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Inland Empire
Inland Empire is a film by David Lynch about a once-feted Hollywood actress who is cast in a movie that is rumoured to be cursed. From a queer, feminist perspective, film critic Melissa Anderson examines how Lynch’s late masterpiece is not only a brilliant evocation of how images work on the mind, but how powerful 'acteurs' are in the creation of dreamlike cinema. Laura Dern’s astonishing performance, as the film’s realities splinter and identities multiply, is elucidated by Anderson through her deep affection and respect for Lynch.
The book is part of the Decadent Editions series, which examines one film for every year of the 2000s, each a milestone of contemporary cinema.
The book is part of the Decadent Editions series, which examines one film for every year of the 2000s, each a milestone of contemporary cinema.
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128 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
February 26, 2022
Acteurism—a term supposedly coined by Dave Kehr—posits that an actor can be as much of a creative force as a director. (What about that homely mugwump, the screenwriter, who so boringly resembles quill-holders in other media? Oh, save that for another day!) In a bold and brave salvo, Melissa Anderson tries to apply acteurism to that highly auteurist (or maybe Cageanly random) text, David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE.
There are critics who write potently and profoundly on acting in cinema—namely Pauline Kael and her minions, the Paulettes. David Edelstein writes marvelously on the dynamics and felicities of performance. James Wolcott can knock a performance out of the park. One big difference between the Paulettes and Melissa Anderson: not only do they like show people, they ARE show people—they know how to tap dance on the page. Anderson, by contrast, is an academic wallflower. Not for her the Dionysian flames of the thespian’s art. Or, to be really fucking harsh about it: When a critic starts talking about an actor’s “body language,” you know they know not a tinker’s cuss about acting.
Melissa Anderson can be a joltingly brilliant critic in Artforum and 4columns, popping unexpected perceptions. But here, she pushes the same tired peas around her plate: in a groan-inducing reminder to future readers of what this moment was like, she invokes Me Too, George Floyd…she laments that Lynch doesn’t hire enough black actors. This grumpy checklist-oriented approach to cinema pulls the curtain up to reveal that Anderson doesn’t have the goods to pull off a virtuoso, acting-centric take on INLAND EMPIRE.
I saw INLAND at an early screening Lynch delightfully arranged to hold at the Cinerama Dome—imagine a movie shot on worse than an iPhone projected on that august screen! What struck me was that the picture is not, as so many thought, “just a bunch of YouTube videos,” but rather a FINNEGANS WAKE-like contraption of universes emptying out into universes. It’s as if Laura Dern were trapped inside ten BEING JOHN MALKOVICHES. There is meaning there, I would go so far as to say *literary meaning,* but Anderson, wisely leery of being a Lynch decryptor, doesn’t go there. Lacking the language to convey performance—her repeated mantra is “Words are my enemy”!—she muddles about, finding Harvey Weinstein under every lamppost as if this were Thanksgiving 2017. Anderson can be a wonderful writer, but larger-than-2000-word shapes are seemingly not for her.
There are critics who write potently and profoundly on acting in cinema—namely Pauline Kael and her minions, the Paulettes. David Edelstein writes marvelously on the dynamics and felicities of performance. James Wolcott can knock a performance out of the park. One big difference between the Paulettes and Melissa Anderson: not only do they like show people, they ARE show people—they know how to tap dance on the page. Anderson, by contrast, is an academic wallflower. Not for her the Dionysian flames of the thespian’s art. Or, to be really fucking harsh about it: When a critic starts talking about an actor’s “body language,” you know they know not a tinker’s cuss about acting.
Melissa Anderson can be a joltingly brilliant critic in Artforum and 4columns, popping unexpected perceptions. But here, she pushes the same tired peas around her plate: in a groan-inducing reminder to future readers of what this moment was like, she invokes Me Too, George Floyd…she laments that Lynch doesn’t hire enough black actors. This grumpy checklist-oriented approach to cinema pulls the curtain up to reveal that Anderson doesn’t have the goods to pull off a virtuoso, acting-centric take on INLAND EMPIRE.
