[atari 2600]

Originally Posted by me

"There simply has to be some kind of narrative content with tendrils to some at least some notion of linear consciousness in film or at the very least there has to be resonant unconscious non-linearity that is relevant to unconscious archetypes that in their own way give content to the piece. If these forces of motion are not present, then a film turns into a big turd that just sits there"

Originally Posted by The Usher

Why? What do you mean it turns into a big turd? Why do you have to have meaning? Surely this is just a prescribed necessity that Hollywood demands.

Life (& Death) demands meaning. Film is a slice-of-life. It cannot help but be that (even in a fantasy film.)
If, as an artist, you want to represent life in more non-objective ways then there's modern visual art for that, or you can truly make visionary cinema that rewrites the language. In Zen, "this" is "that," but with Inland Empire, it is a case of "this" isn't "that." Haha...It's no Joycean portrait-of-absurdity with postmodern ironically romantic pathos. It's no visual Camus; it's just utter cack.
Warhol deftly managed to combine the two (film and modern visual art, the objective and the non-objective) by keeping the camera static and interference absolutely minimal. His remarkably Duchampian instincts and choice of subjects is what made his early non-conventional films important. Andy's films are about archetypes and the turd that lays there in Warhol is truly fertilizer for the imagination.

Originally Posted by me

at the very least there has to be a resonant unconscious non-linearity that is relevant to unconscious archetypes that in their own way give content to the piece.

Inland Empire seems to be little more than a cut-up of failed digital shorts and travelogue footage (unlike Rabbits, he got out of the house) with a constant eye out for the weird. Lynch mistankenly assumes that since the camera moves (also unlike Rabbits (which is, by the way, included) and since there's phantasmagoria with the sound and editing, that the project won't lay there like a turd when viewed by audiences.

It's a shame that Lynch feels like he has to try and be some sort of American version of a surrealist filmmaker to secure his place among directors when his star shone so brightly early in his career.