The INLAND EMPIRE

The INLAND EMPIRE

I just got invited to see the movie INLAND EMPIRE by G in last minute in West Village tonight; we dined together afterwards with a couple of drinks (one drink for me and a couple for him) and cut it rather short than what it could be as a typical night in town recently.

I just tend to start feeling lower and lower limitlessly when I am sitting alone in my place, so it was a good night out when I am off from work. The city looked pretty dead with a conspicuous number of cops that I could not feel unaffected. I could breathe only in a night like this to feel relaxed for no risk that I am taking for taking a night off. 

Yet I feel rather impatient than unwinded away from the rountine, and that is the wierd thing for sure about how my mind works.

The movie Inland Empire was quite impressive for me in regards to the director Lynch's keen awareness of two issues; collective consciousness (or unconsciousness) or a singular narrative that puts different people together, or archetype as people often phrase, and how to seek out to materialize it. He seemed to focus this time on how to bring out multiple stories of different women, which seemed to be frangmented and mysterious at first, to be ultimately narrated as one story to unify differences into one as somehting like 'history of women' (herstory)&nb sp;to the point that we could call the unified story 'feminism'. I am afraid it sounds cheapened and corny when I succumb to the general vocabulary to describe the whole complexed visual experiences in the film, but to get down the process of verbalizing to discuss what is not to be discussed so easily, somebody has to initiate something. So I put this down here for a starter for Lynch seemed to be pretty good at the attempt of exploration as we see in the film where we understand that we do not have an easy answer to it.

According to G, Lynch recently published a book on guess what; New Age-ish themed book on meditation. That makes a total sense to me especially after I saw the movie. It is all about collective (un)consciousness, and how to overcome your tiny ego and connect one's experiences of an individual to the universal one. All those women in hte film were ultimately "UNITE"ed, and it was noteworthy that the film almost looked as if it was his interpretation of Sweet Charity, to muse on what makes the women's profession possible and why they do it. Or it becomes an archetype when someone gets aware of the brutality that every encounter of man and woman triggers, from ancient times to today. So Lynch was another artist who ended up recognizing the brutal scenary of the crash of interests of men and women, it was just that he set the angle from women's side as opposed to men's justification of violence, and it was the triumph of the film.

I did not notice Nastasja Kinski was there as the credit went. This movie had a whole set in Polish where parading a bunch of Polish women, and come to think of it, she is a Polish decsent even though I almost forgot about it, to say the least of her whose father, Klaus Kinski, the famous horror actor from Poland.