Inland Empire: Before you watch, read this!

 There are realities we recognize, and realities in between. As we send our desperate calls, our wishes, and the cries of our hearts across the airwaves, the networks, and in our dreams, our cries pass through other worlds and are echoed by those who live there. Our suspicions and our doubts echo and play out in repetitive little games and little shows that would tell us a lot if we could see them. But we wouldn’t understand what we were seeing. It would be as nonsensical to us as talking rabbits living in apartments. The "rabbits" understand us, though. They’re very interested in what we do next.

But that reality is just an in-between space. Behind that reality, on the other side, is a world of spirits who watch us. Some are good, some are evil. Some just want to keep things in balance. They live there, but they can come here when they want to. They have work to do here. In Twin Peaks, these were the spirits who lived in the Black Lodge. In Inland Empire, their Lodge is an elegant room that seems to be decorated in a 19^th century European style. They appear in the form of elderly Polish men and women.

One of the rabbits comes here too. He hangs out in the attic of a movie theater, waiting to hear an accounting of events.

An old tale:

A little boy went out to play.
When he opened his door, he saw the world.
As he passed through the doorway, he caused a reflection. Evil was born.
Evil was born and followed the boy.

And the variation:

A little girl went out to play. Lost in the marketplace, as if half born.
Then, not through the marketplace, but through the alley behind the marketplace,
This is the way to the Palace.

This boy and girl were meant to be together. They were meant to have a child, a son, and be a family. But the girl got lost and the Shadow found her.  The Shadow becomes more real by stealing the life the boy was supposed to have. The little girl could not resist the Shadow, because he seemed to offer good fortune. Seduced away by his allure, she came under his control and remained trapped, in perpetuity.

This is the original crime, and it happened several realities and generations ago, layers deep, at the core of the reality sphere.  

The aftermath of this crime is a story that repeats again and again, across realities, and from generation to generation. It is the story of Osiris and Set. It is the story of Adam and Eve, and of Siegmund and Sieglinde. It is the story of Blue Velvet. It is the story of the Princess in the Tower.

Let us call this aftermath story AXXON N. In each version of AXXON N, the boy had to make his own way in the world. His role was to make a living and support himself and a family with a new wife, but his family life is tense and tainted by distrust.

The boy and the girl try to come together over and over again, over a series of lifetimes. Unfortunately, this takes place in the form of illicit affairs, because the girl belongs to the Shadow, and the boy is always married to someone else. The Shadow always thwarts them, and this leads to a murder, usually of the boy. The girl remains trapped, and the boy must start again in a new life.

The boy, as mentioned, is always married to another woman. Because this is not the woman he’s supposed to be with, their marriage is filled with suspicion. Just as the boy has doomed affairs with the girl, his new wife also has affairs with the person she is supposed to be with, who is also married to someone else.

In this way, the original crime, the theft of the girl from the boy, ripples outward, its effects intertwining not just the boy and the girl, but also the people attached to them, and the people attached to them, and so on.

The boy’s new wife is not aware of the role she plays, and she doesn’t know that she is there as a pawn of the Shadow. She is an innocent accessory to the original crime, through no fault of her own. But because she’s benefitted, she owes the girl a debt. But her marriage to the Boy is never a happy one. It is always filled with tension and distrust, and as the Boy struggles to find the Girl, the Shadow is watching and ready to stop him. The Shadow guides them all toward murder.

Now, the movie.

Before you watch the movie, watch the deleted scene that I have named "A Dangerous Meeting". (see Wild Assertions and Untoward Thrusts: Inland Empire: Deleted Scenes (aka Some other things that happened) (tooforwardindeed.blogspot.com) In this scene, you will see the Shadow seduce the Girl.

The boy’s new wife is the main character of Inland Empire. Her name is Nicki, and she is played by Laura Dern. Nicki is a successful actress, and is married to the Boy, who is dark and twisted and suspicious. His distrust is ingrained in him after playing out the drama again and again.

Nicki and peter live in a beautiful mansion. One day Nicki is visited by an older Polish lady, actually a fairy godmother from the spirit world who has decided that the time has come to redress the original crime and to set things right at last. The Boy can’t do it. He is helpless to do anything but lash out uselessly. The Girl can’t do it. She is trapped in the tower. But no one has ever paid attention to the New Wife. The Polish lady tells Nicki the old tale of the boy and the girl, but to Nicki it is just a riddle, for now.  She is just a side character, but through her, things can be set right.

