OK, here we go, the big one, Inland Empire. This was the first film I ever remember bailing on mid-watch. It was many years ago, before I had a blog, and it was probably my first David Lynch film, watched purely based on a 5-star review in Empire magazine. All I can remember is a rabbit sitcom. I called it quits after about an hour of utter incoherence, but this time I’m trapped on a train, and the next episode of Alien: Earth is refusing to play so I’m watching this instead. I think the best way of me trying to keep track of everything going on is, like with my Twin Peaks re-caps, to keep a stream of consciousness style document going whilst I write, which I present to you now (slightly edited and tidied up after watching). Let’s get going!

A blurry-faced man and woman in a black and white hotel room, discussing prostitution, she’s afraid. Now it’s in colour, she’s watching a humanoid rabbit TV show with a laugh track. I know one of the rabbits is Naomi Watts, apparently the others are Scott Coffey and Laura Harring. The rabbits speak in non-sequiturs and questions, occasionally drawing laughter from the unseen studio audience. The woman watches, tearfully.

In an upper class palace room, a stoic man understands a more agitated man is looking for an opening. A wide-eyed lady (it’s Grace Zabriskie from Twin Peaks!) enters a large home, populated by Laura Dern in classy mode. The lady is a new neighbour, we’re getting a lot of very tight handheld closeups on Dern, this is already quite unsettling. She is playing an actress, this new neighbour lady is very odd, overly inquisitive, a purveyor of judgemental expressions, and the camera is just way too close to her face.

Laura Dern’s expression talking to the woman is basically my expression watching this film.

Jeremy Irons! In a scarf! Justin Theroux is here too, does he always wear black when working with Lynch? Dern’s character is an actor whose career descended, keen to re-ascend. She and Theroux are appearing on a talk show hosted by Marilyn (Diane Ladd, Dern’s real life mother, fun.).

William H. Macy! He’s Marilyn’s announcer, also fun, I hope he sticks around. This is an awful talk show, pitching for hot goss and reactions, getting nothing. Apparently Theroux has been told not to hit on Dern, her husband is too powerful. The film they are making is called On High in Blue Tomorrows, oof.

Harry Dean Stanton! Irons is a tea critique (A criteaque? No.), just like the coffee snob in Mulholland Drive. They’re remaking a film that was never finished, based on a Polish folk tale, and in which the two leads were murdered so the project is believed to be cursed. Sounds like they should make something else then.

The lady who was crying at the rabbit sitcom is now in a police cell, believes she’s been hypnotised and is going to kill someone with a screw driver – the tool or the drink?. Oh, the tool, it’s already stabbed into her stomach. Huh. These intense close-ups are intensely off-putting.

I’ve never noticed how small Harry Dean Stanton’s mouth is before. “Do you have a couple bucks I could borrow? I’ve got this landlord…” I love that he’s hitting up everyone in the cast and crew for any spare cash they might have.

I truly hate how many actors are shot from this angle, just under the chin, pointing up at the face. It’s so unnatural and jarring.

Irons trying to instruct Bucky the lighting guy (voiced by Lynch, I’m pleased to say I clocked this) to lower a light by 2 feet, but Bucky has a cramp, is the kind of stuff I do love about Lynch’s films. More of this please.

It’s become clear to me that I recall nothing of this film beyond the script read-through scene. Whilst filming, Dern’s character forgets they’re shooting a scene, as the dialogue is reminiscent of their off-screen relationship too, her husband knowing they’re having an affair and will kill them both. So the person Stanton saw spying on the reading, and Theroux chased away from set, was Dern, who was also in the reading. Now, do I try and work out whether we’re dealing with time loops, clones, dreams, doppelgangers, astral projections or who knows what, or do I just try and enjoy/survive the story?

Dern is chased from the backlot into a room, that now exits onto a street from same direction the studio lot was in, emphasising how fake the movie business is?. She’s now in the room she and Theroux had sex in that was all blue before? Wandering through previous locations and events sounds like dream logic to me, and I do not typically care for dream logic in my narratives, mainly because I do not often remember dreams.

Is it unusual to have a character wandering through all the Lynchiness trying to comprehend it all too? I don’t remember other characters being this confused, ans I do love Dern’s range of incredulous, exasperated, confused expressions.

Dern consults some sex workers who seem to know her husband or Theroux (I’m not sure, for some reason I’m a little lost). They tell her to burn through silk with a cigarette then look through the hole. She does and sees… red lights? A guy being abusive to a lady and punching her in the face. And now we’re in the rabbit sitcom, maybe. Hmmmm. If I wasn’t on a train with nothing else to do I’d be very tempted to bail on this again, and I’m not even halfway yet!

