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INLAND EMPIRE universe in which every physically possible event has happened. There c TER u should be MW universes where the dinosaurs dominate the planet ... Even as you read this sentence your universe may be fragmenting into a INLAND EMPIRE: number of branches too large to count. THE BEGINNINGS OF APPENDIX II GREAT THINGS Actress Nildci Grace (Laura Dern) isn't sure what's going on or even who she is. She has the role she's been hoping for in a new film, On High in But many primal atoms in many ways moving through infinite time Blue Tomorrows, yet at the same time, she's more confused and fright­ up to the present, ened than she has ever been. But is that a bad thing? The director of Blue Clashing among themselves and carried by their own weight Tomorrows, Kingsley Stewart Ueremyirons) is certain of what he's doing, as Have come together every possible way, he begins to taclde a script blueprint, for which he sees himself as a kind Tried every combination that could be made of construction boss who faces the task of building the film from script And so advancing through vast lengths of time, specifications with the help of a crew of actors and technical personnel. Exploring every union and motion, Just like in the "malting of. ..." featurettes so prevalent on DVDs. But is At length, those of them came together that a good thing? In Lynch's portrayal of the Hollywood marketplace in Which by a sudden conjunction interfuse Inland Empire, Lynchian confusion trumps certainty. Nikki complicates Often became the beginnings of great things-[italics mine] Stewart's plans-for the better. Inside the bound horizons of Stewart's Of earth and sea and sky and living creations. busy marketplace activity, when Nildci finds that something boundless is LUCRETIUS, ON THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE, breaking into her life as an actress and a woman, the ensuing uncertainty TRANSLATED BY SIR RONALD MELVILLE changes everything on the studio soundstage, inexorably flooding Blue Tomorrows with a depth and power beyond Stewart's wildest expectations. [A]t every occasion where a quantum event has more than one outcome Acounterforce on the limitations of Stewart's worlcing style, Nildci im­ (e.g., when an electron may strike one atom or another), the universe ports into the production of Blue Tomorrows a spontaneous and uncertain splits. We have one universe where the electron hits atom A, another process resembling the spectacle of atoms described above in the quota­ where it hits atom B, and so on for all of the possible outcomes .... a new tion from Lucretius, a Roman scientific philosopher who lived roughly universe for each and every potential outcome. This is the Many Worlds between 99 and 55 BC. Lucretius was an early exponent-without benefit (MW) interpretation. From the MW viewpoint, the universe is like a tree of modern laboratory equipment and the lmowledge accumulated in the that branches and re-branches into myriads of new sub-branches with intervening history of scientific thought-of the uncertainty principle. every passing picosecond. And each of these new branch universes has In his masterwork, On The Nature of the Universe, he essentially described a slightly different sub-atomic "history." Because an observer happens an uncertain cosmos in which, at unpredictable times in unpredictable to have followed one particular path through the diverging branches of places, "things swerve." This framework of thought was eclipsed fur many this Universe-Tree, he never perceives the splitting. Instead he interprets centuries by the absolute ideas of Newtonian physics, but the tide has now the resolution of the myriad of possibilities into one particular outcome turned. The philosophical leap from Lucretius to Heisenberg is not a big as a Copenhagen-style collapse [decreation] .... There should be a MW one, so the parallel I draw here between Lucretius and what happens to Ni!dd in Inland Empire is continuous with my argument that Lynch has 122 123 DAVID LYNCH SWERVES INLAND EMPIRE drawn on intuitions resembling those of modern physics for his portrayal the marketplace. What happens to Nildd is much more non-local. Lynch of matter in his second-stage films. Lynch has not read Lucretius recently, would be more likely to describe her experience as a revelation of what if at all. Nevertheless, as we shall see below, Lucretius, as an ancestor of Blue Tomorrows always was, though initially blocked by false appearances. present-day quantum physicists, is helpful for illuminating the very com­ However, as stunning as Nikld's unexpected triumph is in her role plex (and, to many, elusive) narrative structure ofinland Empire. in Blue Tomorrows, the more central issue for Inland Empire is her growth Director Kingsley