I saw INLAND at an early screening Lynch delightfully arranged to hold at the Cinerama Dome—imagine a movie shot on worse than an iPhone projected on that august screen! What struck me was that the picture is not, as so many thought, “just a bunch of YouTube videos,” but rather a FINNEGANS WAKE-like contraption of universes emptying out into universes. It’s as if Laura Dern were trapped inside ten BEING JOHN MALKOVICHES. There is meaning there, I would go so far as to say *literary meaning,* but Anderson, wisely leery of being a Lynch decryptor, doesn’t go there. Lacking the language to convey performance—her repeated mantra is “Words are my enemy”!—she muddles about, finding Harvey Weinstein under every lamppost as if this were Thanksgiving 2017. Anderson can be a wonderful writer, but larger-than-2000-word shapes are seemingly not for her.
July 9, 2022
At least half of this book is Anderson abdicating her role as a critic, insisting on the impossibility of doing Inland Empire and Laura Dern’s performance therein justice in words. There is interesting material here—namely, when she actually embarks on an analysis of the movie (and Lynch’s oeuvre more broadly) through its theme of “a woman in trouble” and the history of sexual violence in Hollywood—but it comes too late. A first draft of a better book.
March 12, 2025
“𝘐𝘯𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘌𝘮𝘱𝘪𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘭𝘺 𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘦𝘤𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺, 𝘢𝘴 𝘓𝘪𝘮 𝘱𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘰𝘶𝘵, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘪𝘭𝘮 ‘𝘪𝘴 𝘢𝘭𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘯𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘦, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘺𝘦𝘵, 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘦𝘹𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴, 𝘪𝘵 𝘣𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘬𝘴 𝘪𝘵𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧 𝘢𝘸𝘢𝘬𝘦, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘢 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘦.”
I wish we could’ve ended with grace with this one, but all we end in is a confused mess.
At once, it begins as an introduction to Lynch’s work, then a slight breakdown of Dern’s filmography, but then warps itself into a political critique of Lynch’s work that veers off into a cop-out conclusion with woe-is-me-idk-what-im-doing given Anderson’s livelihood amidst the first Trump election and the pandemic. We lose the plot. Reality sinks in and we forget how to live. For Anderson’s case, she’s forgotten what she was supposed to write, if there was anything worth writing at all.
Great mentions of other works stripped off and pasted here to give you the diet versions of greater, and perhaps, better reads, but still worth reading to make sense of Inland Empire, the insidious ugly child of Lynch’s filmography that grazes the grizzly underbelly of an old Hollywood trying to modernize itself.
In essence, this is an adhesive-bounded Twitter thread made for Letterboxd users brain-rotted by TikTok who don’t know how to think for themselves. And sometimes that’s the dead-end worth ending up at after seeing a perplexing film.
I wish we could’ve ended with grace with this one, but all we end in is a confused mess.
At once, it begins as an introduction to Lynch’s work, then a slight breakdown of Dern’s filmography, but then warps itself into a political critique of Lynch’s work that veers off into a cop-out conclusion with woe-is-me-idk-what-im-doing given Anderson’s livelihood amidst the first Trump election and the pandemic. We lose the plot. Reality sinks in and we forget how to live. For Anderson’s case, she’s forgotten what she was supposed to write, if there was anything worth writing at all.
Great mentions of other works stripped off and pasted here to give you the diet versions of greater, and perhaps, better reads, but still worth reading to make sense of Inland Empire, the insidious ugly child of Lynch’s filmography that grazes the grizzly underbelly of an old Hollywood trying to modernize itself.
In essence, this is an adhesive-bounded Twitter thread made for Letterboxd users brain-rotted by TikTok who don’t know how to think for themselves. And sometimes that’s the dead-end worth ending up at after seeing a perplexing film.
Read
May 1, 2025displays the kind of anxiety about being outwardly conscious of all the right social issues that you only get by having spent too much in the 2010s on twitter
does cartwheels to avoid actually talking about the subject at hand
a pretty good overview of Laura Dern and not much else!
does cartwheels to avoid actually talking about the subject at hand
a pretty good overview of Laura Dern and not much else!
January 7, 2022
An excellent critical work about the film INLAND EMPIRE, focusing largely on Laura Dern's performance as a key authorial voice in the film.
July 13, 2024
Vague vague book. I read in an airplane and an old man tried to talk to me about it
September 24, 2023
No tenía que hacerle así de sucio a una profesional de tan alto vuelo como Naomi Watts.
Laura Dern es sin duda mi actriz favorita, crecer conociéndola como “ la chica de Jurassic Park” y madurar entiendo por qué es la musa de Lynch ha hecho de ella una figura totémica en mi vida. Pero que ella gane en un escrito no tiene por qué significar que otra actriz pierda en la misma redacción. Me pareció hasta las huevas. Tan hasta las huevas como llenar páginas de comentarios bab🐻s y sin fundamento para criticar el ouvre de Lynch pero caletita, lavándose las manos, pasando piola pero dejando ahí su chiquita solo por ladrar.