As hard as I try, I just cannot pay attention to anything that happens when the Polish couple is on screen. It’s like my brain goes “Ah, these people have nothing to do with the Laura Dern-starring central plot of this film, so this is surely irrelevant, so what would you like for dinner tonight?”

Are all the sex workers and Dern in the motel room because they’ve all slept with Theroux? Argh! Did not care for Dern’s rictus grin jump scare approaching the camera in the dark, no thank you!

Mary Steenbergen has arrived two-thirds through the film! She’s entered the motel room, has she just had sex with Theroux? She’s mumbling about a bill that needs paying, and wearing the same green-faced watch Dern wore to look through the burned silk hole.

And Dern is recounting all this to a guy too? What is this, The Grand Budapest Hotel? Man I wish I was watching that right now.

The neighbour is called “Crimp?” They emerge with a red lightbulb in their mouth, Dern understandably picks up a discarded screwdriver for protection.

If something doesn’t make a lick of sense from one scene to the next I tend to just disassociate from it and drift off. That’s happening a lot here. Why is Dern telling a group of sex workers, to their delight, “I’m a whore. I’M A FREAK!” then she sees herself across the road? Yeah, I’m lost now, fully.

“I don’t know what happened before, or after. I don’t know what happened first, and it’s kinda laid a mindfuck on me.” Lady, same.

I’ve given up trying to work out what’s going on. Hoping it’ll either end with more of an explanation, or I’ll look up what it means afterwards, or I won’t. For now I’m just sitting through it, waiting it out, watching the clock. This is the kind of film where watching it makes you reconsider the life choices that led to this point. I knew this would happen, and yet I chose this path willingly.

Who is the guy she’s recounting this all too? Why? Where? Real, a dream, or something else? She leaves, back with the sex workers on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, they all talk to her like she’s familiar. Are there two Laura Derns? Is she one, both or neither? Does the answer vary from scene to scene? Will it matter in the end? Will there ever be an end?

She starts clicking her fingers, pulls out the screwdriver, another woman rushes her, grabs the screwdriver and stabs Dern, flees leaving her wounded, other sex workers do too. Dern screaming with screwdriver handle sticking out of her stomach, did anyone dress as this for Halloween in 2006? She pulls it out and drops it on Dorothy Martin’s star, then hobble-flees away.

Is that Terry Crews? Unhoused guy next to Asian lady talking about getting a bus to Pamona to stay with her friend Niko who lives there, wears a blonde wig to parties looking like a movie star – Mulholland Drive? All I know about Pamona I learned from Holly Gennaro. “She has got a hole in her vagina hole. She has torn a hole into her intestine from her vagina.” OK, we’ve crossed into TMI. Monkey that screams like in a horror movie, all the while Dern dying from a screwdriver shivving. Vomits blood onto the pavement in front of them. “‘s OK, you just dying s’all.”

It just doesn’t look as good, polished, as Mulholland Drive, it’s like comparing Unsane to Ocean’s Eleven, except Unsane was pretty compelling.

Argh! It’s the movie! There’s a camera filming her die! But Dern doesn’t get up after cut is called. OK, she does. Post-filming, she just kind of shuffles through wardrobe and makeup removal, method acting struggling to break out? Now the earlier crying lady is watching Dern – not in the movie, after the filming – and crying, and Dern can sense her through the screen?

What do the signs saying “AXXONN” mean? Were I doing this Twin Peaks style, how many questions would I end up with, and how many am I missing because I fundamentally missed things that I’ll never know because I’m certainly not watching this again? For those interested, I ended up watching this across four trains, as I’m sure Lynch intended. I cannot imagine I would have liked this anymore if I’d watched it all in one sitting, in a cinema. I would’ve left or fallen right to sleep.

One such unintentional break in trains was just before Dern shoots a guy several times, only for her face, in crude clown makeup, to be superimposed over his, but spewing black bile.

I genuinely don’t know who half the characters in the film are. This would probably reward repeat, scrutinising viewings, but that would be a very meagre “reward” for having endured such a harsh punishment.

I advise watching this on a shiny laptop is a reasonably lit environment, so when it cuts from Laura Dern looking at herself on the distant couch to a black screen, you can stare directly into your own eyes and wonder if the past three hours were a good use of the precious few we’re given in this life.

Not sure of who most of these credited characters are, were they in this film? Why is there a lumberjack in a Steve Zissou hat sawing during the end credits dance party? Would I like it more if, like Mulholland Drive, someone smarter than me explained it then I watched it again? Almost certainly, but no-one needs to do this as once I press the “Publish” button I shall not think about this film again. The only Lynch project I’ve got left to cover is Twin Peaks: The Return, so that should be coming up soon!

Choose Life 2/10