The Super Fun of It
David Lynch’s Inland Empire comes out on DVD this week. Nathan Lee chats with the director about digital video, putrefied experiences, and tapioca.
Source: Village Voice
In the fall of 2006, David Lynch published a book called Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. "Ideas are like fish," he begins, and the book is his guide to their natural habitat (the unconscious); the best way to hook them (transcendental meditation); and the most effective kinds of bait (desire, intuition).
Along the way, Lynch shares the ingredients of his best-known recipes (Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet), as well as some of the more exotic ideas he’s managed to catch (“I don’t necessarily love rotting bodies, but . . . the textures are wonderful”). Midway between chapters devoted to “Kubrick” and “Common Sense,” a whale emerges from the depths. “I’m through with film as a medium,” Lynch declares. “For me, film is dead.”
Lynch made good on this promise—or bad, depending on your point of view—with last year’s release of Inland Empire, a movie shot with the Sony PD-150, a low-grade digital-video camera considered obsolete for serious feature filmmaking. Like his previous film, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire tells the story of a woman lost in the labyrinth of self. Laura Dern plays Nikki Grace, a Hollywood actress in the grip of a violent identity crisis, the nature of which is reflected in the elusive, dreamlike shape of the movie. But where the glamorous look of Mulholland Drive referenced the Hollywood past (westerns, musicals, film noir), the rough textures, weak colors, fuzzy depth of field, and structural volatility of Inland Empire resembled nothing so much as YouTube having an epic nightmare.
Audiences expect the unexpected from Lynch, but many critics were appalled by this new direction. In thrall to the vanishing art of 35mm cinema, they failed to appreciate the extraordinary variety and visual richness of Inland Empire, with its encyclopedic investigation into the spatial and textural possibilities of video as video, not a low-rent replacement for film: the distortion of objects looming in the foreground and evocative ambiguity of background shadows; the unique beauty of a video dissolve and the dissolution of forms in “overexposed” light. To dismiss the medium of Inland Empire is to miss the message. Just as Mulholland Drive can be read as a cautionary tale about the effect of movies on consciousness, Inland Empire speaks to the isolation and fragmentation of the post-cinema psyche, the splintering of self in the matrix of the Internet. As such, it may be the first movie masterpiece that doesn’t properly belong in movie theaters.
“Digital makes it what it is,” says Lynch on the phone from his house in the Hollywood Hills. Back in L.A. from the Polish premiere of Inland Empire, the director spoke to me about digital filmmaking, cooking quinoa, and the beauty of the “thing.”
“With traditional shooting on film, the equipment is so big and so heavy you need a large crew,” he says. “And the setup between shots takes a long time—sometimes a very long time. With digital, you have much less downtime—sometimes just moments. So what happens is, you stay in the scene, and there are less things around to break that scene. You’re in it-—you’re in it!” But what precisely are we getting into with Inland Empire? The only explanation Lynch has offered to date is that it’s about "a woman in trouble." What kind of trouble? “Well, you know,” replies Lynch, “I just say it’s about a woman in trouble.” That’s it? “That’s it. I can’t really say, because it putrefies the experience. You see a thing, and that thing has been worked on for a long time until it feels correct as a whole. And then it needs to go out without any additional words. It doesn’t do any good for the director to say this or that—it doesn’t really change people’s opinion. They might come up with something far more interesting out of it.”
Lynch’s reticence to comment on the meaning of Inland Empire extends to the double-disc DVD package. The first simply contains the film as shown in the theaters, without a commentary track. The other disc is made up of nearly three hours of extras and features, including a 70-minute collection called “More Things That Happened.” Incorporated into the body of Inland Empire, this additional material would push the total running time to over four and half hours, but Lynch insists that they be considered apart from the main attraction.
“There are things that don’t go in a film that you can still love,” he says, “but the film’s got to stand on its own. It’s got its own feel, and you don’t want to fiddle with that. Anything else should be separate. So the film is the film, the other things have a bearing on film, but they’re just . . . ”— ha!—“more things that happened.”
