A Reflective Exploration of Lynchs film Inland Empire: the Film Style and Cinematic Message - Research Paper Example

Written and directed by the famous film director David Lynch, the surrealistic, psychological thriller film Inland Empire (2006) was the most radical film of the year and the film has been appreciated for illustrating Lynch’s filmic style and cinematic message. All through his works, Lynch has been able to create new visions about his artworks and he has cut down the formal struggle between artist and medium. It is essential to realize that Lynch is a director who has been seeking to place his work within mainstream production, nevertheless his creative practices constantly de-familiarize his chosen medium. It is essential to realize Lynch’s work as an anticipation of the independent aesthetic which has assumed a superior position in Hollywood in the recent past. Lynch’s entry into mainstream movie-making, from fine art and mixed media, happened at a time when film industry was in a state of economic and technological transformation. “After Eraserhead (1977) and The Elephant Man (1980), he took the opportunity of Dune (1984) to gain access to a system of production that has consistently appeared puzzled by or suspicious of his ways of seeing… From the art-house avant-garde of Eraserhead, to the blockbuster Dune, the television serial Twin Peaks (1990), the porn video culture of Lost Highway (1997) and the ‘Disney’ family film The Straight Story (1999), Lynch’s films give aesthetic form to the synergies of post-classical Hollywood in a way no other contemporary film-maker’s work has done.” (Sheen and Davison, 2) It is important to note that Lynch’s work has been distinctively situated at the nexus of changing systems of distribution and exhibition since 1984 and these changes include the introduction of video and play television at the end of the 1970s and across the 1980s, the rise of the multiplex, with its extended market reach, and the growth of the regional independent cinemas. Most essentially, Lynch’s works exhibit an intensely creative approach to the activity of production which can be compared to the classical directors’ works which have brought European aesthetic traditions to the studio-system working practices. Inland Empire effectively illustrates Lynch’s filmic style and cinematic message and this film significantly continues the director’s commentary on Hollywood that he began with his previous works. In a reflective exploration of the film Inland Empire confirms that it very clearly illustrates David Lynch’s filmic style and cinematic message, and the creation of this film has been in line with his previous films such as Eraserhead, Mullholand Drive, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, and Wild at Heart. In this new film, the great eroto-surrealist David Lynch has offered one of the important imaginary orifices of pleasure, which is fascinating and enjoyable. Significantly, Inland Empire can best be comprehended as a supernatural mystery thriller, wherein a vanilla-wholesome Hollywood actress called Nikki Grace accepts the heroine’s role in a passionate southern drama about adultery and murder, working with a mischievously handsome actor and an elegant British director. However, to the bafflement and terrified dismay of Nikki Grace, played with unyielding composure and intelligence by Laura Dern, she discovers that the script of the work is a remake of a lost, uncompleted Polish film, and she realizes that the project is curse. It is important to realize that Lynch’s new film very well represents his filmic style and cinematic message. As Peter Bradshaw maintains, “Inland Empire is, as with so many of Lynch’s movies, a meditation on the unacknowledged and unnoticed strangeness of Hollywood and movie-making in general, though I am bound to say that it does not have anything like Naomi Watts’s marvelous ‘audition’ scenes in Mulholland Drive. The director’s connoisseurship of Hollywood, his anthropologist eye for its alien rites, are however as keen as ever.” (Bradshaw) Therefore, it is obvious that the new film by Lynch bring out various essential characteristics of a regular Lynchian movie. In a general evaluation of Lynch’s works, the critics often identify a significant connection between the ‘feeling of optimism’ and the openness to critical freedom. According to the most recent critics of his works, the complexities of his works can be very well situated within the critical frame of post-modernism. A profound understanding of the cultural contexts and inter-texts within which Lynch’s works are situated and his intensive creative engagement with the specific working practices of his industry can be valuable in realizing the effect of his new film Inland Empire, which is a manifestation of the creativity of the director. Significantly, he encourages a reconsideration of the periodicity of cinema, though his excessive attention to the complete range of working practices at his disposal. In a reflective analysis of the film Inland Empire, one becomes aware of the sources of Lynch’s own creativity as well as his role in a twenty-first-century cinema, which is more in a state of becoming than of having been. “In this respect, one of the most important features of Lynch’s work is his continuing engagement with the noir aesthetic. Arguably the strand of film-making that has maintained the disruptive potential of European traditions within mainstream production, noir has emerged in post-classical Hollywood as the narrative and stylistic template for an independent aesthetic.” (Sheen and Davison, 3) Therefore, the new film by Lynch can be best realized as an attempt to continue his engagement with the noir aesthetic and he has been effective in bringing out the various essential features of his previous works through this new film. One of the most fundamental aspects about the new film by Lynch is that, in this film, he is emphatic about the power of image and sound to communicate his vision. It is highly acknowledged that few directors