mind not seeing the series first. Obviously, I understood some characters were supposed to be known by the audience before seeing the actual movie, but their role is either minor, or clearly stated. In fact, it seems knowing the series before watching the movie made people hate the movie, because of how different it was from the series, mostly in tone. "Twin Peaks" was on the whole fun, a bit silly and rather light ; "Fire Walk with Me" was bleak, frightening, confusing and violent. But given the subject of the film, it was bound to be that way...

To me, "Fire Walk with Me" is a masterpiece : it's beautiful, it's smart, it's fun and entertaining, it's mysterious and hypnotic, but mostly, it talks about a very difficult subject with great subtlety and, actually, realism. By putting the audience into the very heart of Laura Palmer's Hell and not judging neither the victim nor the abuser, David Lynch took the harder route and accurately materialized the brutal psychological facts of abuse. And, by showing human beings as little more than puppets into the hands of greater psychological forces similar to Gods, he illustrated part of the human condition.