Demás decir que esta autora se dedicó más tiempo en el diccionario para agregar sinónimos rebuscados que en las películas de Lynch y contar su experiencia.
En un memazo real de David Lynch que me envió Valeria el dice “la gente quiere hablar de cine pero THE FILM IS THE TALKING.” Y no podría ser más cierto, lo único bueno que podría rescatar del libro más allá del diseño gráfico es que me recordaba a momentos de algunas de las mejores películas que he podido experimentar. Este libro lo compré para Ali el día que fui a ver una proyección de Inland Empire en el IFC, con Jenna y mi mamá. Sin duda, un dios plan. Creo que este día también le compré a Valeria el icónico polo de Andrea Arnold. Quizá fue el día que repetimos plan para ver VORTEX de Gaspar Noé, no lo sé, pero fue en ese entonces. A lo que iba es que experiencias de este tipo, como las que mil directores te pueden contar sobre películas que disfrutaron o les impactaron, EN EL CINE, siempre son únicas, inesperadas, sublimes, no hay nada más lindo que decir “amo el cine” en plenas pelis. Banalizar lo experiencial para convertirlo en una sesión de juzgado donde se buscará la crítica a como de lugar es como una pareja tóxica que no te respeta.
Al cine se le ama, y en el este libro me queda claro que a mucha gente, sobre todo pseudointelectuales progre, les arde que algo sea bueno, interesante y apolítico. O político que no resuena con lo que piensan. Este ensayo, es un hilo de mierda de twitter bien escrito, al cual no le daría like, retweet o bookmark, por mala gracia.
Por falto de criterio. Por falto de amor.
Por infeliz.
Laura Dern es sin duda mi actriz favorita, crecer conociéndola como “ la chica de Jurassic Park” y madurar entiendo por qué es la musa de Lynch ha hecho de ella una figura totémica en mi vida. Pero que ella gane en un escrito no tiene por qué significar que otra actriz pierda en la misma redacción. Me pareció hasta las huevas. Tan hasta las huevas como llenar páginas de comentarios bab🐻s y sin fundamento para criticar el ouvre de Lynch pero caletita, lavándose las manos, pasando piola pero dejando ahí su chiquita solo por ladrar.
Demás decir que esta autora se dedicó más tiempo en el diccionario para agregar sinónimos rebuscados que en las películas de Lynch y contar su experiencia.
En un memazo real de David Lynch que me envió Valeria el dice “la gente quiere hablar de cine pero THE FILM IS THE TALKING.” Y no podría ser más cierto, lo único bueno que podría rescatar del libro más allá del diseño gráfico es que me recordaba a momentos de algunas de las mejores películas que he podido experimentar. Este libro lo compré para Ali el día que fui a ver una proyección de Inland Empire en el IFC, con Jenna y mi mamá. Sin duda, un dios plan. Creo que este día también le compré a Valeria el icónico polo de Andrea Arnold. Quizá fue el día que repetimos plan para ver VORTEX de Gaspar Noé, no lo sé, pero fue en ese entonces. A lo que iba es que experiencias de este tipo, como las que mil directores te pueden contar sobre películas que disfrutaron o les impactaron, EN EL CINE, siempre son únicas, inesperadas, sublimes, no hay nada más lindo que decir “amo el cine” en plenas pelis. Banalizar lo experiencial para convertirlo en una sesión de juzgado donde se buscará la crítica a como de lugar es como una pareja tóxica que no te respeta.
Al cine se le ama, y en el este libro me queda claro que a mucha gente, sobre todo pseudointelectuales progre, les arde que algo sea bueno, interesante y apolítico. O político que no resuena con lo que piensan. Este ensayo, es un hilo de mierda de twitter bien escrito, al cual no le daría like, retweet o bookmark, por mala gracia.
Por falto de criterio. Por falto de amor.
Por infeliz.
October 27, 2021
Anderson finds a more clear and compelling voice about 70 pages in, which is frustrating because I admire her approach. The book really needed a stronger edit.
January 21, 2023
laura dern <3 & her modigliani-like face
May 15, 2024
A great think piece of Lynch's final film.
