I attended the "Inland Empire" screening and Q&A session with David Lynch at the AFI Silver Theatre Sunday night.  The flick is likely his most inscrutable to date (though I've never seen "Eraserhead"), and at 172 minutes, his longest, I believe, if you discount the various extended TV cuts of "Dune."  Like a lot of his films, “Inland Empire” is probably more enjoyable to argue about afterwards than it is to watch.  That's not to say I won't ever look at it again, but my impression upon a single viewing is that it has some wonderful stuff in it -- love that sitcom about the family of rabbits! --  and these bits would shine even more brightly if he pruned the film by 45 minutes.

Mr. Lynch himself was wonderful; Approachable, friendly, and -- most surprisingly for a guy whose work is so beguilingly impressionistic -- completely open to discussing his work.  He was equally generous and responsive to questions about the thematic concerns and origins of his films as he was to practical on-set/in-the-editing-room questions about how he works.

I asked him how he directs actors in a film like "Inland Empire" -- a completely nonlinear, surrealist piece shot in disjointed segments over a period of three years.  Obviously the nature of the piece, in addition to its protracted, stop-start shooting schedule, would seem to make it difficult for an actor to find their spot in the movie on any given shooting day.  Lynch responded that he simply has his actors rehearse until he likes what he's seeing, then he turns on the camera. "Inland Empire" was shot on digital media, largely by Lynch himself, and using mostly natural light , so he was free to to take his time in a way that he wouldn't have been if he'd had a union crew on the clock.  Indeed, the freedom that using digital photography has given him was a topic to which he returned again and again over the course of the evening.

Prior to the screening, Lynch came out along with the composer of the film's score and the two of them performed a short improvisational piece on keyboards with spoken narration from the director to set the tone for the film.  A nice touch.

I have to say that even though I'm glad Lynch is having a ball reveling in the freedom of dirt-cheap digital photography, the results are often pretty wretched.  Obviously what's onscreen is exactly what Lynch wanted to put there -- working this cheaply means Lynch will never be rushed again, and indeed, I doubt he has ever been rushed since doing "Twin Peaks" for weekly network TV, of which he directed only the pilot and a handful of episodes -- but long stretches of "Inland Empire" look like shit.  The big screen does low-grade, unlit digital photography no favors.  He wanted that dirt, I suppose.

Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday introduced Lynch before the movie and moderated the Q&A session afterwards.

Most of the questions were intelligent enough, even the minor variation we heard on “Where do you get your ideas?” A: The subconcious, silly!  Which is made more readily accessible to the artist via meditation, of which Lynch is a twice-daily practitioner. 

Hornaday herself didn’t seem to have much to say about “Inland Empire” or about Lynch’s body of work, so I was a little surprised when I checked out her review the next day and found it to be as insightful as any of the others I’ve read.  Like all the critics, Hornaday isn’t sure what’s going on in this film but she stops short of saying it’s just meaningless solipsism:

“Clearly for Lynch the point is to explore the subconscious -- in all its violence, depravity and lust -- and to create a movie that unspools as much like a dream as possible. The question is whether the familiar Lynchian devices -- the Gothic interiors, shapely breasts, Arbuslike freaks and brutalized women -- are still porous enough to reward interpretation, or whether they've become a closed system of self-referential mannerisms.”

Hey, I can use “solipsism” in my own blog if I want.  I’m paying for my web space.  And anyway, my usage is way less annoying than when Hornaday began her introduction of Lynch Sunday night thus: “I’ll start with the quotidian:  Please turn of your cel phones.” 

Quotidian.  It almost made me want to move to a red state, if only just for a second.