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David Lynch Goes DigitalWhy Inland Empire is better on your TV than it was on the big screen.

By Dennis LimPosted Thursday, Aug. 23, 2007, at 10:34 AM ET

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Video, as Lynch uses it here, is the language of the subconscious, somehow more and less real than plain old filmic reality. DV looks more lifelike than film (its frame rate, the frequency at which successive images are captured, is higher than film's and closer to how the human eye operates), but it also seems unnaturally heightened, since it's not what celluloid-trained eyes are used to.

Lynch started his career as a painter—earlier this year the Fondation Cartier in Paris mounted a show of his photographs, digitally tweaked erotica, and massive, crude, roughly textured oil canvases—and he uses video with the curiosity and resourcefulness of an innate visual artist. He pays attention to its flickers, its shadows, its susceptibility to distortion from under- or overexposure. In this remarkable scene, for instance, he achieves a multitude of textures with an amusingly low-tech flashlight-in-the-dark method.

Bodies and faces, meanwhile, are repeatedly abstracted with an unforgiving lens or light source. Dern fearlessly offers herself up to one disfiguring wide-angle shot after another. The extreme close-up is a Lynch trademark, and here, using his DV camera like a new toy, he peers even more intently than usual, as if he's stumbled on an entirely different way of looking.

Whether or not Lynch intended it to, Inland Empire in the end conveys a techno-existential insight worthy of William Gibson. Film is a physical process, dependent on the interaction of light and chemistry. Video is by definition more remote, more spectral, a cluster of data in the electronic ether. And while mortality is a defining trait of film, a medium that degrades and disintegrates over time, video—quickly and endlessly reproducible—conjures a spooky sense of the infinite. In Inland Empire, truly a horror movie for the digital age, it's not that the ghost is in the machine. The ghost is the machine.

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Dennis Lim is editorial director at the Museum of the Moving Image and a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

I'm halfway through this film (another advantage to watching it on TV; you can serialize it).

It's exceptional. Far better than the reviews lead me to expect. Creepy as only Lynch can do creepy.

All the familiar Lynch touchstones are there: close-ups of a weeping woman in trouble; fractured time; odd asides that don't makes sense until the end (if then), Harry Dean Stanton being weird; a matinee-idol male protagonist; dark hallways; lights and lamps that suggest doom; and so on.

A new Lynch film is like another visit to a recurring dream (nightmare?). I just with they came along more often.

I guess I get extra bonus points for watching it on a 15-year old TV with a failing picture tube. "Now, it's dark".

--Noam Sane

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