Written by that lesbian you bummed cigarettes from while reading Derrida in the cool off-campus cafe. The book starts super strong. Has good bits on acting. Devolved into reflections on #MeToo and representation — including some interesting asides on the male gaze. And finishes with a reflection on Inland Empire's uplifting ending.
A good read
Written by that lesbian you bummed cigarettes from while reading Derrida in the cool off-campus cafe. The book starts super strong. Has good bits on acting. Devolved into reflections on #MeToo and representation — including some interesting asides on the male gaze. And finishes with a reflection on Inland Empire's uplifting ending.
A good read
April 9, 2025
Read this again after an Inland Empire rewatch and appreciated a little more how it focuses more on Dern than Lynch, and also - something that frustrated me a bit the first time - how its more stream-of-conscious approach mimics the way Lynch created the film. I appreciate the connections she makes throughout Dern's career to the variations of her character in the film. I think one of the strongest parts of the book is tracing the way Dern has grown/changed in response to her breakout film Smooth Talk. From being a teen actor who reflected on it more as a job, to her late twenties when she wanted to read it optimistically, to a post-MeToo activist who is less certain it was ever innocent.
With Laura Palmer, Lynch explored how disparate aspects of humanity can all fit within one person (prom queen, sex worker, drug addict, meals on wheels volunteer, girlfriend, lover, daughter, friend, abuser, victim, etc) who is able to embody all while retaining agency (to the point that her refusal to give up that agency is what gets her killed). After that he seemed to reject that those disparate aspects can be contained within the same person and, instead, split the person into multiples (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks: The Return).
Inland Empire attempts to do both. Dern is split into at least three characters, but in the end, they all become one again. Like Laura Palmer.
With Laura Palmer, Lynch explored how disparate aspects of humanity can all fit within one person (prom queen, sex worker, drug addict, meals on wheels volunteer, girlfriend, lover, daughter, friend, abuser, victim, etc) who is able to embody all while retaining agency (to the point that her refusal to give up that agency is what gets her killed). After that he seemed to reject that those disparate aspects can be contained within the same person and, instead, split the person into multiples (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks: The Return).
Inland Empire attempts to do both. Dern is split into at least three characters, but in the end, they all become one again. Like Laura Palmer.
December 31, 2021
David Lynch is one of my favorite directors and I go back and forth about which one of his films is my number one favorite. Currently I think that spot is held by Twin Peaks: The Return, but Inland Empire is a close second. This film is a sprawling, challenging, and often ugly (but in an amazing way) look at Hollywood, acting, and the divisions and contradictions inside our personalities. Rather than trying to "solve" the mysteries of the film or make sense of the narrative (a delightfully impossible text), Anderson comes at the film from an "acteurist" philosophy in which the main actress, the amazing Laura Dern, is seen as a co-creator with Lynch. Her feminist, queer, interpretation of the movie mixes in Dern's biography and filmography, current events that happen after the movie was filmed (in particular Harvey Weinstein and the #metoo movement), the connections with Lynch's previous film, Mulholland Drive, and Anderson's personal reactions to all the above. If that sounds messy and nonlinear and sometimes frustrating to you, then you are right on the money, but as a whole, it is a great response to this messy and nonlinear and sometimes frustrating film. It is also a big ole love letter to Laura Dern, and I am all for that.
March 30, 2022
Melissa Anderson se centra más en la figura de Laura Dern y en su importancia capital en la creación de Inland Empire que en la labor de Lynch o en un análisis más profundo de las propuestas de la propia película, y aunque considero que hay fragmentos en los que naufraga un poco en sus objetivos –sobre todo cuando abre el enfoque a otras interpretaciones de Dern y a intentar definir con palabras lo que puede suponer una actuación dramática; quizá también es que personalmente no me interesa tanto eso–, siempre lo sabe reconducir y llevarlo hasta destinos bastante interesantes. Creo que necesitaría más espacio para desarrollar algunas de sus ideas, sobre todo en lo referido al enfoque feminista sobre la obra de Lynch, que claramente es poco más que un apunte al final, pero en general me he quedado contento: no es el libro de Inland Empire que más me interesaría leer, pero es un muy buen libro sobre Inland Empire y, valga la redundancia, Laura Dern.
December 22, 2022
Published in 2021 and uses "Black" and "Latinx" but also "Kiev."
The times change fast.
The times change fast.
Read
May 19, 2022laura dern
April 23, 2023
This is a (more than fair) love letter to Laura Dern marketed as a book on Inland Empire and David Lynch.
