Daniel Frampton takes a filmosophical view of David Lynch

There seems to be some confusion about what David Lynch’s Inland Empire is about. While some reviewers at the time of its release attempted some form of interpretation, most simply summarised as best they could and hurriedly moved on. The film – unsettling, confusing, hilarious, affecting, powerful film that it is – has divided audiences, but also provoked some philosophical questions about the point of cinema. In fact I think that the film simply represents a kind of “filmosophical cinema”, that is, cinema that challenges us and forces us to think. This cinema has new and complex characters, new and difficult images, and new kinds of fluid shifts between multiple narratives – all of which work together to create more sense than meaning, and thus perhaps a new kind of “philosophical” effect or outcome.

For a start, the film contains characters who split and change: an actress becomes her character, and then a battered wife, and then a prostitute. It begins to seem that any character might possibly transfer with another, creating a kind of continual doubt beat about what we see and hear. Laura Dern has called the character she plays, Nikki, “a broken or dismantled person, with all these other people leaking out of her brain.” Meanwhile human-rabbits and dance routines come and go between the stories, all seemingly watched on a television by a young woman in a hotel room.

Then there are the images themselves. The film is dream-like, in the sense that it is actually quite close to what dreams are really like: indistinct, grey, dour, dark, muted, blurry. There are even many bad-quality, almost amateur images, which create a slightly unreal feeling. These are images which are both uncomfortable and unnerving to watch – they are a shock to our thought. The film’s director, David Lynch, has talked of “getting an image that’s true to the idea”, and an early scene reveals this film-thinking: a Polish neighbour comes round to see Nikki the actress, but in the scene she is just slightly, uncomfortably, defocused. Our eyes do not like this only-just-out-of-focus feeling, and it is not a pleasant image to watch. And in a sense we feel what Nikki feels, a certain blurry idea of this unknown woman, and an immediate sensation of the uncomfortable things she says. Even quite static interior shots in the film stir our minds. Lighting is often restricted in these scenes, and our eyes investigate the darkness of the images, looking for what might be there – what we think “should” be there. We become active filmgoers, investigators, as we begin to look ‘into’ the images, rather than just at them (images which recall the darknesses of Leos Carax’s Pola X, or Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf).

But around these unstable, ill-defined, gaseous images the film (or rather the film’s mind, or “filmind” as I call it) most daringly constructs multiple film-worlds. These are parallel, or subjective, or future film-worlds (sheets of time, as the philosopher Gilles Deleuze would call them), narrative lines which refract over and around each other to create an almost crystalline form to the film. And these sheets of past, present, or future fluidly combine and twist: scenes shift with the swiftness of thought. Inland Empire seems to make shift-associations as though in a semi-conscious state, with overlapping narratives steered perhaps by memory (the past), perception (the present), or imagination (the future/the mind). The film’s progress might be moving according to Nikki’s thoughts, or may be itself pulling Nikki into other lives, other narratives. That is, its filmind might be reactive and subsuming, or active and controlling. Or maybe both. Either way the shifts feel empathetical and fluid. (A film such as Claire Denis’s The Intruder has similar shift-associations – though perhaps less super-natural.) But the result of this is that again we are unsettled and shocked to wakeful thought: why is a Hollywood actress becoming a prostitute? What links the young TV-watching girl to the drama? This is filmthinking that is relational and expansive. Our normal engagement with cinema is ruptured, and we are forced to think and relate one world to another. But we also might begin to enjoy the worlds for themselves and let go of our desire to “work things out”. For Inland Empire gives us many undetermined or irrational relations between its worlds: not everything is meant to mean; the film affects us in a much more direct and intuitive way.

But for a cine-scientist such as David Bordwell, the films directed by Lynch are too “indeterminate”, because this cinema is not rationally ordered and figurable. And this certainly isn’t the kind of neat multi-narrative we see in Babel or Crash, where linkages become clearer as the film progresses. These “safe” kinds of multi-narrative cinema usually resolve themselves in the final reel (whereas Inland Empire revolves itself into even more stories and linkages); the meaning of Crash is spoon-fed to us, and once worked out, can then be forgotten. There are no ripples of meaning after leaving the cinema (it is in that sense that you might call Hollywood “subliminal”). So how do we handle this “filmosophical” cinema? How do we engage this cinema of new characters, images, and shifts? Well, we have to give more of our selves to it. We need to bring our personality to the cinema house. And we need to come prepared to accept confusion, and the possible necessity of further viewings.

Peter Greenaway used to say that his films needed to be watched multiple times in order to really appreciate them (we don’t look at a painting just once, he would say). And more recently Lukas Moodyson, talking about his film Container, which contains over 20 mundane and dramatic stories, has said: “Your really can’t get the film into your head by seeing it once. You have to see it seven times.” Nowadays Greenaway talks about being “liberated from linearity”, and his latest work, The Tulse Luper Suitcases, has 92 stories. In fact Greenaway has publicly argued that cinema died when the television remote was invented. It’s also dead because it’s all been done before – cinema now just repeats its own tropes and paradigms, he says, and filmgoers are merely passive receptors. And I would agree that much cinema is definitely text-dependent: stale cinema that tells stories efficiently enough, but without any visual flair. Consequently most people are not visually fluent, are not able to cope with over-visual media: we feel we need guidance by story/text – even though, as Greenaway quotes Derrida, “the image always has the last word” (though that sounds to me like something Barthes would say).

