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Far Out Magazine, 2025
To anyone who tries to find answers to Inland Empire, you might be met with maddeningly open-ended questions and endless confusion, left in a daze as the credits roll alongside Nina Simone’s ‘Sinnerman’ while you stare open-mouthed at the screen.
It’s the kind of film-watching experience that will leave you questioning everything you just saw, scrambling to connect threads between loosely related imagery that surely unveils something just outside your grasp. You feel stupid and utterly useless, clutching at straws in your mind as you attempt to piece together a puzzle that perhaps has no clear picture. This is all part of the fun when watching a David Lynch film, and while it’s a lesson I have now learnt, I recently came to the rather life-changing conclusion that I have finally achieved the impossible, and cracked my interpretation of Inland Empire.
After its release in 2006, the film was met with a frenzy of bewildered watchers who, like many others, became lost in the maze of tangled timelines and cryptic images. The buzz around it felt like a fever dream itself, with Lynch sitting next to a cow on Hollywood Boulevard in honour of Laura Dern’s mesmerising performance and the likes of Steven Spielberg chiming in about his interpretation of the plot, with many differing opinions on its hidden meaning. The most popular review for the film on Letterboxd is a lone question mark, which perhaps encapsulates the sheer perplexity that it provokes for many.
But while it is certainly one to mull over, a recent viewing of the film allowed me to view it in a new light, shedding some of my previous frustrations as I came to understand it in a way that made sense to me, which is perhaps the ultimate catharsis when watching Lynch’s work.
The story follows a Hollywood actress who stars in the screen adaptation of a once-abandoned Polish play, with the lines between reality and fiction beginning to blur as she loses herself in the role. It’s one of the most experimental and nonsensical from Lynch’s repertoire, which might be hard to imagine given that most of his films reside within a similar realm. It begins in a way that feels almost accessible, with the lead actors, Nikki and Devon, beginning the production of the film and embarking on the usual challenges that come with a new creation.
However, it soon becomes plagued by the usual markings of the director’s surrealist tone, although this time, it is tainted with something that feels more akin to horror, shot on a grainy DSR camera with uncomfortably close and skewed angles that make the whole thing feel off-kilter. While the first 30 minutes follow a linear pattern, it is a brief structural anomaly within the context of the entire film, which soon descends into a blur of moments where real life becomes indiscernible from the lives of the characters played by the actors, and characters we have never met.
Everything bleeds into one mutant organism, leaving us unsure as to which moments on screen are part of a constructed reality or whether a new truth has evolved off-screen, merging with Nikki’s performance and sprouting a new web of narratives. You start to wonder whether anything you’re seeing is real or if it is all a simulation happening in an imagined story realm, perhaps reflecting the process of fleshing out a character and becoming lost in their experiences as you try to understand them more deeply.
But while there are many interpretations of Lynch’s work, and there is no definitive answer or neat bow to tie up any of his puzzles, I found myself being drawn to one idea that made the most sense to me.
The director has often concerned himself with themes relating to Hollywood and female pain, with the dark side of the film industry being explored through women who are consumed and exploited by the monolith until they have nothing left to give. We see this in Inland Empire through Nikki’s descent into madness, despair and anger, losing herself completely in the role as she desperately tries to prove her worth, and eerily reflecting the plight of womanhood itself.
At the beginning of the film, we learn that Nikki is married to a very wealthy man, living in a grand house that is ornately and rather excessively decorated. Something feels off, because while she is successful in her own right, she makes allusions to her husband’s possessive and controlling nature, something that intensifies her desire to succeed in what will be her most challenging role yet, perhaps longing to be thought of as equally accomplished next to someone who thinks of her as a trophy wife.
As a result, she commits every fibre of her being to this performance, eventually destroying herself entirely as she becomes another woman consumed by the Hollywood machine and the quest to be seen. Throughout our time in Nikki’s multiple fractured realities, we see other women who have suffered the same plight, some who playfully lament over their experiences and others who are completely broken by them, existing as shells of people who gave everything to the industry, never appreciated and lost in history after doing so.
While some of them find their way back to the truth, others become lost in this cacophony of alternate realities. Your own truth and identity becomes obsolete, with Lynch commenting both on how women are seen as disposable to Hollywood and how many are forced to play an endless list of parts that become indistinguishable from our true selves in an attempt to prove our worth, either making or breaking us.
Many of us are constantly performing, but some of us become lost in our performances forever, and all women are trying to escape this narrative, whether aware of it or not. Through Lynch’s terrifying dreamscape, one full of grotesque and horrific imagery, I see the idea that there is no separation between our personal memories and those of other women—it all belongs to all of us and is equally real. They all exist simultaneously in our own minds, just in different planes of existence, and the act of performing breaks down these walls and allows some to travel between worlds, even if it destroys you in the process.
As the credits roll, we see all the women who have been sprinkled throughout the story, dancing to Nina Simone together in one big room as wild animals roam free around them. All of them are forced to perform in some way, and it either reaffirms who they truly are or unmoors them completely, leaving all trapped in a maze of collective memories in which you are unable to discern yours from those of other people. But this is the enigma of womanhood itself: it can be a hellish underworld or a beautiful room where everyone is united in their pain and dancing to the same tune, feeling our way through the darkness together, even when it doesn’t make sense.