Time in Worlds Within Worlds Within Worlds: Experiencing Proper Time Via David Lynch’s Inland Empire

Introduction

As an artist, David Lynch has always been interested in exploring time visually. When he entered the painting sphere, he drifted back to his childhood, where he would be rocketed to a distant galaxy. In his pictures, the universe is in perpetual motion, people get lost, and time collapses on itself. Lynch has spoken of "the big, big pieces of time" we humans are drifting through, and it's folly to think we can either understand or manage the situation; it’s a complex bit of business best addressed through the abstractions of paint (McKenna, 2018). In the early 1990s, Lynch made a painting called A Figure Witnessing the Orchestration of Time that tackles the subject head-on. The picture submerges the viewer in a murky, turbulent field where we encounter a lost soul who seems to be ensnared in a scrap of netting that stretches across a portion of the canvas. The atmosphere is vibrating, and we’re trapped in a place that is everywhere but nowhere. 

This place exists outside of time, and yet Lynch’s painting is simultaneously rooted in art history. Gustave Moreau’s 1886 portrait of the mythological figure Ganymede—which finds the figurative painter dissolving into abstraction—telegraphs a similar sense of chaos and emergency. It’s as if both paintings, every painting, are part of an ocean of images mankind has been swimming in for centuries.

Although David Lynch worked on his visual oeuvre for over fifty years, and claimed he misses painting when he is not painting, he is most known for his work as a film director. Yet, even when he was not painting, he approached the world as a painter, and it transpires in each of his cinematographic projects.

Using Inland Empire (2006) as a tool to examine time, this paper uses sequences from the film to create passages for concepts of time that are best explained visually—cinematographically. Inland Empire is the vantage point of choice to illustrate how time im-passes from a phenomenological perspective. This paper shows how Lynch’s film visually discloses the linear circularity, or circular linearity, of time, following an expression coined by the American scholar Elliot R. Wolfson, indebted to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

Primary Observations On Inland Empire

Trying to make sense of Inland Empire, a range of critics analogized its unfolding with the logic and hybrid structure of the Internet. Kristin M. Jones compared the film, which she saw “[r]iddled with shifts between places and levels of reality,” to “wormholes, rabbit holes or web portals” (Jones, 2007). Dennis Lim thought that Inland Empire “progresses with the darting, associative logic of hyperlinks” (Lim, 2007). Zoran Samardzija later expanded on Lim’s digital metaphor and proposed that Inland Empire’s overall pattern resembles a “hyperlink temporal structure,” “more akin to a web where individual moments hyperlink to each other and other Lynch films” (Samardzija, 2010). And finally, Allister Mactaggart also compared the film with the web: “INLAND EMPIRE is a film whose structure and style is in keeping with the technological interconnectedness that the World Wide Web and the internet provide […] the structure and mood of the film echoes that of the topology of the internet, where paths cross, interlink and sometimes knot” (Mactaggart, 2010). Along the same lines and following in Anne Jerslev's footsteps, I engage with Inland Empire as a hyperlink narrative and discuss the connection between temporality and the hyperlink structure (Jerslev, 2012).

The film’s assemblage or “composite” of dislocated worlds of screens corresponds with a post-cinematic[1] “multiple and fractured” mode of perception and a concomitant sense of “fractured subjectivity” (Jerslev, 2021). The audience is immersed in fictional spaces with no clear demarcations and a time without continuity. They are trapped in a distorted, fractured environment together with the main character, Nikki Grace, who seems to pass bewilderedly from one world to the other through one strange or impossible passage after another. This three-hour-long film offers no clear boundaries between different screened levels of reality, no clear “master frame.”

In the following discussion of Lynch's first and sole digitally shot film, I will attempt to unravel aspects of the film’s strange and complicated post-cinematic structure to situate its focus on deconstructed continuous time and coherent space, which will serve to exemplify phenomenological concepts of time in the remainder of this paper. The hyperlink narrative’s dissolution of continuous time is not arrived at because of the affordances of digital media technology that Lynch had at his disposal and used to that extent for the first time. [2]  In effect, the transgressive, “excessive,” post-cinematic screen aesthetics in Inland Empire are not solely enabled by digital technology (Jerslev, 2021). But it has multiplied in this film, in which time implodes within the diegesis simultaneously with the constitution of space as a web of intertwined and overlapping screens and scenes.

