“Inland Empire OST” Review
Various Artists. Inland Empire OST . 2007.
This is a guest review by Tyson Stewart
Sound has always been important in the work of David Lynch. More than any other contemporary filmmaker, he has used it to express the ineffable, the mysterious, emptiness, and chaos of life. The roars in Blue Velvet during rough sex. The explosions as Cage lights up in Wild at Heart. The stinging wall of gas, formless and unpredictable, as Henry visits the X family in Eraserhead. By fully exposing the arbitrary links between forms and concepts, Lynch’s brand of estrangement operates as a kind of Barthesian mythologist.
In Inland Empire, Lynch uses songs and an original score to create a more organic, less conceptual reflection of reality. This time around, sounds are largely from the mediascape. Lynch celebrates and mourns media’s encroachment of reality. Jazz, bad TV music, pop, splashes into the abyss, and the simply weird are what you’ll find on the soundtrack. It goes without saying, if you want to estrange the world, Lynch is still your guy.
Lynch has one half dozen titles of his own on the soundtrack. They are my favorite and I’ll focus on them. With Inland Empire, he has become something of a neo-auteur . He is all over this film—so much so, in fact, that at times, while experiencing the film, you may feel like you’re in someone else’s thought processes, a flow of consciousness that has no genre really.
The film itself is like an up-to-date version of Bergman’s Persona. It deals with performance, but maybe more explicitly, with that point between actor and character or being you and performing. The whole thing is like a gap wherein narrative becomes necessarily impossible and the complexities of identity make for great, vexing art. Where Bergman needed two actors to accentuate the gap, Lynch employs the brilliant Laura Dern to sublime effect.
A jumble of natural and pop sounds, the estrangement of the everyday explodes onto the soundtrack with a force hitherto not present in the entire Lynch oeuvre. Whether it’s the dance song Locomotion that conjures up all sorts of suburban memories or the wash of Rabbits Theme, the sounds want to simultaneously own the scenes and point outward. The 12-minute Woods Variation, for example, sounds like something done before, but it wasn’t the eerie ballad that I heard before; rather, it’s the experiences that felt like the song. My memories are suddenly opened up—the rhythms create sudden cognitive mapping of events past, both real and mediated (i.e., a walk into an underground parking lot in the winter or an 80s TV suspense program).
Ghosts of Love has to be the best thing on the album. Here, Lynch’s digitally fucked up voice and maddeningly simple lyrics feel like a love song by a psychopathic ghost locked in a telephone booth next to a train station or something. Its echoes and deep vibrations matched with the omniscient ghost (film director or God?) voice create an out-of-body experience à la going to the movies. Dizzyingly circular.
The other great song is Polish Poem. In the film, it appears at the end, when Dern stumbles through the maze one last time and reaches Lost Girl, who is returned to her family, and we (and Dern) finally learn to live with the mystery. Like none other, this song points to Lynch’s perpetual optimism. Its themes of renewal, second chance, opening up, and female warmth inspire happiness that mainstream product forgot long ago just how to do.
Inland Empire’s violence and dread, created through the endless dislocations and disconnects, invite you to feel fully. The film comes home with you. It isn’t a movie so much as a state of mind. And something is happening .
Inland Empire Trailer
June 12th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
Excellent review Tyson, you really capture the haunting atmosphere of Lynch’s images and music. Inland Empire is easily one of his most difficult but rewarding films. Thanks for your contribution, I hope to see more of your writing appear on this blog. Cheers.