Its dense, so dense, I'd say Lynch's most obtuse, sprawling and encompassing film since Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. It may take two or three more sittings to digest everything thrown at the screen. Its incoherence means characters, moments, plot points (ha!) still seem a little hazy at the moment, so I apologise if the following is, well, junk frankly.<br /><br />When approaching a Lynch work, to avoid finding oneself completely lost, it is often helpful to hunt out the emotional anchor - the 'reality' border which frames our subsequent trip into the disturbed mental wasteland.<br /><br />In Eraserhead, Henry's fear of commitment and fatherhood. In Blue Velvet, Jeffrey's sexual awakening. In Lost Highway, Fred's jealousy and inferiority regarding his wife. In The Straight Story, Alvin's guilt over the deaths of his grandchildren. In Mulholland Drive, Diane's sense of rejection and betrayal.<br /><br />With these rather ordinary strands of guilt, fear and failure, Lynch relocates to his absurdist, cineliterate dreamscapes - chaotic, multi-layered palimpsests of creaky genres and deeply personal insecurities, sexy red curtains and frazzled electrical currents.<br /><br />We arrive at Inland Empire.<br /><br />I'm sorry, but I can't see Dern's character as being anything other than a figment, a fragment even, of the hotel room-bound Polish girl's nervous breakdown.<br /><br />The Pole lives in a run-down flat with a husband who is a distant, mean man. Her marriage is disintegrating, plagued by infidelity, jealousy, the conception of a child that does not belong to him. She feels degraded, guilty, trapped, terrified by impending child birth and the world the baby is entering.<br /><br />She retreats, collapses into herself, her mind splinters and starts to conflate all number of separate realities, pre-conceptions, clichés, imaginary situations. She dreams of a Hollywood actress - Dern - whose life slowly, disturbingly is pulled towards her own. Within that dream of Dern, we have two, perhaps three, separate versions of Dern's own reality - as a rich, lonely actress in a large house, as the character she is playing in the 'cursed' remake, as a literal substitute for the Polish girl. It's the Great American Cinematic Obsession - the construction of identity.<br /><br />Like Mulholland Drive, Lynch is stuck on the cultural devastation wreaked by Hollywood. Writing about the influence of film on societal attitudes towards violence in his seminal history of Tinseltown, The Whole Equation, David Thompson argues that cinema's impact on our attitudes to love and sexuality has been far more devastating and expansive.<br /><br />Is this what Lynch is getting at? That the very nature of our watching film - that collective, passive, erotic musing in the dark - has broken our notions of beauty, fidelity and desire. The messed-up philandering Polish girl withdraws into the shadows of rabbit sitcoms, trashy celeb chat-shows, noirish murder-mysteries and Southern romances. She becomes a catatonic spectator staring at a fuzzy TV screen.<br /><br />The projector's shaft of light that threateningly tears through the opening frames of the film is a definite omen. Hollywood here is not the Dream Machine, it is a sinister exploitative cage, populated by gangsters, hobos and, in an obvious link to the nature of acting, prostitutes.<br /><br />But yet, there is an escape.... that epiphanic closing sequence where Dern finishes the shoot, breaks away from the director and sees herself on screen - now outside the movie - is followed by her killing the sinister phantom and embracing the tearful Polish girl... its a serene, goose-pimply moment of release and self-discovery. The Pole's mental surrogate finally finding an escape route, bursting out of the rabbit hole, peering at the daylight. The horror is over.<br /><br />Oh, one final thing, Dern's performance is something else. DV lends itself well to the raw immediacy of the extreme close-ups Lynch favours here and Dern just plunges herself into the camera's emotional intrusion. It's like someone's excised the first few layers of her face with a scalpel and left the audience to soak in this teeming deformed mass of expression, tic and utter abandon.<br /><br />Do not, under any circumstances, miss this.