Stewart has a marketplace approach to filmmaldng as a human being. With the freedom that Nildd gains from her creative that resembles assembling prefabricated furniture-and Newton's ideas process comes not only artistic liberation from the shallowness that Blue about how time and space work. Not much of a story. The narrative gets its Tomorrows manifested when Kingsley Stewart began shooting the film, but juice when Nikld Grace, a faded though still young Hollywood star and at also a release from the constraints of a stifling marriage to a domineering first a compliant member of his team, separates herself from the market­ husband, and the petty and nasty influences of the industry around her. place that Stewart represents. In the words ofLucretius, she is buffeted by And there is more: freedom also brings a responsibility to others and a the "many primal atoms" of her situation that "clash among themselves." capacity for helping them. Nildd's story is the opposite of Fred Madison's. They "by a sudden conjunction interfuse" and become "the beginnings As he becomes less and less free, he becomes less and less his brother's of great things." Her story is like the films we have just discussed in that keeper; a murderer in fact. Nildd's freedom, by contrast, enables her to it plays with uncertainty, but it is unlike the tales of Fred Madison in Lost help a needy character known as the Lost Girl (Karolina Gruszka) and lifts Highway and Betty Elms in Mulholland Dr., because it does not culminate her into a generous, ascending cycle of being. in lives drained of joy and love by the power of the marketplace. Nor, al­ Of course, Lynch is not just talldng about filmmaldng. Filmmaldng though it has a harmonious conclusion like The Straight Story, is it like that is one of the aspects of human endeavor that he knows best and he fo­ film. Alvin imposes the form of his journey. Nikld's more extensive nar­ cuses on it, but he believes that all work participates equally in the same rative is not under her control. Instead, the marketplace becomes a pos­ process by which art is created, and he accordingly uses the specifics of sible launch pad for the "beginnings ofgreat things" because Nildd Grace the creation of Blue Tomorrows to talk about the enterprise of doing and allows herself to benefit from the energies that sweep her up and move living, what it means to be fully and vibrantly alive1 As he shows us the her past the Hollywood culture that Stewart has bought into. Through way that Nildd, for reasons that can never be fully !mown, surrenders to Nildci's story, Lynch revitalizes the film-about-maldng-films genre as he the larger forces around her, he makes her experience a model for letting invents numerous ways of depicting with vivacity and intensity why and go of the narrow limits set by the most constricting aspects of our society how filmmaldng at its best is the marriage of Hollywood technology and that foreclose our full potential as people. I make a distinction here be­ the energies of uncertainty. tween society as a whole and its most constricting aspects because, after When Nildd, her co-star Devon Berk (Justin Theroux), and Stewart be­ all, Lynch is also part of our society, the part that moves toward openness gin to work, the image of the script they are about to bring to life fills and hope. Moreover, his Hollywood in this film is a place of opportunity the screen, conveying a sense ofits dominance. But it is a false sense. The for those who can avail themselves of it. Meaningful stories can be told paper script turns out to be as apocryphal as its author, one Lawrence in the marketplace, if the Stewarts of the mass culture industry do not Ashton, a ghostlike fiction who never appears. (Nor does anyone ever have their way completely. Meaningful life can be lived if, like Nikld, we speak of him.) Rather, Blue Tomorrows evolves dynamically in ways that have the courage to let it happen. are beyond the conscious will of the creative team, as material hidden Non-locality permeates Lynch's vocabulary for depicting Nildd's brave in the depths of its story churns up to the surface. Of all the people in­ journey; it is a concept we have discussed before, but for easier applica­ volved with the film-within-the-film, it is Nildd Grace who most fully rides tion ofthe non-local phenomenon of entanglement to Inland Empire, I will the wave of the story's evolution. In fact, Lynch would not use the word review its definition here. Entanglement literally occurs when physicists evolution because that implies a linear process of change endemic to observe particles involved with each other without being in direct (or even 124 125 DAVID LYNCH SWERVES INLAND EMPIRE indirect) relation to each other in a single timejspace frame.

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