Inland Empire is the story of the actress Nikki Grace, who lands the leading role as Susan (Sue) Blue in what turns out to be a remake of an unfinished Polish film concerning murder, jealousy, and love. The leading stars of the original Polish film were murdered during shooting, and the new film seems to have inherited this curse. The set is haunted, and Nikki appears to gradually lose track of reality as well as the ability to distinguish between herself and her role as Susan Blue in the film, between the new film and (her fantasy of) the original Polish film. She moves between different characters and worlds, each with its own atmosphere and mise-en-scène. Altogether, they compose a barely unified collection of temporal and spatial fragments: the original Polish film; the original Polish film featuring Nikki; the American production of the film On High in Blue Tomorrows (on- and off-screen). Moreover, there are human beings dressed in ordinary clothes but looking like rabbits who are performing scenes in what seems to be a sitcom—so the presence of a laugh track and the generic sitcom mise-en-scène and acting towards the audience suggests—even though the exact scale is hard to figure out as the stage seems the size of a doll’s house. In addition, there is (perhaps) a kind of story about Polish-American prostitutes. At one point, they perform a dance and lip-sync act to Little Eva’s 1960s hit song “Locomotion,” after which they disappear as if by magic, like in a silent cinema trick film. Or they vanish following an imaginary click on another link, which opens a new window to another world made possible by some invisible webmaster’s construction of a site. Finally, there is Nikki’s Hollywood mansion, where she lives with her possessive husband and where she is visited by a strange woman who speaks obsessively about living in a discontinuous time in which consequences nevertheless follow actions:

I can’t seem to remember if it’s today, two days from now or yesterday. I suppose if it was 9:45, I’d think it was after midnight! For instance, if today was tomorrow, you wouldn’t even remember that you owed on an unpaid bill. Actions do have consequences. And yet, there is the magic. If it was tomorrow, you would be sitting over there.

Later in the film, a woman whom Nikki meets in one of the rooms she has entered or re-entered through some virtual (invisible) or real passage (a door) in either the American or the unfinished Polish film repeats the words regarding owing on an unpaid bill. Some scholars, among them Jerslev, argue that this might suggest that the film takes place in a split second, in the twisted mind of the strange woman who apparently knows more about Nikki's future than Nikki herself. This proposal might be supported with reference to a subjective shot of the woman's finger, which points towards an empty sofa in Nikki's salon after her last remark about the confusion of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. "Can you see it?" she asks Nikki. When Nikki turns her head, a POV shot shows her sitting “over there,” on the sofa, together with two girlfriends.

We return to Nikki’s mansion by the end of the film and the wide-angle shot of the strange woman and the following shot of Nikki who turns her head and looks “over there,” in the direction of the strange woman’s pointing finger, is repeated. However, what Nikki sees at this point in time is herself sitting alone in a formal and peaceful pose (unlike in the earlier scene in which she was chatting with her girlfriends and received the message that she had landed the part in the film). It may therefore also be possible to understand the film as Nikki’s stream of consciousness, her imagination of a journey towards a more self-reliant and confident person, released from her entrapment in an endless repetition of unhomely spaces. Perhaps the film illustrates the change she imagines for herself in the split second in which she turns her head in the direction of the sofa and sees first herself chatting with her girlfriends and then seemingly relaxed, clad in an informal light blue dress. Or maybe the film is a staging of a fantasy of Nikki’s nightmarish and gradually more releasing journey towards selfhood by a disembodied and non-diegetic narrator.

