Inland Empire
With Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux.
US, 2006, DCP, color, 180 min.
English and Polish with English subtitles.
DCP source: Janus Films
The second part of Melissa Anderson's visit features her new book Inland Empire (Fireflies Press, 2021) which will be on sale before the screening of the film.
Signed copies of Inland Empire will be available before the screening or books can be signed by Melissa Anderson afterward.
Melissa Anderson’s freshly published, compact ode to David Lynch’s psychological hall of multidimensional mirrors is as much a ballad for the film’s adroit star, Laura Dern. “What Dern does with her ectomorphic body, her elastic face, her accented speech,” Anderson asserts, “is indispensable to keeping the spectator tethered, if not held rapt, to the psychic entropy of Lynch’s film.” Likewise, her cogent essay is a gripping page turner that connects twisting, tangential threads around her central preoccupation while pondering existential, essential questions about the actors and the authors of so many mesmerizing images and stories produced by and behind the Hollywood dream machine. She eloquently diagrams how personas, characters and people cannily and uncannily intersect in the Lynchian universe and beyond. – Brittany Gravely