You might have seen the above video by now––it’s been making the rounds all weekend. Someone took a couple of clips from the Inland Empire DVD, of David Lynch railing against the watching of films on cell phones, and set it to the familiar music from Apple commercials. “It’s such a sadness, that you think you’ve seen a film on your fucking telephone!” he cries. “Get real!” Cue the iPhone logo. The End. Cute, right? Harmless.

Not exactly. Kent Nichols, co-creator of the mega-popular web series Ask a Ninja, has written a blog post in response to the clip, titled “David Lynch is a tool.” “Look David Lynch,” Nichols writes. “I respect that you’ve made a career by confusing people and by pretending to be smarter than them.” But…

…you’re getting to be a cranky old man. If someone wants to pay you to watch your weird little films on a cell phone or a DVD or a flipbook, just smile and take the money. Short of inviting every potential viewer to sit and watch it in your personal viewing chamber, there is no “ideal” viewing experience.

There’s just content and people. People want the content, we give it to them.

Though Nichols goes on to concede that “some stuff works better in the cinematic environment,” he concludes by saying that if a filmmaker wants to reach the masses, “You just need to create visuals that will play well on a 320×240 window. If you’re doing anything else, you’re being a cranky old artist.”

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Yesterday BoingBoing pointed to an article on The Psychologist Online by Huw Green that argues that David Lynch’s work, particularly Inland Empire, is an accurate depiction of what it’s like for someone with a psychotic illness to encounter reality.

I immediately thought of last week’s episode of FilmCouch, in which I used Lynch, a new documentary about the filmmaker, as a point of entry to talk about his recent work. I compared Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire to recent films penned by Charlie Kaufman, namely Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I argued that Lynch’s films are far more effective due to the fact he, unlike Kaufman, refuses to provide the viewer with the necessary tools to keep track of the breaks in narrative convention.

Green’s article points out nearly the same thing (without the comparison to Kaufman). Measuring Lynch’s effect on the viewer, Green says:

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Lynch, a new documentary about the often imitated but never duplicated auteur, gives us an excuse to see how titles like Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire stack up to the next generation’s attempt at mind-bending cinema. Karina interviews an interview pro, NYU professor and host of AMC’s Movies 101, Richard Brown.

FilmCouch 43

I Watch Stuff offers a roll of the eyes towards the above Gucci advert directed by David Lynch: “This minute of models doing what must be the waifish equivalent of dancing (swaying gently with passing breezes) to the tune of ‘Heart of Glass,’ all I could think was, ‘Oh god, was there a time when David Lynch would dance to Blondie?’” But it’s not surprise to see Lynch indulging in pop music–he stole that shtick from Kenneth Anger twenty years ago, and has often wavered on the ironic/sincere line with it.

To me, the ad falls in with the recent trend of corporations paying brand-name directors to rehash chunks of their film work within the context of an advertisement. The Gucci ad plays like the last scene of Inland Empire, stripped of the feeling of catharsis provided by that film’s previous two hours and forty minutes, with Nina Simone swapped out for Blondie and with a lot more money to play with. In some ways, this feels like what Lynch has been working towards for years: it’s a chance for him to experiment with mood and visual atmosphere without having to worry about assigning meaning to anything.

Inland Empire, David Lynch’s epically obtuse melding of sex, dream logic, pop music, Eastern European mythology and the Hollywood nightmare/dream, finally arrives today on DVD. Equal parts confounding and revelatory, unwatchable and transcendent, it’s a total chore to sit through, but for the last forty minutes alone, it’s totally worth it.When the film premiered last fall at the New York Film Festival and then toured a dozen or so cities in Lynch-sponsored release, it inspired some of the most gloriously schizophrenic reviews in recent memory. J. Hoberman published what many interpreted as a negative review of the film in the Village Voice, only to place it on his Top Ten of 2006 list a couple of weeks later. Hoberman maintains it was all a misunderstanding: “Seems that when I characterized Inland Empire as a miasma (that is, “a thick, vaporous atmosphere”), it was taken as pejorative. Anyone familiar with Lynch knows that there are good miasmas and bad.”

My favorite review of the film, by Ed Gonzalez at Slant, was another rave easily excerpted to look like a pan. It read in part: “Inland Empire is totally fucked up, picking up reception from metaphysical wavelengths past and present and places here and there…Some may call it a toilet, but I like to think of it as a splendiferous whirlpool of wonders.”

The official Inland Empire website has a number of clips from and relating to the film. Most of these are not as good as the GooTube trailer I’ve embedded above, but they’re worth watching for the completely discordant revenue-share ads tacked on by Revver at the end. Click the “Read More” link to see a screenshot of the ad that I got at the end of Laura Dern’s deathly serious monologue.

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