Blog post: Inland Empire
Based on a Real Story: After watching this movie, I could not turn the light off because the surge of images from all the movies—especially horror movies– that I have seen all my life would come over me whenever it gets dark.
Darkness-blur- unrecognizable faces&languages; that’s where it all starts.
-> Start Moving: this movie, the images from other movies, my perception of the world
all gooey and indistinguishable active ingredients.
Through the play of camera lens & eyes, fantasy and reality, artifice and so-called “real world” bleed into one another, corrupting both sides and the audience& his/her world.
(Scene #6: The actress gazes at one direction, and we get to see the world through her eyes. A shade of somebody passes by the camera in a really close proximity, and we realize we were watching a movie, not through her eyes.)
Why fear?
Why is this movie so terrifying when there is no serial killer, no ghost, no definite threat? (although, yes, there is/was a pregnant woman with a screw driver stuck in her belly who disappears for a quite a long time in the movie, if there is any temporality in this movie)
The camera movement reveals to us, the Fundamental Absorption, our perception of reality is an artifice.
We do not have a Discreet-Discrete world.
Now that’s terrifying.
The second time the pregnant woman appears (#Applause), she is no longer pregnant, nor is the screw driver in her belly. Where did her baby go?
Lack of central narrative means more than just being “experimental”.
It’s “mental”, because we carry around “my body”, filming the world believing that there is coherency. Once we lose the body as “my body”, the eye as “my eyes”, we go insane. We go.
Babies learn Object Permanence , and learn the linear consistency of the world-narrative as they learn their body is “my body”, something somehow separate from the world; Before then, they suck, chew, and even damage their bodies as they would to any other object in the world, playing with their body, the body as continuation to the world. Play with me?
Based on a True Story: There is a reported case of a young girl with this disorder constantly pulling out her eyeball without realizing what she was doing to herself.
It is a constant play– Playwithme Playwithme– that terrifies “me”.
There are mumbles and noises that is foreign language, only recognizable through subtitle. We only know most of it is Polish because the subtitle told us so. (Any Polish speaker? Is this True?) One Asian woman speaking with heavy accent earns herself subtitle. Subtitle only exists in movies. Yet at that moment, we believe Susan/Nikki is actually dying.
“Why are you crying? It’s just a movie! Why are you crying?”
(From Scene #4: In La fortune Lounge, a girl who is sitting behind me is telling her friend a story.)
It’s just a movie. Reality is here.
Origin is here.
Ok, ok, for real.
“Once a rhizome has been obstructed, arborified, it’s all over, no desire stirs; for it is always by rhizome that desire moves and produces.”
This movie started movements in me. The scrambles of scenes are added into my eyeballs, I keep seeing somebody looking through my closet ajar.
Cameraeye is voyeurism. We cannot escape Cameraeye.
(Scene #271: a girl’s hands with black nail polish typing into the laptop)
We desire Cameraeye to appear on the screen. That lets the actress escape her (artifice) death.
We do not want to see Cameraeye. We’ve been watching a movie the whole time. And still are.
(#Laughter track)
Fact: There is no ending credit with dark screen for this movie.
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thepoemangaddessmachine 