The screen spaces are enigmatic presentations of worlds and purveyors of atmospheres. The screens in Inland Empire are either transparent or invisible frames—Nikki looks at herself within the same space frame, for instance, or a change of screen is subtly marked by a change in image texture. Moreover, there are monitors for displaying surveillance images (recorded and/or transmitted in real time), television screens, or the screen in a cinema, which is at once a “silver screen” and a surface that displays in real time what takes place in front of it. As differences between planes of real and virtual are blurred and the origins of both recorded and screened space are continually rendered obscure, the film creates a strong sense of temporal simultaneity. Yet, at the same time, occurrences in different screen spaces seemingly unfold in keeping with different temporalities. The mirror logic in the mise en abyme figure (of which there are a few in the film) seems in Inland Empire to be replaced by a fragmented “desktop aesthetics” without the mise en abyme’s obvious formal symmetry. So, in Inland Empire, time and space merge and collapse into a confusing blending of the “real” and the “screened.” Just as significantly, the many projections in the film point to Inland Empire itself as a digital screen.

As noted by Jerslev, David Rodowick advances the concept of “digital event” for “the particular characteristics and affordances of digital film in his discussion of (the disappearance of) filmic specificity in the age of digital media” (Jerslev, 2021). As a metaphor, the concept addresses what Rodowick regards as one of the characteristics of digital cinema as a medium, its lack of temporality. Digital film confers upon him a sense of “time lost,” caused by the lack of “analogue film’s indexical inscription of time, its traces of the past. Rodowick therefore proposes that we speak of a different ontology as regards digital film, characterized by an increased attention to the present and to the control of information” (Jerslev, 2021).

The digital event is a useful metaphor not only for the way the diegesis continuously collapses in Lynch's film but also for its capture aesthetic, the way single shots give the impression of being cut-and-pasted from different (Lynchian) image data archives. An example is the cross-cutting between Nikki and the strange woman (named First Visitor in the end credits) who comes to visit at the beginning of the film.

In that scene, Nikki’s face is shot in close-up and framed symmetrically, whereas the woman’s face is shown in a skewed ultra-close-up that cuts off the upper part of her hair. The slightly distorted wide-screen ultra-close-ups of the strange woman’s face and the harsh light that comes from a window in the background give the impression that the woman’s face has been digitally inserted into the space from somewhere else. Therefore, time dissociates from space and becomes distorted too—just like the woman apparently knows something that has not yet happened. The woman is not firmly anchored in space either. After she has told Nikki that she has definitely landed the part, a second of the shot seems to have been deleted. Accordingly, the woman’s speech collapses, as if she were an automaton stalled for a fragment of time, or some data had been lost by the pasting of her face into the scene. Nikki observes this ultra-short breakdown, but then the woman resumes, and the uncanny conversation goes on.

We repeatedly get the impression that we are not only looking into worlds through the bewildered eyes of Nikki, (one of) her film character(s), or an omniscient disembodied film narrator. We are looking at recordings of past events or transmissions of real-time events projected onto a surface or displayed on a monitor. The film’s layering of different points of view and the repeated use of wide-angle long shots of rooms and wide-angle close-ups of faces create a strong sense of surveillance, as if the images were procured by different sorts of digital image technology, each of which was intended for automated capture. Shifting image textures emphasize the feeling that the film shifts constantly between diegetic on-screen and off-screen spaces, between pre-recorded screenings and real-time projections, between screenings and some kind of real. And because past, present, and future are mixed and create a confusing simultaneity, the difference between projections of stored data and real-time transmission is blurred too.

The third type of screen, replacing dynamic screens (digital as well as analogue), the digital screen of real time, includes interfaces/screens of real-time transmissions such as Zoom, the smartphone, live video, or the screening of real-time surveillance footage on a reality show or in a control room (Jerslev, 2012). When cinema uses the screen of real time, it thus invokes what Jerslev interestingly terms a new “rhetoric of temporal indexicality” in which indexicality resides not in photography’s arrested having-been-there-ness but in live-now-ness (Jerslev, 2012). She argues there was a movement from the indexical trace to indexical live-ness: fiction films like The Truman Show constructed rhetorically one of the specificities of early reality television programs, i.e., a truth claim based on the impossibility of manipulating real-time transmitted images.