I understand that Lynch's work (and in particular Inland Empire) defies all those things that leave film theorists ablaze, either burning with a desire to sing him the highest of praises or set him aside as pure unsubstantiated, unjustifiable drivel.
Inland Empire throws away anything that even remotely resembles a plot and plunges you into the depths of a shattered, damaged psyche that then begins to split even further and takes you on a pretty unique journey. Confusing and deeply disturbing, it can be scary and at times infuriatingly frustrating; but it is highly rewarding as an experience and whatever is left for the viewer to process can't easily be put into words, and I don't believe it should, or at least those should not be the lenses through which we appraise its value. Lynch doesn't believe that either and Melissa Anderson goes to extreme lengths to let us know that she agrees with both of us, reminding the reader time and time again that 'words are the movies enemy'. And yet, since a book is made primarily of words, it eludes me why she agreed to write 100 pages on it.
I am not advocating for the absence of film writing or film analysis at all. I love it when it's done properly (Roger Ebert, I miss you dearly), when it adds layers to what is on screen and uses words in its favour as a way of expressing the feelings it arose at any given moment, contextualises a scene, theorises about possible meanings and methods of achieving a certain mood or emotional gravitas, etc... . However, I hate it when it goes in circles or makes a point of overstating what we have already seen on screen without adding anything of substance to it.
I also have a problem with simple things expressed in the most lavish of words when there is no need for it. At times, I had the feeling Anderson wrote this with a Thesaurus next to her so that she could find the absolute best (and most futile) synonyms.
Or maybe I'm just dumb.
Learned a few words though, so thanks for that:
-leporine
-gnomic
-arcana
-voluble
-ENSORCELL
-precis
-simile
-GOSSAMER
-redound
-pillorying
-cornpone
-askance
-coeval
-atavistic
-sobriquet (that's literally a nickname. what's wrong with 'nickname'?)
To be fair, she does make some interesting points throughout and I genuinely believe that if this was shorter and marketed differently it would have been worthwhile.
Anderson also has some sense of self-awareness and admits that she is 'loosing the plot' or 'free associating'. And boy can she go on off a tangent:
'Hedren's accounts of being tormented by Hitchcock on set (and off) for both Marnie and The Birds are well known. (Also well known: the enormous influence of Hitchcock's 1958 masterwork Vertigo, the quintessential film about doubling, on Lynch's entire corpus.) Holding up Marnie like a prism, I see odd, atavistic refractions, energy waves passing through Laura Dern's film roles. In Wild at Heart, Sailor is also the name of Lula's lover.
Tippi - the sobriquet of a real actress who endured tremendous misery inflicted by Hitchcock while playing an anguished character in Marnie - forms a rhyme with Nikki, the name of a fictional actress who also suffers from psychic disintegration (...)
Another slant rhyme: Marnie - mad, larcenous, suicidal, single, childless mid-century woman -with Marmee, selfless, beloved, highly competent nineteenth-century matriarch.'
Tippi and Nikki
Marnie and Marmee.
They rhyme! Get it?
Also, why is Weinstein here? And race? Why stir up the pot with stuff from the current debate in a monograph about a film from 2006? Not everything has to be of the utmost wokeness.
Finally, some interesting things of note/good quotes as atonement:
"In an email, a gay male Parisian friend asks me 'How do you engage with Lynch gender-wise?'
I write back that I am often moved by his perverse empathy, that the suffering that his abused, deranged or dead (as in the case of Twin Peaks' Laura Palmer) heroines endures isn't gratuitous or aestheticised. Rather, this torments reflect a simple, repugnant reality: that women are reviled. These scenes in the Lynch ouevre are difficult to watch. Sometimes I find them repellent. Yet they haunt, exposing foul veracities of not only Hollywood, but also small-town America, the world at large; each locale - any locale - perpetuates the misogyny indigenous to it."
"To continue Balsom's assertion about the 'power and pleasure in being an object', I'd add that, in the case of Dern, there is power and pleasure in performing instability, disintegration, abjection - and power and pleasure in witnessing how she paradoxically exerts such control while falling apart."
"(...) like Inland Empire, is also about the bewilderments of performing and the ever-unstable boundary between fantasy and reality, 'the fiction... gobbles everything up, and finally it self-destructs' "
This wasn't exactly an enjoyable read, but I love all things Lynch related so sadly couldn't give it a pass.
It is a hard subject matter to tackle, and all things considered writing about any of his films is a commendable effort, albeit in some cases a superfluous one.
