“The ambulance guys, they say, what the fuck happened here? I say, he come to reaping what he been sowing, that’s what. They say, fucker been sowing some kinda heavy shit.”
Over the course of its three bizarro hours, INLAND EMPIRE draws a lot of attention to its mode of presentation and status as physical artifact. The film opens with a shot of a movie projector cranking up and throwing a beam of flickering light into the darkness. The camera turns, and the screen becomes our screen. This is only the first of dozens of times Lynch reminds us what exactly it is we’re looking at. The magic is that it works anyway.