And what about “Ballerina,” a study of a woman dancing to a piece of music composed by Lynch? “It’s another thing—it’s just a thing—but to me, it’s a very beautiful thing.” Indeed—whatever else “Ballerina” might be, it makes for a definitive rebuke to anyone who claims video incapable of rivaling the beauty of film. Composited from two different shots, sheathed in a smoke-like emanation, the movements of the dancer are as hypnotic as the infernal close-ups of Wild at Heart or the interstellar oddities of Eraserhead. “Ballerina” might be viewed as a preparatory sketch for the vast canvas of Inland Empire, the trace of an artist refining his technique. A painter before he was a filmmaker, Lynch devotes as much attention to the production design and set decoration of his movies as he does to the performances or cinematography, as can be seen in the montage of behind-the-scenes footage on disc two called “Lynch 2.” “That seems to me the joy of it,” he says of this artisanal care for details. “I mean, the super fun of it!”
As for “Quinoa,” which begins with the filmmaker preparing a recipe based on the hearty grain, then morphs into a beguiling lesson on how to cook up a story, Lynch merely notes: “Well, you know, there’s all these cooking shows. But I don’t cook. I know how to make tapioca from when I was little, and rigatoni because I learned how to make rigatoni. But now I know how to make quinoa. So I did kind of a cooking thing.
“The chef does not make the fish,” Lynch continues. “The chef can prepare that fish and really make it a great meal—a beautiful, you know, thing—but the chef doesn’t make the fish. It’s like you are going along down the street and you get an idea, and it’s a thrilling thing, it’s the whole thing, and it might be a fragment, but that fragment is complete. So you go into this process where more ideas hook onto it, and the more ideas you have, the quicker the rest come to join it. They become like bait, and you just stay true to those ideas. And where intuition comes in is, you’re translating this idea to film and it’s not quite right. Like on a violin note—if you lean a little bit harder on that note, it feels correct, and if you back off a little bit, it doesn’t feel correct. And if you follow this thing, staying true to idea, intuition is your friend. You walk away when it feels correct.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Lynch Goes Digital
Why Inland Empire is better on your TV than it was on the big screen.
Source: Slate.com
In recent years, David Lynch has emerged as a tireless proselytizer—of organic coffee, transcendental meditation, and, perhaps most surprising for a onetime celluloid fetishist, digital video. While other veteran filmmakers (Jean-Luc Godard, Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh) have dipped their toes in the chilly electronic murk of DV, Lynch has jumped right in. "Film is like a dinosaur in a tar pit," he told me when I interviewed him last fall.
Lynch's latest feature, Inland Empire, is his 10th, and his first to be shot in digital video. The movie was an overwhelming experience on the big screen, a three-hour waking nightmare that derives both its form and its content from the splintering psyche of a troubled Hollywood actress, played by Laura Dern. But the natural home for this shape-shifting epic may in fact be the small screen. Watch Inland Empire on the DVD that came out last week and you sense that this lurid, grubby fantasy springs from deep within the bowels of YouTube as much as from inside its heroine's muddy unconscious. The DV that Lynch has come to cherish is the medium of home movies, viral video, and pornography—the everyday media detritus we associate more with television and computer monitors than movie theaters, more with intimate or private viewing experiences than communal ones.
And not only does Inland Empire often look like it belongs on the Internet, it also progresses with the darting, associative logic of hyperlinks. Indeed, parts of the movie originated on Lynch's Web site, davidlynch.com, itself a labyrinth of wormholes and worlds within worlds. The rare major filmmaker who caught on early to the potential of streaming video, Lynch has been creating short films specifically for an online audience since 2001. One of his more popular Web series, Rabbits, in which a rabbit-headed family recites Beckettian non sequiturs (to the sound of canned sitcom laughter), actually made its way into Inland Empire.
The practice of shooting feature films on video only goes back a decade or so, to the introduction of the cheap, compact MiniDV format. The Dogme '95 movement, led by Danish troublemaker Lars von Trier, kicked off the digital revolution, and before long, DV was the default mode for indie filmmaking the world over. Broadly speaking, the first wave of MiniDV films can be grouped into two categories: those that treat video as a language in itself, with its own expressive potential (the first Dogme film, The Celebration, for instance, or even The Blair Witch Project), and those that attempt to disguise or neglect to accommodate the video-ness of video and use it simply as an affordable substitute for film.
