In "Mulholland Road", Lynch used his superb technique to show the audience the contrast between the dream of a woman in trouble and the real life, so we can be seen as the intersection of two "worlds", one world is a woman The unsatisfactory real life, the other is the dream of "spiritual victory". Moreover, during the development of the plot, the audience can distinguish the junction of reality and dream, which is the small box obtained by the "Quiet Bar".
But "Inland Empire" doesn't seem so simple anymore. The film tells about two women, the reality and fantasy of two women. Therefore, we can simply regard it as "Double Mulholland Road", but in fact, Lynch did not simply distinguish the fantasy and life of the two women, but intertwined them all, and the identity of the two women They can also be exchanged in the film.
If we simply distinguish what the film is talking about, we can summarize it as follows:
1. Nikki (Laura Dern) is a Hollywood actress. She is married to a Polish. He has strict control over Nikki's life. Nikki is not free in life. She got a role, the film was called "On high in blue tomorrow", directed by Kinsley (Jeremy Irons), but as the film progressed, she gradually couldn't distinguish between her real life and the fictional life of the movie. She has a relationship with the actor Devon, but it is not certain whether it is in reality or in the movie.
2. The play "On high in blue tomorrow" is adapted from a folklore outside the Jeep, originally called "47". It tells a woman Sue, she used to be a prostitute, but she seems to have forgotten about it, but her repressed memory keeps haunting her, making her unable to distinguish reality from hallucinations. At the same time, her life with her husband was not satisfactory. She wanted children, but her husband was unable to have children and was degenerate by nature. Sue met another man Billy. After having a relationship with him, Billy denied knowing her, but Billy's wife Doris (Julia Ormond) took a grudge and killed Sue.
3. A woman watching TV, she is watching "On high in blue tomorrow", which is the movie starring Nikki. She seems to see her past life and current life through the character Sue, empathizing with her, so she is particularly moved At the end of the movie, she kissed Sue goodbye in her imagination. In the end, her husband took a little boy home. It is conceivable that her husband could not bear children, so he adopted a child for her.
4. The Polish part is the memory of the woman watching TV. She used to live in Poland and was a prostitute. The black and white part at the beginning of the film is a woman having sex with a man (the faces of the two people are blurred). But then she had a child, so she wanted to get rid of this life and live a good life with a man, but a "bad guy", the film called "Phantom", maybe her husband, he killed that man.
5. Three rabbits are in a house, the room number is 47.
But the story is not so clearly displayed in front of the audience. The plot and scenes shown in the film can be seen as a fusion of Nikki's illusion, Sue's life, and TV-girl's psychological feelings and memories. Especially in the last part, when Nikki finished the last death scene, she found that she was still in the scene. This part not only had Nikki's hallucination effect but also mixed with TV-girl's imagination. She imagined that Sue killed Phantom in the end. It was as if she killed the shadow that puzzled her soul.
"Inland Empire" once again shows David Lynch's inquiry into the human psychological world. He shows the inner subconsciousness of the characters through blurry and strange images. It may not be as glamorous as "Mulholland Road", but it is definitely more complicated, obscure, and incomprehensible than "Mulholland Road".
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