Of course, the Shadow will never let that happen.

Nicki gets a part in an upcoming movie, but this movie is yet another iteration of AXXON N. During rehearsals and filming, Nicki becomes confused between the story in the movie and her reality.

THE BLUE SCENE

All of this seems to be leading somewhere. But, before we can get any answers to what questions have been raised so far, we arrive at what I call the Blue Scene, at which point what straightforwardness we’d had up to this point comes to an end.

In the Blue Scene, everything is dark and seems filmed through a blue lens. The film’s leads are in a bedroom having sex, “Fuckin’ for the first time”, as she breathlessly describes it. But what’s not clear is, who are they? It’s Laura Dern and Justin Theroux, but are they Nicki and Devon, the actors, having sex? If so, is it really happening or is it a scene in the movie they’re filming? If not, are they in fact the characters, Susan Blue and Billy Side? Do they think they are?

We don’t know, because she is acting bizarre and highly agitated, and talking vulgarly with a southern accent.  He’s calling her Sue. The man and woman played by Theroux and Dern are fucking like mad, but who they are and who they think they are is unknown, as is when and where they’re doing this. Nicki’s husband Peter (the Boy from the tale) is also there, unseen by them, lurking in the shadows.

The woman starts telling the man about something that “happened yesterday, but (she) knows its tomorrow”.  The man doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and seems to wish she’d shut up and just f*ck. She describes filming a scene where she went to get groceries, and parked in an alley behind the set, and saw a metal door with words written on it. She says she was flooded with a memory, and begins crying out to him, “Devon, it’s me! Nicki! It’s me!” He laughs rather insanely, and the camera takes us out of the room and down a blue hallway.

The Blue Scene is the breaking point we were waiting for, but it still raises nothing but questions. Is it real, or in Nicki’s mind? If it’s real, when does it happen? Nicki seems disconnected from time, which doesn’t help. If it’s real, does Devon know who they really are, or is he starting to get lost in his role too? Nicki says it’s their first time having sex, but as who? Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive both had similar down-the-rabbit-hole scenes where identity shifts took place, but this one is the most vague and opaque.

We then see the scene Nicki described. After the heavy, sweaty, black and blue confusion of the Blue Scene, Nicki in the sunlight is a welcome sight. Just as she described, she pulls her car into an alley behind the set, takes out a bag of groceries, and approaches a metal door. On it is written “Axxon N”.

So Nicki has found “the alley behind the marketplace”, just as the old woman described. This is the symbolic alley that the old woman said leads to the Palace. This alley leads Nicki to a house on the movie set, but when she goes in, she is transported to a different reality. 

That is the end of Act 1. 

Nicki and we the viewers find out what this new reality is together: Here, she is a poor housewife in a dingy rural town.

Also, we were told in the Old Woman's story that when the boy went out into the world, his shadow was born. When Nicki goes into "the alley behind the marketplace", a shadow of her own is also born.

This is a jarring change in tone for the movie. It’s definitely not the world in the movie script she was shooting, even though the names of the characters carry over. She has entered another iteration of the AXXON N play.  She is still unhappily married to the Boy, but his is the opposite of her life as an actress in a mansion. Now she’s a nobody in a shack.

But by crossing over into this new reality, she has escaped the fate that always comes at the end of AXXON N, which is either to be murdered, to murder someone else, or to watch your lover die. The question now is, what does she do? She doesn’t even know who she is anymore.

Here in this new reality Nicki meets the girls. The Girls are like a flock of birds, always gathered together. Like Nicki, the Girls have lived past lives. They help her view the past and see one incident in particular, with the boy and the girl and the Shadow, that seems to take place in Poland in the late 1800’s. An Axxon N story that ends in murder.

The Shadow knows that she’s not where she’s supposed to be, and begins to stalk her, sometimes with her own face.

At one point Nicki slips back into the world of the movie script she’d been shooting, an opulent world of southern mansions, pretty dresses, and sharply dressed gentlemen. This doesn’t last, though.

Nicki makes her way to a theater. She may still be the rural housewife at this point, but if so, a lot of time has passed. She is now beat up and homeless.  In an upstairs attic room, she meets Mr. K, a rabbit from the apartment dimension, but in human form. She starts to tell Mr. K about her broken family life and the strange people and events involved.

Meanwhile, the Shadow still stalks, and the Girl still waits in the tower.

.   .   .

Knowing all of this should make watching IE a better experience.

-Thomas Caniglia