Greenaway outlines what he believes to be the four tyrannies of cinema: actor, text, camera, and frame. The actor usually fails to make us forget he is an actor; over-reliance on the text creates boring cinema; the camera too simply and uncreatively records; and the frame is unnatural and constrains our vast possible movable vision. Greenaway wants to escape these tyrannies, and so be able to communicate sophisticated ideas through image-environments. This involves: dramatic characters that don’t insult our intelligence; creating wondering nonlinear image-based narratives that open our minds to a visual experience beyond plot-driven films; sidelining the camera, perhaps using animation as a possible future for thought-full cinema (he recalls Picasso saying that he didn’t paint what he saw, but what he thought); and removing the frame by presenting multiple frames, and therefore multiple viewpoints that Greenaway says will “empower” the viewer. But this is a kind of cubist cinema that has indeed been attempted in “regular” cinema, in such films as Korine’s Julien Donkey-Boy, von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, or Ruiz’s Three Lives and Only One Death – films which at moments think multiple viewpoints on a character, almost creating a shattered dimensionality for the filmgoer to inhabit.

But is Greenaway’s post-cinema a better kind of filmosophical cinema? We do not simply watch current cinema passively, and there is much “image-based” (almost silent) creative cinema out there (again, films such as The Intruder, but also The Son, Hidden, etc.). Furthermore, is it not possible that we are more passive when faced with more images, more frames? Do we have time to be active engagers with so many images coming and going? Does our imagination have the space to be “empowered”? Isn’t this environment as limiting as Hollywood fast-edit nth-degree expressionism? Plus, Greenaway’s “notion of the visual” is a strangely non-visual notion, because his images are usually broken down to become almost linguistic (recalling the internal montage of that supra-Hegelian-expressionist Eisenstein). Greenaway’s “image” becomes a Deleuzian “table of information”, an index of possibilities, a structured catalogue of meaningful parts: a graphic, mapped, readable, and therefore somewhat dead, “image”.

I applaud Greenaway’s intervention, but worry that it is not the visual image (and its possiblities) that interests him, but the fact of image choice, or the effect of image multiplication and montage. He seems obsessed with the notion of change, multiplicity, choice, but without actually convincing us that this is better than a great work of “traditional” cinematic art (though he does admit that much multi-image VJing can be very bland). Greenaway’s “cinema is dead” manifesto is as much there to help him promote the kind of image-environment he has decided to move into (via the gallery). In a sense he has a defeatist view of cinema: let’s give up and make multiscreen interactive mediascapes. He blames “choice” for the demise of cinema – that is, we apparently became bored by choice-less cinema – but why give in and make cinema more simply choice-full? He may be right that much cinema is crap, but for me someone like Lynch has a better idea: confront the filmgoer with better, more complex cinema.

And one reason that Inland Empire represents a kind of filmosophical cinema is because it demands exactly this: the reactivation or re-energisation of current filmgoing. This cinema – complex, thoughtful – demands our concentration, our attention, our allegiance, our brains. Inland Empire is an open film which is personalised by each filmgoer. “It means in terms of ourselves,” Lynch has said. It is a film that is for each of us: we fight with the film, we engage the film, we are active co-creators. It is our film. Inland Empire forces us to change our way of viewing cinema: we need to journey along with the film’s thinking, allowing ourselves to be swamped by the mood of the film rather than always engaging in meaning-searching. We then might gain another kind of “meaning”, a more sense-led outcome. This filmosophical cinema is thus both personally creative and sensually meaningful.

This affective sense of understanding is also a more fruitful understanding than your typical “soon to be forgotten closed final meaning”. It is more productive intellectually and emotionally because it grows into ideas and concepts (for a philosopher such as Alain Badiou, meaning has no philosophical relevance). The experience makes sense: meaning is in the feeling – the mood of the film, its style of thinking, is here more important than narrative comprehension. At the end of Inland Empire we understand what the film is about, even if we don’t think we do. We understand that Nikki has been through a journey, and affectively understand the reasons why she changed, even if we can’t explain the specifics.

After a London screening I asked Lynch whether he would consider cinema to be a kind of consciousness, in that it’s making decisions, it’s allowing us to see characters and events in certain ways? He replied: “There are things that cinema can do that can catch an abstraction. It can say something that can’t be said any other way. It can say deeper abstract things and give indications of hidden things. It’s a magical medium.” For Lynch the forms of cinema can give us ideas of things beyond and before narrative understanding. His is thus a cinema that favours ideas over theory: each of his films’ dramatic worlds can be enjoyed for itself (its own idea) without necessarily having to be tied and linked to the other worlds or a final conclusion (a theory). The filmgoer senses an idea, a rough idea, and has space to think about it. Rational and logical cinema is thus opposed to affective and intuitive cinema – intuition here being a kind of superior or transcendental empiricism, a purer kind of receptivity.

We might now begin to see a practical and aesthetic link with transcendental meditation, which Lynch has famously promoted. With TM we supposedly realise other facets of our character, the different levels of our self, and so may come to comprehend our authentic and inauthentic selves (perhaps like Nikki). TM is also supposed to increase creative thought: we can then take in more, can understand multiple inputs (perhaps like our filmosophical filmgoer). This filmgoer gives their self over to the film, where they have room to think; thus Lynch’s dream spaces come to resemble what the philosopher Martin Heidegger called “clearings” for thought: spaces of contemplation and meditation. And it is because it is itself a kind of pure thought that film can immanently reveal these creative thoughts, these multiple facets, these hidden, abstract things.

During Inland Empire we become emotionally rather than intellectually involved in Nikki’s “troubles”, and in the end affectively receive an abstract idea of the change she has gone through. A change (in her situation), a new little knowledge (of the effect on her), that she passes on to another (a necessary realisation): absolving guilt, clearing pain, transferring love. But this is just my own personal mix of the film – go see Inland Empire for yourself: welcome the confusion, enjoy the new complexity, embrace Filmosophical Cinema!

Daniel Frampton is the founding editor of the salon-journal Film-Philosophy, and the author of Filmosophy (Wallflower Press)