"She has torn a hole into her intestine from her vagina."
When David Lynch describes where the inspiration for the Polish portion of Inland Empire came from, he tells the story of “five or six” Polish men getting out of a car in front of his property. He goes on: “They invited me over there and I asked them …, because I heard there were factories, … if they could get me into factories so that I could photograph, and if they could get me nude women at night to photograph.”
The infuriating aspect of most David Lynch interviews is the amount of subterfuge that goes into his answer to the simplest questions. Whether or not you believe in transcendental meditation is secondary to the fact that David Lynch sells his life as if it were actually a David Lynch film and vice versa. Why are there suddenly five or six Polish men piling out of a car in front of Laura Dern’s house? David Lynch wants you to believe it’s because shit like this happens all the time.
And, in a certain light, I see what he means. Sure, a living room full of Russian whores doing the locomotion is probably a foreign experience to most of us—but once you’ve experienced the scene (or a similar one in Blue Velvet where a buxom lady go-go dances on top of a car while Dennis Hopper beats the shit out of Kyle McLoughlin) you can’t deny the ubiquitous undercurrent of aggression that resonates in the seemingly harmless pop music: Phil Spector killed his wife, Joe Jackson beat his kids, Kurt Cobain blew his brains out, etc., etc.
Perhaps the movie is disjointed. Perhaps it is a collection of scenes that themselves bear almost no narrative consistency. The systematic element of the film, then, is on the level of the imaginary—where a kid logic of sex, violence, and sexual violence bends and distorts the desire that pushes the characters through multiple plots of deceit, adultery, and (of course) “brutal fucking murder.” The rabbits may never betray what the truth behind their repeated statement “I have a secret” is, but we can all probably hazard a guess.
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