Chapter 3 - ‘Disappeared where it’s real hard to disappear’: Three Ways of Getting Lost in INLAND EMPIRE

Summary

Early on in David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE (2006), Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) and Devon Berk (Justin Theroux) are beginning their first rehearsal on the set of their new film, On High in Blue Tomorrows. Also present are director Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons) and his assistant Freddie (Harry Dean Stanton). Freddie hears a noise from the soundstage, which is supposed to have been cleared of other people. Devon goes to investigate, makes chase, but eventually loses whoever it is behind a row of theatrical flats representing the house belonging to Sue Blue, Nikki's character in the film. On his return to the others, Nikki asks Devon who it was. He replies that whoever they were, they ‘disappeared where it's real hard to disappear’. It eventually transpires that what has taken place is an entanglement of reality and fiction, a metalepsis: the intruder was Sue Blue herself (or perhaps Nikki-playing-Sue, at a different point in time). Later in the film we see the intrusion from the intruder's point of view: following an arrow written shakily on a metal door below the words ‘Axxon N.’, Dern's character emerges onto the soundstage, looking – impossibly – at herself. She runs, is pursued by Devon, then opens a door in what should be merely a facade and takes refuge in a building that should not exist.

Where is it ‘real hard to disappear’? And why? These scenes in INLAND EMPIRE activate ideas of location and confusion, logic and paradox. In this chapter I propose that attempting to produce a single, wholly consistent and coherent interpretation of Lynch's film may be misguided, but that this does not imply that we should just give ourselves up to disorientation. I shall demonstrate a more fruitful approach by pursuing three different strategies for reading the film, each of which develops out of – and responds to – omissions in the previous reading. This chapter aims at interrogating the global coherence of INLAND EMPIRE and its relationship to our orientational strategies. I argue that Lynch's film only achieves coherence at the expense of completeness and can thus cohere in a number of different ways; significance will turn out to depend on our interpretive decisions.