Inland Empire (being promoted with coasters, coffee)

It opens here in SF on the 29th, altho I'm not sure where.

i thought the conceptual key was in two lines -- where abused-wife laura dern says to the weird guy in the dark office at the top of the stairs something like, "i don't know what came before or after. i don't know what happened first, and it's kind of laid a head trip on me." and then in another scene, someone (one of the hooker greek chorus maybe?) says, "it had something to do with the passage of time."

a few days after seeing it, for unrelated reasons i looked up the wikipedia entry on the theory of relativity and came across this line: "it is an open question whether or not there is some fundamental principle that preserves causality." that seems like part of what lynch is after -- this sense cause and effect moving in circles, or mobius strips, with all these repeats and echoes and twists. which was present in mulholland drive too, but it's more deliberate here.

the whole thing also made me think of "stuck inside of mobile": people just get uglier, and i have no sense of time. (not to mention, "Waiting to find out what price/ You have to pay to get out of/ Going through all these things twice").

anyway, i want to see it again. and this time i can time a bathroom break to coincide with a lesser scene.

hated the beck song though

whoah

Not for ONE theater! But I'm really glad I came to love films in an era where nobody -- NOBODY, aside from biz people -- knew or cared what the opening grosses of anything were.

Cannot wait to see this movie.

Do you have links, by any chance? I'm not doubting you, but I'm curious.

Lynch also hinted that his interest in Buddhism may have played a role in the structure of Lost Highway. In an interview with Time Out magazine in the August 1997 issue, Lynch elaborated on the parallels with Buddhism. The interviewer talked of Fred resigned to continue forever, making the same mistakes over and over again, in a number of different realities/lives/modes of being, forever striving for the ideal that Alice represents. Lynch replied that, "He is not consigned to this fate forever... He is not traveling in a circle, but rather a spiral, and at the end of the film moves round onto the next level. Maybe eventually he can find release. The film is only a small part of the story."

People were talking about meditation upthread as evidence of his interest in Buddhism. He may very well be heavily into Buddhism I just wanted to point out that when he advocates meditation he's talking about something else and any Buddhist themes evident in his work could quite possibly be ideas that he picked up second-hand through TM.

TM site
Maharishi bio
Anti-TM site
Another critical site

DL: Political intentions. Zero. Some people are very political [Dern raises her hand to indicate she is one of those people] and they'll see politics in everything. This is a world on its own and you just go into this world. When there are abstractions, people have varying interpretations, thoughts, about it. But it's the same with all film. It's so beautiful when the lights go down, the curtains open, and we get to go into a different world.

LD: The mere existence of this film is political. It is rare people are using their voice and doing what they want to do. David isn't trying to redefine cinema; he's defining his own voice. And we need more of that. So I think it's a highly political film.

http://www.greencine.com/article?action=view&articleID=380

http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=4737&IssueNum=184

“It’s like this. At a certain point, you know exactly what it means for you … . If you don’t know what it means, then you have to think about it more to … put the final pieces together. It’s happened to me on lots of films, starting with Eraserhead, I didn’t know what this thing meant. I was building it, but I didn’t know what it all meant, and I was just going nuts. And I start reading the Bible. And I come upon this line, and I said, ‘That is it.’ And it described the whole thing to me.”

I chuckle to signal that I understand the futility of my next question but that it’s my job to ask it anyway: “What line was that?”

“I bet you were gonna ask that,” he says.

“Is this a question you decline to answer, or … ?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it doesn’t matter. It would putrify the experience for other people. You work on a film so hard, to get it to feel correct as a whole … and then it’s done. You don’t want to talk about it. It’s cinema! Why break it down and try to put it into words? It’s the language of cinema. It exists that way, for a reason: there it is. It’s on its own. It shouldn’t be taken away from or added to.”

as i was walking out of the theater after the movie, i saw the woman's companion stretching his arms and yawning. "well," he said, turning toward her, "what was that about?"