By now most David Lynch fans have figured out that when he was making his most recent film he was really making at least three different films, and while it would be drastically oversimplifying matters to suggest that he created a unique soundtrack for each of them, he did use music to delineate many-a-thing in the vast kingdom known as INLAND EMPIRE. One of the first images in the film, in fact, is an old phonograph needle, grazing the surface of an album. Is Lynch hinting that we should pay special attention to the music?
Lynch's meticulous devotion to sound design is, by now, well documented. He has been writing and co-writing music for his movies ever since Eraserhead and his longtime collaboration with composer Angelo Badalamenti has been much closer than most. With INLAND EMPIRE, however, Lynch shows signs of becoming even more obsessed with the art of soundtrack. He not only wrote four of the musical pieces for the film, he made his singing debut on two of them as well. (I'm happy to report both cuts are fantastic.) Lynch also recently started his own record label, Strange World Records, and when Lynch says "strange world" in relation to music, he's not talking about an obscure Fela Kuti remix. No sir.
The first non-ambient piece of music we hear in INLAND EMPIRE is one of two sonic bookends Lynch uses in this film—a beautiful song called "Polish Poem" that he co-wrote with Chrysta Bell, who sings it. When it plays in the beginning of the movie, there is a woman—a "Lost Girl"—sitting on a hotel room bed, crying. The lyrics seem to articulate the Lost Girl's thoughts, and heighten the sense of sorrow in the scene.
On the other side I see
It's falling far away from me
I can see that
the wind blows outside
I breathe again, and know I'll have to leave
To forget my world is ending
I have to leave
I hear my heart beat
Tears are coming to my eyes
I cry, I cry
My hands are tied as I wish, but no one comes
Something is happening
The next key bit of music is an instrumental adaptation of "The Colors of my Life" from the Broadway musical Barnum, as played by The Mantovani Orchestra. Lynch first introduces this music during Nikki Grace's (Laura Dern) rehearsals for a film-within-a-film called On High in Blue Tomorrows, then repeats it again—score like—several times during the shooting scenes. It's a sophisticated choice because it shows how the action of a film often begins before production does. Plus, Lynch knows full well he's using a challenging, exceptionally fluid style of storytelling in INLAND EMPIRE, so he relies heavily on music's ability to act as a partition in film—a method of bracketing the action into meaningful phrases.
I admire Lynch's choice to use the Mantovani. While many would now categorize it as generic elevator music, Annunzio Paolo Mantovani actually developed a trademark style of "cascading strings" that gives his music an instantly recognizable sound, one immensely popular in its day. Lynch uses it in a decidedly postmodern way, cutting to the music without fade-ins, and demonstrating how it can sound incredibly cloying or romantic depending on the imagery that accompanies. Since Lynch isn't trading on anything as fleeting as mere hipness as a director, he's able to bring in elements like these and show you how strange and lovely they can be, like the DJ who blows your mind with a little Lionel Richie at three in the morning: he's musically fearless, and therefore incredibly cool. In public, Lynch may like to style himself as a bit of a throwback, but let's not forget that musically speaking, he's more adventurous
than most people 30 years his junior. He directed a video for Ramsteinn. He collaborated with Trent Reznor and Brian Eno on soundtracks, and at various points has itched to include This Mortal Coil and Marilyn Manson on them. The man is not operating in a vacuum.
The big love scene in On High in Blue Tomorrows is a relatively chaste depiction, but Lynch soon replaces it with a more urgent,
sweaty one. Lynch has temporarily cut away from On High in Blue Tomorrows to show Nikki and Devon (Justin Theroux) begin their off-screen
affair in earnest. This encounter includes swearing, laughing, and a decidedly unerotic freak-out by
Nikki. Lynch chooses some scary ambient music to go under it—a radically
different choice than the lush refrain he played for Susan and
Billy's impassioned frottage. There is huge difference, he seems
to be saying, between our fantasies of love and how it really goes.
I find it funny that some reviewers have wondered whether or not Lynch meant to portray On High in Blue Tomorrows as the not-very-good film it first appears to be. He was definitely not a literalist the last time I checked, which was Mulholland Drive, where he brilliantly explored the human need to create and inhabit idealized worlds, but portrayed them as inherently fragile, untenable places. It's the same in INLAND EMPIRE. On High in Blue Tomorrows is a construct—a dated and fragrant little hot house in which Sue Blue falls in love with Billy Side. The treacly music is a part of the set-up, and boy, when something seems too good to be true in a Lynch film, you'd better buckle up.