Inland Empire is, in one regard, a suitable example of the concept of surveillance narration and filmic “diegeticized surveillant omniscience" (Jerslev, 2012). However, the construction of time and point of view in Lynch’s film is more ambitious and more complicated than is the mere spectacle of (simulated) real time. Inland Empire is constructed along a structure of clashes and blurring of boundaries between different visual regimes and screened times, in which it is difficult to locate a diegetic present or a primary focalization—whether we look at a screen of real-time transmission, a screen of projected film, or a screen that projects surreptitious observations. As Jerslev observes elsewhere, in Inland Empire,

The visual field is both expanded and fragmented by the ubiquity of screens. The perspectival framing and focalization in photographic media multiply and disintegrate in the film, which makes questions concerning the what, when, and where harder and harder to answer as the film moves along. The framing is at times invisible. At other times, camera angles, short passages of slow motion or stop motion, a shift from black and white to colour, a shift in focalization and the sharpness of the image surface, or the sudden exposure of the digital image’s pixels draw attention to the images as recorded projections that were captured by someone and projected from somewhere—for instance a control booth— within some diegetic world (Jerslev, 2012).

Time and space cease to be narratively connected. Nikki may move through a passage from one world to another and one screen to another. Temporally, she can move from the present to the past and back again, or she can move without time moving along. As she tells her confused male co-star Devon Burke at one point, when her on-screen and off-screen characters start blending, “[i]t’s a story that happened yesterday, but I know it’s tomorrow.” There is no distinguishable yesterday and tomorrow, no precisely localized here and now, there and then. The film instead provides a sense that the audience is being directed, precisely at random, to new links on a website and entering yet another world.

Inland Empire is a work of digital film art, strongly marked by Lynch's experiments with the PD-150 camera and the aesthetic possibilities in this camera’s lack of technological sophistication (Jerslev, 2021). Inland Empire meditates on what could be called a new condition of the mediated real: the lack of differentiation between the screening of the world and the screened world, the substitution of single for multiple overlapping perspectives in the “post-perspectival era” (Jerslev, 2012). It also makes a case for new tools of cultural navigation and other perceptual capabilities. Finally, it describes subjectivity as an ephemeral, unstable condition.

The construction of a “digital uncanny” (Jerslev, 2021) in Inland Empire resides in the radically fragmented structure and the dissolution of time and space. Inland Empire is a thrillingly enigmatic and frightening vision of a multilayered world of screened realities, in which perspective changes constantly and in which space is unsettled and time folds in upon itself. As in many other Lynch films, the construction of worlds to enter and suspension of hierarchy and perspective are accompanied by uneasiness and an uncanny sense of lost control (Paraskeva, 2012). Inland Empire’s screen aesthetics emphasize surface and image as digital events while communicating a fragmented story about the confusion of present and past, and of a woman, at once frightened and determined, wandering in and out of David Lynch’s (screen) worlds.

How Time Im-passes from Heidegger to Lynch

Inland Empire explodes the rules of prefiguration […] since here time present is also time past and time to come. Through its slippery use of time, Inland Empire offers the possibility of a specific experience—a simulacrum of the experience David Lynch undergoes as a creator (Nochimson, 2007).

Departing slightly from the film studies approach to understanding Inland Empire, while keeping the tools I have displayed to think about time from both film studies and phenomenological perspectives, I will now use scenes from the film to illustrate representations of the orchestration of time.

The ring composition of the film introduces the instantaneity of time by means of symmetry. The scene at the end of the film which symmetrically calls back the scene at the beginning when the strange woman asks Nikki to look at the sofa across the room, pointing at it, as to see herself (Nikki) “sitting over there,” does not elicit “the feeling that time may not really have passed at all,” as some commentators of Inland Empire have suggested (Barney, 2009), but rather the feeling that time extended in a blink of an eye—a split second—that was long enough for Nikki to see herself in the sofa across the room, having got the role in the remake of the cursed Polish film.

The only dimension of time that appears to be real is the transtemporal present, what Heidegger labels praesens, that is, the instant, Augenblick, literally, the blink of the eye, which “is more original than the now for the reason that the instant is a mode of the pre-sent, of the enpresenting of something, which can express itself with the saying of ‘now’” (Wolfson, 2021). In that Augenblick, time has instantly passed, and Nikki has presently completed her journey before its commencement.