I understand that Lynch's work (and in particular Inland Empire) defies all those things that leave film theorists ablaze, either burning with a desire to sing him the highest of praises or set him aside as pure unsubstantiated, unjustifiable drivel.
Inland Empire throws away anything that even remotely resembles a plot and plunges you into the depths of a shattered, damaged psyche that then begins to split even further and takes you on a pretty unique journey. Confusing and deeply disturbing, it can be scary and at times infuriatingly frustrating; but it is highly rewarding as an experience and whatever is left for the viewer to process can't easily be put into words, and I don't believe it should, or at least those should not be the lenses through which we appraise its value. Lynch doesn't believe that either and Melissa Anderson goes to extreme lengths to let us know that she agrees with both of us, reminding the reader time and time again that 'words are the movies enemy'. And yet, since a book is made primarily of words, it eludes me why she agreed to write 100 pages on it.
I am not advocating for the absence of film writing or film analysis at all. I love it when it's done properly (Roger Ebert, I miss you dearly), when it adds layers to what is on screen and uses words in its favour as a way of expressing the feelings it arose at any given moment, contextualises a scene, theorises about possible meanings and methods of achieving a certain mood or emotional gravitas, etc... . However, I hate it when it goes in circles or makes a point of overstating what we have already seen on screen without adding anything of substance to it.
I also have a problem with simple things expressed in the most lavish of words when there is no need for it. At times, I had the feeling Anderson wrote this with a Thesaurus next to her so that she could find the absolute best (and most futile) synonyms.
Or maybe I'm just dumb.
Learned a few words though, so thanks for that:
-leporine
-gnomic
-arcana
-voluble
-ENSORCELL
-precis
-simile
-GOSSAMER
-redound
-pillorying
-cornpone
-askance
-coeval
-atavistic
-sobriquet (that's literally a nickname. what's wrong with 'nickname'?)
To be fair, she does make some interesting points throughout and I genuinely believe that if this was shorter and marketed differently it would have been worthwhile.
Anderson also has some sense of self-awareness and admits that she is 'loosing the plot' or 'free associating'. And boy can she go on off a tangent:
'Hedren's accounts of being tormented by Hitchcock on set (and off) for both Marnie and The Birds are well known. (Also well known: the enormous influence of Hitchcock's 1958 masterwork Vertigo, the quintessential film about doubling, on Lynch's entire corpus.) Holding up Marnie like a prism, I see odd, atavistic refractions, energy waves passing through Laura Dern's film roles. In Wild at Heart, Sailor is also the name of Lula's lover.
Tippi - the sobriquet of a real actress who endured tremendous misery inflicted by Hitchcock while playing an anguished character in Marnie - forms a rhyme with Nikki, the name of a fictional actress who also suffers from psychic disintegration (...)
Another slant rhyme: Marnie - mad, larcenous, suicidal, single, childless mid-century woman -with Marmee, selfless, beloved, highly competent nineteenth-century matriarch.'
Tippi and Nikki
Marnie and Marmee.
They rhyme! Get it?
Also, why is Weinstein here? And race? Why stir up the pot with stuff from the current debate in a monograph about a film from 2006? Not everything has to be of the utmost wokeness.
Finally, some interesting things of note/good quotes as atonement:
"In an email, a gay male Parisian friend asks me 'How do you engage with Lynch gender-wise?'
I write back that I am often moved by his perverse empathy, that the suffering that his abused, deranged or dead (as in the case of Twin Peaks' Laura Palmer) heroines endures isn't gratuitous or aestheticised. Rather, this torments reflect a simple, repugnant reality: that women are reviled. These scenes in the Lynch ouevre are difficult to watch. Sometimes I find them repellent. Yet they haunt, exposing foul veracities of not only Hollywood, but also small-town America, the world at large; each locale - any locale - perpetuates the misogyny indigenous to it."
"To continue Balsom's assertion about the 'power and pleasure in being an object', I'd add that, in the case of Dern, there is power and pleasure in performing instability, disintegration, abjection - and power and pleasure in witnessing how she paradoxically exerts such control while falling apart."
"(...) like Inland Empire, is also about the bewilderments of performing and the ever-unstable boundary between fantasy and reality, 'the fiction... gobbles everything up, and finally it self-destructs' "
This wasn't exactly an enjoyable read, but I love all things Lynch related so sadly couldn't give it a pass.