High-definition video, which now often closely approximates film, has become an increasingly common format for studio productions (David Fincher's Zodiac being a recent example). But Lynch is not interested in simulating celluloid with a state-of-the-art video camera. He shot Inland Empire with the relatively primitive Sony PD-150, a consumer-grade model that was introduced in 2001 (eons ago in techie years) at a retail price of less than $4,000. Lynch's love of video has much to do with the freedom it grants. Shooting with a camcorder removes the strictures of a traditional film production, allowing for a smaller crew, less setup time, and no accountability to money men. The lightweight camera, along with the low cost and high capacity of videotape, generally means more and longer takes. Video permits Lynch to indulge fully his taste for improvisation—to make things up as he goes along. Inland Empire was written a scene at a time and shot piecemeal over a period of three years.
But Lynch being Lynch, aesthetic concerns presumably outweighed practical ones. Compared with film, video typically looks harsh and almost hyperreal, with a narrower range of colors and weaker contrast, but it's precisely those qualities that Lynch revels in. While a lower-resolution film stock, like Super 8, has a grainy, romantic allure, lower-resolution video, characterized by fewer pixels per inch, merely looks fuzzy. For Lynch, who has likened low-res video to film stock before the emulsion process was perfected, the murkier the image, the more "room to dream," as he puts it. It's no wonder this master of the enigmatic would prize video for its literal lack of information.
The deeper you get into Inland Empire, the more logical the video aesthetic seems. The bleeding colors and the unstable image are a perfect fit for the fugue state that the movie gradually sinks into. Simply put, Inland Empire is the story of a grave identity crisis. The trouble begins when actress Nikki Grace (Dern) lands a part in a hokey melodrama called On High in Blue Tomorrows. As actor merges with character, and film and reality violently intersect, space and time also begin to fissure. One minute we're in sunny Southern California, the next in snowy, old-world Poland.
Inland Empire shares with Lynch's previous feature, Mulholland Drive (2001), a morbid fascination with the destructive machinery of Hollywood. Both regard acting as a threat to the stability of the self. The earlier film, ingeniously reconstructed from an aborted TV pilot, was a poisoned valentine, ruefully enthralled by the promise and magic of old Hollywood. Inland Empire strips off the patina of glamour. In every respect—from its experimental ethos to its unconventional economics (it was partly self-financed and eventually self-distributed)—the film is Lynch's defiant rebuke to the industry that has never fully embraced him. At one point, one of Dern's characters (she seems to be playing three or four) is stabbed in the gut and staggers along the Hollywood Walk of Fame, leaving a trail of blood.
Video, as Lynch uses it here, is the language of the subconscious, somehow more and less real than plain old filmic reality. DV looks more lifelike than film (its frame rate, the frequency at which successive images are captured, is higher than film's and closer to how the human eye operates), but it also seems unnaturally heightened, since it's not what celluloid-trained eyes are used to.
Lynch started his career as a painter—earlier this year the Fondation Cartier in Paris mounted a show of his photographs, digitally tweaked erotica, and massive, crude, roughly textured oil canvases—and he uses video with the curiosity and resourcefulness of an innate visual artist. He pays attention to its flickers, its shadows, its susceptibility to distortion from under- or overexposure. In this remarkable scene, for instance, he achieves a multitude of textures with an amusingly low-tech flashlight-in-the-dark method.
Bodies and faces, meanwhile, are repeatedly abstracted with an unforgiving lens or light source. Dern fearlessly offers herself up to one disfiguring wide-angle shot after another. The extreme close-up is a Lynch trademark, and here, using his DV camera like a new toy, he peers even more intently than usual, as if he's stumbled on an entirely different way of looking.
Whether or not Lynch intended it to, Inland Empire in the end conveys a techno-existential insight worthy of William Gibson. Film is a physical process, dependent on the interaction of light and chemistry. Video is by definition more remote, more spectral, a cluster of data in the electronic ether. And while mortality is a defining trait of film, a medium that degrades and disintegrates over time, video—quickly and endlessly reproducible—conjures a spooky sense of the infinite. In Inland Empire, truly a horror movie for the digital age, it's not that the ghost is in the machine. The ghost is the machine.