Similarly, the story about Polish-American prostitutes, who at one point perform a dance act to Little Eva’s 1960s hit song “Locomotion” in front of Nikki after which they disappear as if by magic—perhaps, as discussed in the previous section, as the result of some invisible webmaster’s imaginary click on another link, which opened a new window to another world—can be interpreted as a form of play with Aristotle’s understanding of the “now.”

In Physics, Aristotle posits that the “now” corresponds to the body that is carried along, as time corresponds to the motion. For it is by means of the body that is carried along that we become aware of the before and after in the motion, and if we regard these as countable, we get the "now". Hence, in these also the "now" as substratum remains the same (for it is what is before and after in movement), but its being is different; for it is in so far as the before and after is that we get the "now". This is what is most knowable; for motion is known because of that which is moved, locomotion because of that which is carried. For what is carried is a "this", the movement is not. Thus the "now" in one sense is always the same, in another it is not the same; for this is true also of what is carried.^[3]

The dance act (literally locomotion to the song "Locomotion") is carried until it no longer is, in the blink of an eye. One moment, the girls are dancing; the other, they are no longer in the room. In this scene, the Aristotelian "now" is clearly demarcated by visual "before" and "after" the L/locomotion, as "now" that is the same insofar as it is not the same before and after in movement.

As Elliot R. Wolfson offers to grasp the concept of time in terms of linear circularity or circular linearity by close examination of the understanding of time in Jewish religiosity, “the paradoxical depiction of time as an extending line that rotates like a sphere or as a rotating sphere that extends like a line” (Wolfson, 2021) may well be exposed in the dialogue as well as the unfolding of the events of Inland Empire. The film’s adoption of nonlinear time—that is, the film’s refusal of Martin Heidegger’s understanding of “ordinary concept of time” (“time show[ing] itself as a sequence of ‘nows’ which are constantly ‘present-at-hand,’ simultaneously passing away and coming along”) (Romano, 2014) or Aristotle’s countable time, a unidimensional “flowing,” time as “remaining,” as “passing” from the future to the present and from the present to the past, the future “becoming” present and the present “becoming,” in turn, past—enables a circular-linear interpretation of its structure.

The reversibility of the film’s timeline, consequently, does not imply uroboric closure at either terminus but rather an ever-changing flux that destabilizes a palindromic succession proceeding uniformly from start to finish and inversely from finish to start, what Wolfson describes as

The heterogeneity of the homogeneity of the hermeneutic condition sanction[ing] the uncovering of singularity within that which repeats, the novelty within reiteration, the reoccurrence of the unvarying in which the unvarying is nothing but the reoccurrence of variation. The interval of the temporal moment—the spatial hiatus wherein sameness and difference are juxtaposed in the sameness of the difference of their sameness—incarnates the present recognition of the future remembered in anticipation of the reproduction of the past (Wolfson, 2021).

In a passage from On the Way to Language, Heidegger articulates his disagreement with the assumption that a circular movement is inferior, highlighting the circular fashion of a movement that is restored to where it has never been, a circle that is open on both ends. Evoking somewhat of a leap back to where we are, the significant contribution of Heidegger is that we go back to actually where we have not been.

We must first turn, turn back to where we are in reality already staying. The abiding turn, back to where we already are, is infinitely harder than are hasty excursions to places where we are not yet and never will be… To turn back to where we are (in reality) already staying: that is how we must walk along the way of thinking which now becomes necessary (Heidegger, 1982).

For Heidegger, each moment is a compresence of the three ecstases of time. In virtue of that, he tries to dislodge the linear understanding of time. Implied in the conception of a circular linearity is the understanding of time wherein repetition and novelty are not oppositions.

Each interpretative gesture is a reenactment of the revelatory experience, albeit from its own unique vantage point, each moment a novel replication of the past. Repetition and novelty, accordingly, are not antinomical; what recurs is precisely what has been that which will recur as what has never been (Wolfson, 2021).

