On The Real Woman in Trouble of Lynch’s 'Inland Empire’
Or how to interpret what's really happening in the film's story
In this article, I will argue that the real main character of the David Lynch film Inland Empire (2007) is the polish woman (Karolina Gruszka) known only as “The Lost Girl,”and offer an interpretation of the film’s narrative. To this end, I will illustrate that the opening 7 minutes of the film provide an easy way of distinguishing between the real (objective) and fictional/imaginary (subjective) events that we see on screen.
Table of ContentsNarrative and the ‘In-Trouble’ Trilogy
David Lynch has an interesting relationship with narrative.
Though his debut feature Eraserhead was an experimental, absurdist picture that had little interest in traditional storytelling, his work over the next 20 years was far more bound to convention, offering what were for the most part legible and literal, if highly weird and surreal, stories. It was not until Lost Highway (1997) that the director returned to making movies, where the story was entirely open to interpretation, and literal meaning was largely eschewed in favor of symbolism and subjective depiction.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lost Highway constitutes a prime example of what Warren Buckland defines as the ‘puzzle film,’ a designation that has also been applied to both Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006), which I personally like to refer to alongside Highway as installments of Lynch’s “in-trouble trilogy.”*
*Each picture follows a ‘person in trouble’ and at least the first and third installments have been described as such by Lynch in interviews and promotional materials.
The author summarizes the conventions of the puzzle film in his introduction to the book Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, stating that
“...puzzle films embrace non-linearity, time loops, and fragmented spatio-temporal reality. These films blur the boundaries between different levels of reality, are riddled with gaps, deception, labyrinthine structures, ambiguity, and overt coincidences…. In the end, the complexity of puzzle films operates on two levels: narrative and narration. It emphasizes the complex telling (plot, narration) of a simple or complex story (narrative).” (6)”
Though there are those who would scoff at they idea of trying to ‘decode’ Empire or claim that imposing a narrative upon it is to do it a disservice, I believe that the picture indeed lends itself towards a literal interpretation.
In crafting it, Lynch did not completely reject an explanation for the film’s narrative but left enough elements or clues that openly invite and encourage the viewer to uncover it, much as he did in the preceding installments of the in-trouble trilogy.
Both Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive early on establish a narrative framing device that obliquely guides spectators towards a coherent narrative interpretation by allowing them to easily distinguish between the real or objective events that compose the film’s story and those that take place in the ‘subjective reality’’ of the main character, from the perspective of whom the story is told.
Early into Lost Highway, Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) has a meeting with two detectives, who are investigating the mysterious videotapes he and his wife have received of their own home. In the course of the conversation, he admits that he doesn’t like video cameras, preferring to remember things in “his own way” and “not necessarily the way they happened.” This essentially positions video camera recordings in the movie as the only record of objective truth, while framing everything we see otherwise as a manifestation of Fred’s unreliable mind.
Similarly, at the beginning of Mulholland Drive, we witness a first-person POV scene of someone going to sleep on a bed with red sheets. About 90 minutes later, Diane (Naomi Watts) wakes up from the same bed, framing everything that came in-between these two scenes as her dream, something I discuss more in-depth here.
Frame of Television
Inland Empire likewise presents clues that establish or at least strongly imply a clear delineation between real and imaginary/fictional events in its second scene, where The Lost Girl, who we learn is a prostitute, enters a hotel room and has sex with a male client. In the morning, she wakes up and cries, then begins watching television.
Initially, the screen is static, full of snow.
The film cuts to the Lost Girl.
But when it cuts back to the screen, we suddenly see clear images of the Rabbits live-action sitcom on the screen.
Cut back to the Lost Girl’s eyes.
Then, we see Grace Zabriskie’s Neighbor character moving in a disjointed, blurry version of the full scene that will be shown about 5 minutes later.
The next shot shows some of the television images enveloping the walls of the room.
Cut back to the Lost Girl.
Now the camera begins to push in closer and closer to the Girl's eyes - when it cuts back to the TV, which is now closer than before, we again see STATIC.
Cut back to the Lost Girl. The camera zooms in even closer. We then cut back to the static screen, which becomes the frame of our CAMERA as well, meaning there is no further delineation between our screen and the TV screen in the film.
This heavily implies that we - the audience - are now seeing the television screen through the Lost Girl's eyes, and that what she sees - and thus we see - is not real, for television shows a fictional reality. This is corroborated by the fact that the static then DISSOLVES to a scene from Rabbits, Lynch’s absurdist web sitcom series. (Sitcoms, after all, are among the most common and recognizable staples of scripted TV. )
After a few seconds, the film cuts back to the Lost Girl Watching from her hotel room. A few more seconds pass, the film cuts back to her eyes again. This repeats a couple of more times. The intercutting serves as a reminder that the sequences we see when the Lost Girl is not onscreen is actually what the Lost Girl is watching on TV.