To wit: Nikki's adulterous act signals INLAND EMPIRE's turn into murkier waters, and many of its most interesting moments (and music) happen in the scenes that follow. She is so enmeshed in her role as Susan that the line between character and real life is blurring heavily, even as some sort of schism is occurring in her personality too. Scared and confused, Nikki/Susan finds herself in a room with a large group of her lover's ex-girlfriends—a beautiful but sinister Greek chorus of women.
The Greek chorus sequences have Lynch's paw prints all over them; they're highly dreamy even within his trippy aesthetic, and the way that Lynch uses music to deepen their incredibly charged atmosphere is a signature move. "Strange what love does," says one girl to another during Nikki's first encounter. "So strange," she agrees. Somewhere in the background a druggy surf ballad has begun using the very same lines. Lynch wrote and recorded this song himself, and through this imperceptible semantic overlap between dialog and music, he is steering us gently away from the world of rational thought. So potent is the music, in fact, that we hardly notice that the next sequence may in fact be literally hypnotizing us. It's a reprise of the album spinning on the phonograph. A ghostly woman appears in the frame to deliver cryptic commands much the way a hypnotist would.
In other words, if you're on board with Lynch at all at this point in the film, you are putty in his hands.
Since this is the point in the film where we start to plumb its most benthic layer, it's worth mentioning that much of the dark ambient music of INLAND EMPIRE also appeared in The Shining. They're pieces by tonal composer Krzysztof Penderecki, performed by the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra. One of the main story lines of INLAND EMPIRE take place in Lodz, Poland, where the other film-within-a-film was shot, the supposedly cursed one called 47. Is this whole Lodz storyline a shout-out to Stanley Kubrik, whom Lynch has named as an influence? Like The Shining, it takes place in a hotel during winter. Like Kubrick, Lynch is very interested in the horror of anonymity and dehumanization. When we first see the Lost Girl in the beginning of the film, she's entering the hotel room with a john and their heads are completely blurred out. To get the full hall-of-mirrors effect, consider that Kubrik named Lynch's Eraserhead as his primary inspiration for the mood he created in The Shining.
Here again we encounter a wonderful sort of artistic formality in Lynch, whose highly deliberate choices always seem so rich, so laden with hidden and seemingly time-released layers of meaning.
By the time we next encounter the ex-girlfriends, Susan's relationship with Billy Side has soured in some way. We hear the whistle of a train just outside the window and the girls start performing a highly choreographed dance routine to the 1962 Little Eva hit, "Loco-Motion." As they are hopping to the right, the music stops abruptly and the girls disappear before hitting the ground. Needless to say, Susan is unsettled.
This scene is one of the best in the film. It has some great dialogue, one amazing pair of bared breasts, and several shots of Dern's fascinating face half-bathed in a white stripe of sunlight. It's really the truncated locomotion dance, though, that makes the scene so indelible. The Little Eva song is absolutely carbonated with all the heady energy of the early days of rock, and while it seems like it should be a light moment—a group of girls doing a cutesy dance to a catchy tune with flashing lights—Lynch makes it menacing through subtle sound design choices, then punctuates the menace by ripping the needle off the record player. It's another of his signature moves to disrupt things that way. He's always reminding us that we're sitting in Plato's cave, watching shadows on the wall and getting all caught up in them anyway.
Don't get too comfortable folks, he also seems to be saying.
Things go downhill for Susan from there, and we learn more about a darker side of her nature. She's also found out that she's pregnant with Billy's child, but is unable to reach him so she instead spies obsessively on the ex-girlfriends. This time, the gals are sitting around the house, looking mostly bored despite the fact that a hugely malevolent song is playing loudly on the stereo. It sounds as if the devil himself is singing it, but it's actually Lynch again, performing his own tune "Walkin' on the Sky"—a clue as to how weird things are about to get:
Walking on the sky
Right turns to wrong
The end is coming 'round the bend
The world can't last too long
This scene launches a particularly dark trajectory in INLAND EMPIRE. In these scenes that follow, the light often seems to dwindle down to nothing. The sense of dread is growing. We are entering the void with David Lynch, and things that tend to happen in the void begin to happen. Violence. Deep shame and loss. Susan's affair is revealed to Billy Side's wife, which triggers a murderous post-hypnotic suggestion within her.
Next thing we know, Susan lets loose with a blood curdling scream. She's with the ex-girlfriends again, but now they are are now a skanky clatch of prostitutes on Hollywood Boulevard. Lynch kicks in with Beck's darkly kinetic "Black Tambourine."