For Heidegger, time is intertwined with Dasein (the authentic way of the human being). This “authentic temporality” is the temporality of a reversible timeline, in which the end is anteceded to the beginning that is consequent to the end. Authentic time is in effect related to being-toward-death (Sein zum Tode), a being futural, a possibility of claiming or appropriating one’s futurity, which is a running ahead to the past in the present. Being-toward-death is thus a way of performing the Heideggerian notion of the equiprimordiality of the three ecstases of time “as opposed to the accumulation and sequence of allegedly disjointed atomized units,^[4] a portrayal that entails the spatialization of time” (Wolfson, 2021). In his understanding of the compresence of the three temporal ecstases (having-been (past), present, and what is to come (future) in Being and Time), the future is not “later” than the past; the past is not “earlier” than the present. Entailed by this assumption is that each moment is a compresence of the three ecstases, dislodging the linear understanding of time.

In Heidegger’s paradox of temporal reversibility, the running ahead to one’s past is said to allow for one to confront the extreme possibility that stands before oneself in irrefutable certainty and utter indeterminacy. Running ahead of one's own past is the authentic and singular future of one's own Dasein. In running ahead, Dasein is its future; in this being futural, Dasein comes back to its past and present. As being futural gives time, Dasein, conceived in its most extreme possibility (äußersten Möglichkeit) of Being, is time itself (Wolfson, 2021). The plot of Inland Empire consists mainly of a visual representation of Nikki Grace running ahead her own past, a running ahead that is authentic to her singular future as foretold by the strange woman. In this being futural, she visibly comes back (through the film’s scenes) to her past and present; as being futural gives time, Nikki, epitomizing the possibility of Being, is time herself, not in time.

The past to which Nikki runs ahead is not a fait accompli but an open occurrence subject to constant reformulation, “it is something to which [she] can return again and again” (Heidegger, 1992). Nikki returns, in a literal fashion, to worlds she has never been to, reenacting scenes she has not yet played in. She passes through visible and invisible doors, openings, and holes, towards her past. Using a cigarette, Nikki burns a hole in her silk camisole, which is connected to a watch and a phonograph (by the superposition of the images of the cigarette burn hole, the watch, and the phonograph), allowing her to “manipulat[e] time by displaying images cinematically,” (Rourke, 2016) that is, enabling her to continue her journey.

In Heidegger’s ontology of time, time becomes temporal as a consequence of each individual human being running ahead to its past (Heidegger, 1992). In identifying Dasein’s ownmost possibility of being as being-toward-death, we can see that Dasein comports the sense of futurity that is the elemental nature of time; regarding Dasein, we can say it is in time inasmuch as time is its being. Time is thus the “proper principium individuationis” (Heidegger, 1992) and, as Wolfson notes, the “paramount facet of that temporalizing principle of individuation is the future of the past that we are destined to live in the present” (Wolfson, 2021): “In being futural in running ahead, the Dasein that on average is becomes itself; in running ahead it becomes visible as this one singular uniqueness of its singular fate in the possibility of its singular past” (Heidegger, 1992).

As Inland Empire depicts authentic time—by contrast to time of everydayness (Alltäglichkeit) wherein the now of the present is the metrics by which we chronoscopically measure past and future: the past is the irretrievable no-longer-present and the future the indeterminate not-yet-present—, from the moment she is visited by the strange woman and pointed to an empty sofa across her salon, Nikki Grace visibly lives time from the futural retrieval of the past in the present, an act that constitutes the nature of Dasein as historicity (Heidegger, 1992), “that is, the enigma of history that unravels in our being historical” (Wolfson, 2021). The implicit hermeneutical assumption that again is altogether otherwise, to invoke once more the Heideggerian formulation, is made even clearer at the end of the film, when Nikki Grace is seen sitting back in the sofa she was always already meant to sit in from the time she was told an “old tale” by the strange woman. Richard Barney describes the singular moment during an interview with David Lynch, “[Nikki] says nothing, her face doesn’t change very much, but there’s a feeling of a kind of stillness that’s finally arrived, it seems. There’s such a quietness there, of course, that she hasn’t had at all in whatever various manifestations she’s had earlier on” (Barney, 2009).

After having been down anthropomorphic rabbits’ hole, through countless doors and dark passages, lost in worlds, troubled through dimensions, Nikki Grace found her way back again to the sofa she sits in at last, awaiting to transcend.