It is a hard subject matter to tackle, and all things considered writing about any of his films is a commendable effort, albeit in some cases a superfluous one.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 15, 2022
I read this slim little book after seeing Lynch's finest film for the third time (and this time the 2022 remastered video in a cinema). It was only on the third viewing that I started to come to some understanding of what the story is about and I wanted someone else to talk to me about it.
Film critic Melissa Anderson is, it turns out, a fine person to have talk to you about Inland Empire. She doesn't, however, talk a lot about the movie, which is just as well. Decoding Lynch is like solving a really difficult crossword puzzle only to discover there's still one jigsaw piece left over because it wasn't really a crossword puzzle from the outset. And for me to maintain my semblance of the narrative, I have to overlook a lot of things I can't explain. That's how it is with Lynch.
I'm glad I didn't know before I started reading that this is really a book about Inland Empire star and co-producer Laura Dern because I probably wouldn't have read it. Not that I don't appreciate her, but I'm not driven to understand her the way I am with Lynch. And having read the book, I do understand Lynch a bit more. But Anderson's text is about Laura Dern the inspiration for the film from the outset and Laura Dern as a woman in Hollywood, which is what the movie is about (not Dern but women—but also Dern).
With Dern's career setting the guideposts, Anderson is able to talk about Lynch as a filmmaker, about Lynch with regards to MeToo and, briefly, about Lynch in light of Black Lives Matter. Anderson is careful not to use social issues as a measuring stick, and she says flat out that she doesn't want to, But she does address then, and it's enlightening to read her take.
Such issues are frustrating because Lynch won't talk about them—or much of anything else, for that matter. What's more, his films address social issues, primarily violence against women, but the narratives don't attempt any sort of moral judgement or resolution. That leaves him wide open to presumptions and criticism, and that seems to be something he's comfortable with. I don't consider his films to be amoral or anti-woman. I think they are mythic and complex. But this isn't a review of him, it's a review of Anderson's book about him, a very particular book but certainly the best longform text (about 100 small pages) I've read on him—and on Dern as well.
Film critic Melissa Anderson is, it turns out, a fine person to have talk to you about Inland Empire. She doesn't, however, talk a lot about the movie, which is just as well. Decoding Lynch is like solving a really difficult crossword puzzle only to discover there's still one jigsaw piece left over because it wasn't really a crossword puzzle from the outset. And for me to maintain my semblance of the narrative, I have to overlook a lot of things I can't explain. That's how it is with Lynch.
I'm glad I didn't know before I started reading that this is really a book about Inland Empire star and co-producer Laura Dern because I probably wouldn't have read it. Not that I don't appreciate her, but I'm not driven to understand her the way I am with Lynch. And having read the book, I do understand Lynch a bit more. But Anderson's text is about Laura Dern the inspiration for the film from the outset and Laura Dern as a woman in Hollywood, which is what the movie is about (not Dern but women—but also Dern).
With Dern's career setting the guideposts, Anderson is able to talk about Lynch as a filmmaker, about Lynch with regards to MeToo and, briefly, about Lynch in light of Black Lives Matter. Anderson is careful not to use social issues as a measuring stick, and she says flat out that she doesn't want to, But she does address then, and it's enlightening to read her take.
Such issues are frustrating because Lynch won't talk about them—or much of anything else, for that matter. What's more, his films address social issues, primarily violence against women, but the narratives don't attempt any sort of moral judgement or resolution. That leaves him wide open to presumptions and criticism, and that seems to be something he's comfortable with. I don't consider his films to be amoral or anti-woman. I think they are mythic and complex. But this isn't a review of him, it's a review of Anderson's book about him, a very particular book but certainly the best longform text (about 100 small pages) I've read on him—and on Dern as well.
March 2, 2025
third in the series i've read after goodbye dragon inn and ten skies. i love monographs what can i say. maybe didn't fire me up as much as those other two but still a worthy companion to my recent watch. rather than trying to unpack the movie (probably futile?) it unpacks the "woman in trouble" angle of the movie and the lynch filmography at large (hell of the culture at large) as well as becoming a well deserved exploration of the movie's lead, laura dern. dern was, even before lynch, a woman in trouble (a teenager really) in smooth talk, which is a canny comparative performance and movie (becomes as much a focus as inland). that i dont have that much more of a lens into inland itself is a small complaint in comparison to the value of anderson's delving into the nuances of lynch's begging to be unpacked recurring theme of violence against women, itself a bit of corrective to hitchcock's before him and hollywood at large.