Black hearts in effigy
We sing the song that was hated
All dressed in rag and bones
Sharks smell the blood that I'm bleedin'
I know there's something wrong
Might take a fire to kill it
Might take a hurricane
Don't know what life that I'm living
Ohh ohh oh black tambourine.
The hookers cackle throughout as Lynch busies himself setting up a particularly grim mood; it's part of his sophistication with music that he doesn't feel obligated to cut out the other sounds of a scene just because a song happens to be playing. At one point we visually approach a beautiful young prostitute who is either shivering or dancing to the music or perhaps just really high. As we get closer, we can also see that she is half mad. She laughs wildly to see our distaste.
Billy Side's wife is lurking on the edges of this scene, and she eventually walks up to Susan and stabs her in the gut with a screwdriver. For us, On High in Blue Tomorrows ends there with Susan's grisly death—an utterly virtuosic scene. The lights come up and the film crew for On High in Blue Tomorrows applauds Nikki's triumphant performance. She is in a daze from the intensity of what she's just done, and glides off the set in a fugue. She wanders into a theater which turns into the hallway of the hotel where the Lost Girl is ensconced. She fires a gun four times at a mysterious figure known as the "Phantom," whose face transforms into a gruesome caricature of her own.
Of course, there are many different ways we could interpret Lynch's Phantom-slaying scene, but it's definitely a highly dramatic one, and a testament to his genius with music that the gentle piano he chose for it only heightens that drama somehow. It's a piece he co-wrote with the Polish composer Marek Zebrowski.
In the final scenes of INLAND EMPIRE, we once again hear the song "Polish Poem," except this time an entirely new aspect of it is being revealed. Nikki walks up to the Lost Girl and kisses her, vanishing in the process. All the grief present in the song at the beginning of the film is now replaced by a sweeping sense of release, even triumph, as the Lost Girl is set free from the confines
of her hotel room and is reunited with her family. Has Nikki been portraying the Lost Girl all along? Was the Lost Girl imprisoned by guilt and shame over prostitution and, possibly, an abortion? Have Nikki's actions somehow set the Lost Girl free, or has the Lost Girl finally extinguished the Nikki/Susan fantasy, her defense against a brutal past? In any case, the re-playing of "Polish Poem" is an ecstatic payoff to a long and difficult movie, and never before has one song taken on two such completely different guises in the course of one film.
"Lately
I feel films are more and more like music. Music deals with
abstractions and, like film, it involves time. It has many different
movements, it has much contrast. And through music you learn that, in
order to get a particular beautiful feeling, you have to have started
far back, arranging certain things in a certain way. You can't just cut
to it." —David Lynch
We hardly have time to consider everything we've just seen before INLAND EMPIRE's credits roll and we're back in Nikki's living room with a motley crew of characters, some of whom were abstractly referenced in the film. There are assorted Dancing Girls too, and they're bopping around joyfully to Nina Simone's "Sinnerman." The driving rhythm of this song and Simone's incredibly vivid voice make for a happy, very buzzy scene, but even this last bit of fun on Lynch's part isn't as straightforward as it looks. There's a live piano player on the set despite the fact that the music is obvious playback. At first, the lead dancer lip syncs along perfectly with Nina, but eventually gives up the charade and just starts dancing.
There is, in other words, a pretense of this scene being a live musical performance but it's willfully partial. We're getting Lynched one last time—being made to straddle his artfully misaligned sounds and images. He pulls the camera back—way back—for a final tableau that reveals layer upon layer of the tales he's been telling. This parting shot leaves you with the sensation of holding the world's strangest and most intricate snowglobe, Nina Simone bellowing all the while that you "should've been praying" instead.
The CD soundtrack for INLAND EMPIRE is excellent. Unlike the vast majority of soundtrack releases, it includes every key piece of music used in the film, including the Beck, Little Eva, Mantovani, and Simone. I was particularly happy to see "Ghost of Love," a song I was crazy about long before I knew it was Lynch himself singing. It sounds like a vintage track from some forgotten surf album of the late 1950's, and it's the most atmospheric piece in the entire film. Walkin' on the Sky" is pretty special too—an exotic, demonic ditty that shows just how fertile Lynch's own INLAND EMPIRE must be. And while I don't if there has ever been another director who loved music so much that he began writing, recording, and now promoting it through his own record label, I do know that if you should ever find yourself scratching your head during one of his films, just listen to the music. It'll tell you a lot.