By the time we get about 6.5 minutes into the movie, the intercutting between The Rabbits scene and the Hotel Room STOPS and the film continues to follow the Rabbits sequence. At this point, the film has completely transitioned us into the world of the television screen that the Lost Girl sees.
Hence, we enter the fictional reality of TV and thus the Lost Girl’s subjectivity. We don’t know if what she sees on the screen is what’s actually being shown on screen or what she imagines herself to be watching. But either way, it is NOT real.
Consider how the scenes that follow seem to break apart any semblance of coherence. About 7 minutes 20 seconds in, the male Rabbit fades out of the Room he walked into. The next thing we know, the film fades a couple of new characters into the same room. And they have a vague conversation in Polish.
At the end of it, we again see the Male Rabbit in the room, only for the film to FADE OUT. When it FADES IN again, we seem to be in a different movie altogether.
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The Eyes of the Lost Girl
We now see a repeat of the sequence with the Neighbor Character we saw earlier when it was shown on the Lost Girl’s Television Screen but it is now no longer distorted and appears uncut. This then leads into the next scene, which introduces actress Nikki Grace (Laura Dern), whom the film is ostensibly about.
Notably, however, the plotline about Nikki and her role in a new film is interspersed with a lot of seemingly unrelated sequences that seem to come from different genres or movies altogether. There seem to be elements of a sitcom, a murder mystery, a soap opera, a crime thriller about Eastern European prostitution, etc.
The order of the sequences seems random and confusing, especially since there is no clear or direct causal link between them. But the structure starts to make more sense when you keep in mind that everything we see is what the Lost Girl sees on TV.
Recall: what used to be one of the most common activities that TV watchers would perform following the introduction of cable and the remote control?
The answer: channel surfing.
By changing channels quickly, viewers avoid spending too much time on any one specific program and to sample a large variety of distinct texts. When you watch Inland Empire from this perspective, its disjointed nature comes across as intentional.
That is, we could say that the seemingly random order of the scenes is the result of the Lost Girl channel surfing and so sampling different shows and movies. The initial use of “fade in/fade out” transitions between the various sequences supports this view, arguably signifying the shift from one program or channel to another.
Over time, however, the boundaries between all these discrete televisual segments and their respective realities begin to break down, with characters and elements from one sequence beginning to pop up in another, disrupting any sense of spatio-temporal coherence.* In effect, the many fictional programs the Lost Girl is watching merge into a singular stream or “flow” of audiovisual programming.
*For instance, I like to think that the first time we see Julia Ormond on-screen, she is playing a daytime soap opera character in a TV show that is completely separate from the reality of the movie about Nikki Grace. But the next time she appears, her character in the Nikki Grace movie reality begins to inexplicably recall the character from the soap opera.
Flow and Consciousness
Now, I specifically use the term ‘flow‘ here, as it is a key concept in television studies. And Inland Empire is a movie that perfectly expresses it in a visual medium.
To clarify, flow is perceived to be a fundamental characteristic of television. Initially, it was theorized by scholar Raymond Williams in the book Television: Technology and Cultural Form. The author posited that all news programs, series, commercials, short and feature films, etc. appearing on TV function as components of planned sequences that join together into a singular continuous whole or “flow” of audio-visual material.
“In all developed broadcasting systems the characteristic organisation, and therefore the characteristic experience, is one of sequence or flow. This phenomenon, of planned flow, is then perhaps the defining characteristic of broadcasting, simultaneously as a technology and as a cultural form.” (86)
On TV then, boundaries between different media texts break down. Williams in parti-cular notes how differently feature films play on TV. Rather than wholesome, singular works, they are often interrupted and joined to other segments, such as commercials.
I highly doubt Lynch read Williams’ theory.
But everything Williams states in the following passage, in my opinion, perfectly captures the structure, progression, and experience of watching Inland Empire.
“...I began watching a film and at first had some difficulty in adjusting to a much greater frequency of commercial ‘breaks’. Yet this was a minor problem compared to what eventually happened. Two other films, which were due to be shown on the same channel on other nights, began to be inserted as trailers. A crime in San Francisco (the subject of the original film) began to operate in an extraordinary counterpoint not only with the deodorant and cereal commercials but with a romance in Paris and the eruption of a prehistoric monster who laid waste New York. Moreover, this was sequence in a new sense… since the transitions from film to commercial and from film A to films B and C were in effect unmarked… I believe I registered some incidents as happening in the wrong film, and some characters in the commercials as involved in the film episodes, in what came to seem – for all the occasional bizarre disparities – a single irresponsible flow of images and feelings.” (92)
Building on what Williams describes here, I’d say that Inland Empire too ultimately seems to become a single, irresponsible flow of images and feelings. What’s important to note here is that this flow also reflects the subjective experience of the Lost Girl.