To the extent that the moment is authentically novel—an event of presence that is always in excess of being present—it is experienced as the constant resumption of what is yet to be, the return of what has never been, the vertical intervention that opens the horizontal timeline to the spherical redundancy of eternity (Wolfson, 2021).

In the authentically novel moment of “sitting over there,” as foretold by the strange woman, Nikki finally returns to what has never been, where she never previously sat, however where she sat tomorrow, as the First Visitor already knew (“If it was tomorrow, you would be sitting over there.”)

Conclusion

Through one door, one passageway, one hole, strange individuals reach different worlds that identify with the same problems as their own, only faced by different people. In Lacanian terms, the women played by Laura Dern are constantly looking to find the pass in the impasse (trouver la passe dans l’impasse).[5] The tagline for David Lynch’s Inland Empire describes the film as “a mystery” about a “woman in trouble.” This simple phrase coincides with much of what viewers see on the screen but proves less helpful than typical blurbs as a synopsis of narrative meaning. To which of the film’s female characters does it refer? Many of them are in some kind of trouble. And what among the film’s many strange features—from actors playing multiple roles to anthropomorphic rabbits—constitutes the mystery? The deviations from cinematic narrative conventions are not capricious or gratuitous in relation to the film’s content. As Brian Rourke suggests, the difficulty results from a surplus of narrative series within the sjužet, rather than an incomplete or incoherent fabula (Rourke, 2016). Mystery as missing, indeterminate, or indiscernible diegetic information features prominently in all of Lynch’s films and visual arts, regardless of genre. Solving mysteries involves finding out secrets, things hidden in space and time. Trouble, as distinguished from the identifiable threats often accompanying it, can best be understood to refer to danger and suffering exceeding the capacity of audiovisual representation or narrative signification, let alone thematic closure. Mystery and trouble together contribute to life’s surreal complexity—its strange resistance to sense. During an interview, Richard Barney records Lynch’s response to a 1990 statement by David Breskin (“Why do people want art to make sense when they accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense?”) which Lynch amended: “Life is very, very complicated, and so films should be allowed to be too” (Barney, 2009).

Tackling the problem of time from a phenomenological standpoint also involves wrestling with mystery and trouble. Multiple paradoxes about time may appear concealed, mysterious, or mysterious prima facie, and our rejection of time as linear in order to adopt the paradox of the linear circularity of time, the restoration of what is to come, can be troublesome. Using scenes and images from Inland Empire as an attempt to unveil some of these paradoxes’ mystery and illustrate time’s phenomenology, this paper also aimed to convince of the importance of film art, film as an art form with a language and an aesthetic all its own, that can be used to visually convey abstract concepts, such as time. Inland Empire conjures up its own temporal metaphors—which can be recycled for our own needs—breaking out of boundaries and moving outside of cinematographic limitations and expectations, rejecting conventional time all the while, creating a hollowed-out space to be filled by visual depictions of original temporality.

Notes

[1] Post-cinematic is a term within film studies that designates “the embedding and, therefore, transformation of film as a distinctive medium within a broader digital media ecology.” Anne Jerslev, David Lynch: Blurred Boundaries (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 120.

[2] I refer here to the use of Sony’s PD-150 camera (digital video), which provides the image surface with a lower quality than HD video, a lightweight digital camera whose particular image aesthetics can help accomplish the aesthetic idea that Lynch has turned into images and narratives and repeated again and again in interviews throughout the years—an invitation to be absorbed into other worlds of mystery and a surreal blurring of boundaries between different levels of reality, with neither more real than the other. It is thus interesting that Lynch favored the digital technique, which most closely approaches the textural aesthetics of analogue film.

[3] Aristotle, Physics IV, 219^b13-219^b34.

[4] Heidegger is here referring to Aristotle.

[5] According to Jacques Lacan, the pass is a solution to the end of analysis. This solution is oriented around separation from the objet petit a, the object of desire that can never be obtained, which in Inland Empire could be translated to the achievement of a breakthrough into a coherent wish-fulfilling fantasy in which Nikki Grace, one of the simulacra of herself, possesses freedom of movement in space and time.

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