David Lynch’s film “Inland Empire” finally came to my city, and I met it there with 12mg of 4-AcO-DMT loaded in a syringe...
Lynch’s film is a monster lurking in the shadows of a Narnian wardrobe, a world of overlapping fabrics, strange connections made in the dark, and holes in silk, burned through with cigarettes. A world I have always wanted to swim in since I was a child reveling in the terror-charged wonder of nightmares.
“Inland Empire” is a kind of Dadaist meta-film and to say the 4-AcO-DMT added a few layers to the beautiful, self-referential absurdity would be an immense understatement. The theater became an extension of the film, with the creaks of the seats of patrons, unaware and uneasy, becoming the strain of the building itself trying to contain this wild thing from gnashing its way out of the screen. Intermittently the entrance doors would open, allowing phantasmagoric shimmers of light into the darkness as unknown figures quietly shuffled in and out. And my mind was just one more screen, one scattered across these many worlds, letting in dark figures and shimmering light from the cracks at the periphery of my vision. In the film the characters become detached in time. Likewise my mind seemed temporally extended, aware of my how my past was influencing my perceptions and how these haunting images would become slotted for reappearance in the future of my dreams.
The experience and the film were in turn, profound, grotesque, beautiful, hilarious, discordant, and disturbing. Strangely, the disconnected, dream-like images were responsible for the film’s greatest sense of realism. There was something of truth in tumbling through the wardrobe, awash in the plurality of its textures and its shifting threads, something about the depth of an image and the illimitable moment. They are like a puzzle whose completed picture is that of yet another puzzle whose pieces are skillfully hewn together in conflict with their forms, yet the exquisitely fragmentary image produced is a fuller representation of its subject’s reality than the one demanded by objective coherence.
5 stars