It’s no coincidence that about an hour into the film, Nikki Grace - a fictional charac-ter the Lost Girl arguably identifies and empathizes with - begins to lose her sense of self and, among other things, inexplicably finds herself transported to Poland, where she experiences a life that is not her own but similar to that of the character she’s supposed to be playing in her ‘cursed’ film. It is as though elements of the Lost Girl’s own past, her life start to bleed into and alter the fictional reality of Nikki.
Despite all this, the distinction between real/objective events and fictional/subjective events is occasionally reinforced. About 80 minutes into the runtime, for instance, the film reminds us that Dern and the other characters we see are fictional constructs by cutting back to the Lost Girl watching them on TV from her hotel room.
We can conclude from all this that the opening 6-7 minutes provide a way for us to clearly tell apart scenes taking place in the real world (the Lost Girl in the hotel) from those set in the imaginary/fictional one (Nikki Grace et al.).
Whatever we see on the TV screen is not real. Laura Dern’s character(s) and every-thing that happens to her is not real. The Rabbits are not real.
Only the Lost Girl is real.
And much of what we see is her stream of consciousness, which intertwines with and becomes indistinguishable from the flow of various shows and movies shown on TV.
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The Real Woman in Trouble
What all this means is that The Lost Girl is the true “Woman in Trouble” that the film is about. She is the actual main character, the individual whose mind the film is exploring, and whose story it is actually telling. Naturally, one might ask: “What is the Lost Girl’s story? What can be deduced from what we see in Inland Empire?”
I cannot offer a comprehensive response to these questions yet, but I am convinced that one can infer a coherent story by thoroughly rewatching the film and piecing together the different pieces of information scattered throughout and encoded in the fictional realities.* Perhaps I’ll do that in the future.
But for now, I want to provide a general idea of how to decipher the film. And to that end, I need to discuss why the Lost Girl is watching television.
Inland Empire never explains this. In fact, it never explicitly establishes almost anything about the Lost Girl beyond the fact that she is a prostitute with a husband and child. But the simplest answer is that, much like the other protagonists of the in-trouble trilogy, she wants to essentially escape her reality.
And what are some the primary sources of escapism today? Television and film.
It’s really that simple. We watch movies and shows all the time to immerse ourselves in fictional realities, as they help us, to quote some old texts I used to study in grade school, to “escape the problems and troubles of our everyday life.”
I’d say that is precisely what the Lost Girl is doing. Needless to say, her life must be quite unhappy. And if what we see happen to Nikki (in the fictional reality) indeed reflects the Lost Girl’s real-life past, it is likely that she has suffered from an abusive marriage and possibly the murder of a lover at the hands of a monstrous client.
Similar to what we saw in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, the better imaginary worlds the main character immerses herself in don’t last, as aspects of her life start to intrude into and corrode them. In contrast to what happened in those films, however, the Lost Girl seems to survive her internal ordeal and gets a ‘happy ending.’
In my opinion, Laura Dern’s character ultimately comes to embody the Lost Girl’s sense of self. Thus, in the ending, when they meet, the Lost Girl and Nikki reintegrate into a whole person, which is why Dern/Nikki/Susan vanishes. In effect, the Lost Girl has finally “found” herself. She is lost no more, which is why she stops crying and happily greets her family. The use of the dissolve from the Lost Girl’s head in those final scenes further evinces that much of what we saw took place in her mind.
Rather than allowing her to completely escape from reality, watching television seems to have helped her heal and overcome her real-life troubles. From all this, it follows that Inland Empire is about the healing power of watching television and how its flow can impact and in turn be impacted by the subjective experience of the viewer.*
* Now, none of this is to say that this is the “correct” or “best” way of reading the film. After all, Inland Empire opens with what one could argue is another framing device of a record player that describes a radio play called Axxon N., implying that the Lost Girl’s story could very well itself be a work of fiction, which gives things a whole other layer of potential significance. Nonetheless, I do think the clues presented in the movie position the Lost Girl as the film’s true main character and the real ‘woman in trouble.’
But what about you?Do you agree with this interpretation of the film? Did this analysis change the way you look at it? Or am I completely off-base? What is your take on Inland Empire?
Does it make any sense? Is it a good David Lynch movie? Please,
If you like this article and are a fan of David Lynch, please consider reading:
You know it's funny, I don't think I've seen many of Lynch's stuff. I know I've seen "The Straight Story" and at some point I'm pretty sure I've seen Mullholland Drive.