I watched Inland Empire (2006) the other day. Luckily, I had some help from IMDb FAQ, which contains “major spoilers”. I don't really think anything can spoil this movie. You're probably best off knowing as much as possible going in. You'd probably want to acquaint yourself with the Cliff's Notes too. In fact, it's one of those movies that will be “spoiled” if you haven't spent a few weeks preparing for it ahead of time.

I think it's Lynch's 8 1/2, except it's “4 7” (the name of the original, uncompleted movie that the movie within the movie is meant to be a remake of), because Lynch has made four or seven movies so far. Or four movies that people can understand, or seven if you include things like “Rabbits”.

It's interesting and extremely fast-paced if you assume that it could be an attempt to treat memories, fantasies, information and experience as one thing. For example, you could say that a person's identity is composed exclusively of what they remember. As an individual, you are the person who remembers a certain set of events. But how you remember them is also significant: why do you remember things? How do you reconcile unavoidable fantasies (imagined theories of what might happen, without which a human would be no different from a rabbit) with very imperfect memories and largely incomprehensible, chaotic information about reality?

I thought it was interesting that the movie opens with a scratchy 78 droning on about something called “Axxon n”, apparently a long-running Baltic radio drama. That's how we learn about reality. Noisy old recordings of unknown people talking about the long-running Baltic radio drama which is out there.

Labels: Movies