January 1, 2026
On January 15, 2025 I was watching Lost Highway, right as the director David Lynch was passing from this world. I made it my goal after that to watch every one of his feature films this year, finishing with Inland Empire (which I previously watched on a low quality bootleg about a decade ago), his last and greatest.
This book explores this film and tries to pick it apart, but it mostly focuses on how this film is a. definitely a sequel to Mulholland Drive and b. Laura Dern is the greatest actress of all time. I could have told you that!
This book series is really strange too. It seems to be going for the 33 1/3 or Boss Fight series but for 2000s films, but half of the selections are films I've never even heard of, and only 1 other that I've actually seen!
This book explores this film and tries to pick it apart, but it mostly focuses on how this film is a. definitely a sequel to Mulholland Drive and b. Laura Dern is the greatest actress of all time. I could have told you that!
This book series is really strange too. It seems to be going for the 33 1/3 or Boss Fight series but for 2000s films, but half of the selections are films I've never even heard of, and only 1 other that I've actually seen!
November 2, 2023
If you are looking for a speculative analysis of Inland Empire, go elsewhere. What this book focuses on is: 1) Laura Dern's work in David Lynch films in general 2) Laura Dern's portrayal of the lead character 3) Random, short and deviating ruminations on David Lynch's film career in general 4) Deviating analysis of other David Lynch films 5) General thoughts on California. There is not much about the film itself to satisfy this reader. Not even a probable theory of what the film is about. I could do without the deviations that do not address the very film the book it titled after.
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July 27, 2025Been unable to find motivation to really commit to another book recently but I picked this up while at work and read it cover to cover during my shift. It’s not really about Inland Empire that directly, but more viewing Laura Dern through the prism of the film, contextualizing her long relationship with Lynch, and her career at large. It paints a backdrop of seedy Hollywood, or “Shadowland.” Sporadically interesting but I see the vision – words are useless in the face of Lynch’s films themselves, so you have to look to the edges for a book like this.
September 10, 2023
A missed opportunity. The film itself is so richly textured that it lends itself extremely well to this format. Anderson somehow decides to ignore indepth analysis of the film, and instead we get what is mostly a surface level biography about Laura Dern. I can also easily see how a brilliant book could be written about the creative collaboations of Lynch and Dern, but this book doesn't really deliver, "Inland Empire" deserved better.
December 7, 2021
Really great riff on the nature of Lynch and Dern's various collaborations. Most writing on Lynch in general, and Inland Empire specifically, isn't very compelling. Anderson is well served by this style, almost free associative, which rhymes nicely with the film itself. Reading this enhanced my understanding of the film, I think.
September 1, 2022
Melissa Anderson versucht erst gar nicht, den Film "Inland Empire" von David Lynch in diesem Essay zu erklären. Es wäre ein unmögliches Unterfangen, das am Ziel vorbeischiessen würde. Den Fokus legt die Autorin lieber auf Laura Dern, die doppelten Motive und Spiegelungen.
Das bricht weder mit der Faszination des Filmes, noch wird es zu komplex didaktisch.
Das bricht weder mit der Faszination des Filmes, noch wird es zu komplex didaktisch.
April 20, 2025
i don’t think it’s bad but it’s kind of a herculean task to take on a movie that is literally so difficult to talk about other than being like “its a nightmare.” inland empire is a nightmare impenetrable movie for me but it’s one of the most frightening things i’ve seen. this book doesn’t go as deep as the others in this series but it just didn’t have as much to say as i’d hoped
November 19, 2021
Less about Inland Empire & more about Laura Dern & goes off on tangents (like the film), unlike the earlier books in this series ‘Goodbye, Dragon Inn’ & ‘Ten Skies’ this feels more like an homage to a favourite actress.
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March 2, 2023Accessible and meandering book about David Lynch’s most inaccessible and meandering film. Some of the arguments felt a bit frenzied but I’m not used to reading solely about cinema, so this was a nice change!
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March 2, 2025throughout all the countlessly strange and tangential inferences, i'm surprised anderson didn't manage to connect the obvious dot that the bankruptcy of fatty arbuckle's burger chain due to the mad cow disease outbreak in 2006 happened on the same year inland empire was released.
May 5, 2022
Laura Dern provides a nice vantage point from which Anderson can develop a feminist perspective on Lynch’s work while holding on to the magic that illuminates that work in the first place
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