By David Ross. By pure chance, I recently happened upon Michael Atkinson’s discussion of David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006). I was struck by Atkinson’s antic way with words and by his nimble intelligence, so much so that I checked for Atkinson on Wikipedia. He’s made a name for himself as a novelist and poet, as it turns out. I further discovered that he has a blog with much the same air of acuity. Among other things, Atkinson offers his list of the fifty top films of the decade (in order no less – no wimpy relativism there).
Atkinson is right to observe that the organizing principle of Inland Empire is not psychological, in this respect differing from Bergman’s Persona (1966) and most other experiments in pure cinema. But he seems to imply that the film’s dissociative chaos has no unifying principle or organizing logic, and that the search for codes and readings is a kind of category mistake. Atkinson comes closest to the mark when he observes that Inland Empire is purely a movie and nothing else. It strikes me that the film’s organizing principle is cinematic possibility, and that we witness, in essence, a kaleidoscope of set-pieces involving sub-genres of screen gothic (Southern gothic in the traditional sense, mean street gothic, mafia gothic, redneck gothic), though none are fully realized or contextualized. Continue reading On David Lynch’s Inland Empire