I’m a guy who used to take a bus after school to the mall to catch a movie before dinner. I’d go see the ones I liked a couple of times, and sitting alone in the theater1 I felt sort of carried away each time, often by movies that I have absolutely no interest in now. I doubt Dances With Wolves would move me to rapture anymore, even accounting for the firelight dancing along Kevin Costner’s pointy little core. But even so, I’ve had only the smallest handful of moviegoing experiences during which I felt truly transported — when I left the theater through the screen or into my own brain, when I mentally went elsewhere in the closest to literal sense possible, and only returned when the credits rolled. The last of those trips was during David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

Even a lot of Lynchians missed Inland Empire, the director’s most recent feature. It had an extremely limited release in 2006-07 and was quickly saddled with a reputation as a self-indulgent morass, the kind of hypnotrip that many of Lynch’s fans had tired of. And while I guess the words “self-indulgent,” “hypnotrip,” and “morass” all apply to Inland Empire, it’s still not only David Lynch’s best movie, but the best movie of the last decade or so.

The opportunities to see Lynch’s work in a theater are growing fewer and further between, so I made sure to catch Inland Empire during the one week it played in a single art house in Pittsburgh in early 2007. I remember the theater as being mostly empty, like the shows I’d go to as a teenager, and extremely dark and loud. It’s a long movie, a good three hours, but I felt like I sat in the auditorium for much, much longer. Not because I was bored, but because the film transported me in such a way that it seemed like I’d entered some kind of temporal whirlpool in which the normal flow of time didn’t apply.

Let me say right here that I don’t mean that in any kind of New Age sense or anything that has to do with collective consciousness, out-of-body events, or independently owned bead stores. Anyone who knows me well can vouch that I’m reasonably sane and an avowed Materialist who doesn’t buy into anything spiritual. But my experience during Inland Empire was real, and I think it has a valid psychological explanation. See, Inland Empire is the best approximation of a dream ever created.2 More specifically, the movie is a waking nightmare. And while Lynch strongly avoids ever explaining his work, I think that’s exactly what he intended it to be. Every aspect of the filmmaking — the cinematography, pacing, scene structure and juxtaposition, acting, music, and anything else you can name — is tailored to build an experience that replicates the almost-world of a dream. Story lines jump in completely illogical ways that, in context, flow together. Individuals transition from character to character; locations are impossibly designed, linked, and traversed nonsensically; the point of view jumps from watching a story to being a participant in it and back again; all exactly like in a dream.

The thing is, your brain perceives time differently when you dream. You can witness that for yourself when you’re dozing. If you ever check your watch, nod off into a dream, and then check it again when you wake up, the amount of time that’s passed is usually different than what you assume. In fact, in my experience, much less time has always passed than what I judged to have gone by. So my hypothesis here is that Inland Empire, when seen in the pitch black stillness of a theater, replicated a dream so successfully that my brain screwed up its perception of time, just like if I’d actually been asleep. I’ll throw in that since Inland Empire imitates not just a dream but a nightmare, it’s as profoundly unsettling as the creepiest freak-out you’ve ever awoken from.

Inland Empire affected me so deeply that I avoided watching it again for years, because I didn’t want to risk it losing its mystique and becoming just a movie, or worse a not-that-great movie. But about four years later it popped up on Netflix Instant Watch, which meant I could stream it in HD straight to my TV, so the chance of seeing it again well intrigued me enough that I was willing to take the risk. One night, Sophie and I turned out all the lights, closed the blinds, and watched. And even though I’d seen the movie and knew what to expect and was prepared to be mindfully aware of the experience, it happened again. While I didn’t lose the sense of time in the same way I had the first go round, I still felt transported out of my living room, lifted out of the waking world, and left shaken and strange. Sitting through Inland Empire is unlike watching any other movie I’ve ever seen.

I guess you’re probably wondering what it’s about. But there’s not much point in my summarizing the plot, such as it has one. It’s more or less the story of an actress whose role in a movie with strange origins devolves into an identity crisis. Any more detail than that is futile and possibly detrimental. But I’ll mention that Laura Dern stars, and she gives one of the most remarkable performances in recent memory. It’s so good that in late 2006 David Lynch took to Sunset Blvd. with a live cow and sat a vigil to try to win Dern an Oscar nomination. She didn’t get one, nor did the cow.

Get It
Sadly, Inland Empire is no longer streaming on Netflix, though they’ll still send you the DVD. In fact, I can’t find it available for legal streaming or download anywhere online, which is sad because I want to watch it RIGHT NOW. So you’ll have to rent or buy the inexpensive DVD from a retailer of your choice. Watch it in the dark.

1. There wasn’t a huge crowd in Mt. Lebanon, Pa. for Shadows and Fog at 3:15 on a Wednesday. [↩]
2. By “dream” here I don’t mean a fantasy, an aspiration, or an ideal; I’m referring to the sensory experience your brain pumps out while you’re asleep. [↩]