in the past three decades have produced more compelling, controversial, and mystifying films than Lynch and he has been continuing the great efforts expressed in his previous works. All through his career in film industry, he has stressed the importance of image, sound, and music, which are evident in his earliest film shorts such as The Grandmother, the break-out surrealist feature Eraserhead, the hit TV series Twin Peaks, the Oscar nominated The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, and his most recent films Mullholland Drive and Inland Empire. When asked about the role of music in the film, Lynch replied: “Music is huge. It’s because sometimes you get ideas from listening to music. Sometimes a scene comes right out of music, or a mood. It’s inspiring and sometimes marries to a scene. It’s magical ingredient… All the music that you hear is music that I found married to the place in the film where it exists. A lot of things were tried. If it doesn’t work you know it doesn’t work. So then you got to start again.” (Barney, 249) Therefore, Lynch’s new film Inland Empire has been celebrated as stressing the power of image and sound to communicate his vision. There are wonderful images all through the film which help the director in effectively conveying his message and this strategy has been characteristic of his other films too. According to Peter Bradshaw, “Chief among these is Laura Dern’s wonderful face: equine and gaunt, sometimes, but always lovely and compelling in a way that goes quite beyond the cliché of ‘jolie laide’. It is either radiant or haunted, and in one terrible sequence transformed into a horror mask that is superimposed on to the male face of her tormentor. These searing images made me think that Lynch is still inadequately celebrated as a director of women, with sensitivity somewhere between Almodóvar's empathy and Hitchcock’s beady-eyed obsession.” (Bradshaw) It is, therefore, essential to comprehend that Lynch’s new film stresses the power of image and sound to communicate the vision of the director. In an in-depth analysis of the latest film Inland Empire by David Lynch, one can easily find out the various essential aspects of his regular movies and it reveals Lynch’s filmic style and cinematic message. Significantly, Lynch makes use of every available element of cinema to convey his message. In other words, there is no other contemporary director who works with all the available aspects of cinema to the extent as Lynch does. This is one of the major reasons why he has to mobilize various aspects of film-making process to convey the elusive quality of the mysterious. “His sensitivity to the texture of sound and image, to the rhymes of speech and movement, to space, color and the intrinsic power of music, mark him as unique in this respect. He is a director working at the very epicenter of the medium. However, the originality and inventiveness of Lynch’s work comes, first and foremost, from an ability to access his own inner life. It is as a consequence of the truthfulness with which he brings that inner life to the screen that Lynch has revitalized the medium.” (Rodley, ix) Therefore, it is obvious that the film Inland Empire by Lynch is an important illustration of the director’s emphasis of the texture of sound and image, the rhymes of speech and movement, the importance of space, color and the intrinsic power of music. In other words, like any other films of Lynch, Inland Empire celebrates all the available elements of cinema, which is a major characteristic of his films. One of the most fundamental aspects of the film Inland Empire which makes it a typical movie by the director illustrating the various characteristics of his previous films is its multiform narrative. It is a type of narrative that is more complex and challenging than the forking, fragmented or multi-strand stories. Significantly, the multiform narrative works with different strands of narrative woven through different levels of reality. “David Lynch’s films, particularly Inland Empire, provide a good illustration of multiform narrative. Inland Empire’s spectators might wish they were nonchalant surrealists capable of interpreting Lynch’s work as audio-visual poetry mainlined from the director’s unconscious, but even those willing to embrace confusion can’t help but search for a story.” (Stadler and McWilliam, 171) Therefore, it is essential to realize that David Lynch’s film Inland Empire is a typical example of the films by Lynch which illustrate multiform narrative and there is an element of mystery all through the film. In conclusion, a reflective exploration of Lynch’s film Inland Empire confirms that the director continues to make use of all the available aspects of cinema, as in his earlier films, in his most recent film. It is fundamental to realize that Inland Empire effectively illustrates Lynch’s filmic style and cinematic message and this film significantly continues the director’s commentary on Hollywood that he began with his previous works. Lynch was aware that every element of cinema was essential to effectively convey his vision to the audience and he creates the effect through the employment of sound and image, the rhymes of speech and movement, space, color and the intrinsic power of music etc. In short, the film Inland Empire illustrates Lynch’s filmic style and cinematic message and the director effectively continues his great techniques in the film which were established in the earlier films such as Eraserhead, Mullholand Drive, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, and Wild at Heart. Works Cited Barney, Richard A. David Lynch: Interviews. University Press of Mississippi. 2009. P 249. Bradshaw, Peter. “Inland Empire.” Guardian. Dec 15. 2009. . Rodley, Chris. Lynch on Lynch. Macmillan. 2005. P ix. Sheen, Erica and Annette Davison. The cinema of David Lynch: American dreams, nightmare visions. Wallflower Press. 2004. P 2. Stadler, Jane and Kelly McWilliam. Screen Media: Analysing Film and Television. Allen & Unwin. 2009. P 171. Read More