Back from a screening at an Alamo Drafthouse. I'd never been to one before, and I have to say, the operation didn't suit itself very well to IE. Despite them doing many an arthouse screening, a meal and especially the presentation of the check 30 mins before the climax are seriously intrusive; IE was at its most disorienting throes when the waiters started to scurry to everyone. If I go back, though, I could see it being a fun venue for something on the lighter side. It turned out to be a good thing that the first chunk of the movie is glacially paced and features a lot of sitting, milling around, eating and drinking, etc. to accompany the sounds of people shifting around, chewing hamburgers, etc.
Audience was respectful, no laughs that felt denigrating and quite a few chuckles. Harry Dean Stanton's character and Lynch's cameo got the lion's share of laughs, which was fun to see. This is my first time watching it since HDS's passing, and I absolutely adore him no matter what he's doing or how long he features and it was nice to see a group of people take a shine.
I noticed among the preview chatter that many there hadn't seen the film and were coming out of curiosity from exposure to Mulholland Dr. and TP S3. There was an introduction at the event by a host who mentioned that IE has been hard to view due to being self-distributed, and I hadn't really thought of it in that way but it's true that in the age of streaming it's more obscure than ever.
After the lights came up, I heard a lot of "at least Mulholland Dr. had a straightforward plot for more of the movie" and a variation, "at least Mullholand Dr. was only two layers; this had, like, four. Five?" and my favorite comment: "I think I need to make a diagram!"
I'd seen it more recently so I was expecting the assault, but my husband remarked something I found true and which surprised me this viewing: you really only get the somewhat gentle first hour before the movie abruptly becomes a two-hour nightmare. Watching it with an audience truly highlighted how aggressive the experimentalism is; it felt brutal when the fakeout ending ("it burns bright forever") arrived, and how waves of leg waggling, shifting around and general restlessness attended Laura Dern's zombielike shuffle into the true ending.
I've never noticed how extreme the close-ups were; a lot of the film was gigantic, monolithic facial close-ups hovering over the seats. It made certain things come into more clear perspective: the famous phantom jumpscare being the natural evolution of such facial focus, which lasts until the very end, with the camera fixated on the performer's face as she lip-syncs Sinnerman. I appreciated for the first time how much of the film is confrontational; so many things are being broadcast to the audience in a manner that invites and threatens, and at many points the audience is spoken to in place of the protagonist. The relationship dynamic between the viewer and the abstractions taking place are so voyeuristic and immersive, it feels like reality is shifting to include the theater space as a canonical element; when Dern watches herself in a theater, watching herself speaking metaphorically of her life like staring at herself in a theater, the recursion of scanning the seats ahead of me up to the screen where there's more seats to scan, the spatial continuation of it made me feel as if I could look behind me and see something significant. And in fact, later on, when the epiphany moment comes I realized for the first time the light that engulfs the screen is a close-up of a projector, and so the glow of the theater's real projector is projecting that glow, which means the image of the glow in the film is shining its light on the very projector shining the projection, and on & on, so that the theater is shining dual projector light over the audience, and maybe you could say, transmitting itself to itself.
I forgot the film opens in a hotel, and it was fun to experience an overlap as I had been staying at a hotel to attend the screening. Walking back to my room afterward I couldn't help but think of #47.
Loved hearing more notes to the soundtrack and score, although I actually wish it had been a touch louder. I really wanted the moments where someone screams to obliterate my ears.
As for the film itself, I have a lot of thoughts I'm gathering and I might make a thread about an interpretation at some point; at times and just barely eclipsed by TP, IE is the Lynch project I'm most thrilled about when I go down the rabbit hole of piecing things together. I always think that I have encyclopedic knowledge of the film, but at such a long runtime there's inevitably things I'm still surprised at I hadn't noticed before, or a grasp of the film that slips from me in an unexpected way. I think it's the film I've seen the most times that I feel is a brand new experience each and every time.
One thing I will say is how surprisingly timely it still feels. There's something very internet about the valley girls that populate the house Nikki is stuck in, something very forum or chat-room about her disconnected lounging amid their lounging; in fact, the emotional vibe of her entrapment in the house resonated deeply with how I've felt during the pandemic and during a depressed spiral I've only recently crawled out of. Trapped in a house that feels as disconnected and dormant as an involuntary trauma, as deeply layered and permanent as an obsessive thought, populated by hard-faced degraded versions of who were just a second ago familiar loved ones, taunted by a Greek chorus of personified self-talk... the listlessness of the clock-hand whirring, the strangely banal and yet transportational ritual of the cigarette through the silk. The feelings it brought up in me felt unexpressed and I cried at moments recognizing them. I think it's the first time that I found the ending when Nikki reaches the Lost Girl to be touching and relatable. There's something extremely beautiful about how something tender, gentle and restorative is at the spatial center of so much haunted architecture.
Interesting brief allusions to pollution and, very very briefly, politics mentioned in tandem with withheld information and people plunging into strange hypnosis... I suppose when you theme an artistic work on deep confusion, manipulative abuse, and emotional pits it's always going to be relevant, but I went in assuming I had wrung every bit of the film possible over the many viewings I've had, and the fact I still find things unfolding in my head with a movie I love so dearly is thrilling.
