Leo - I'm very intrigued by the stuff I've read so far in your post. I printed it off and will read the rest on the train home. I'm always happy to read somebody's interpretations of DL's work - as long as they are prepared to accept that they are ONLY interpretations. I switch off very quickly if I hear somebody describing their opinions as "correct". I once read somebody put up an MD theory on some messageboard - a poster responded by saying "interesting theory", to which the original poster replied "it's not a theory - it's as close to what actually happened as you're gonna get"

What a tool. And it would be even MORE ridiculous for someone to claim they had a "correct" interpretation of Mulholland Drive.

Yes, and remember Cronenberg´s take on Brian O´Blivion (interesting name), who in Videodrome stands for Marshall McLuhan: he´s dead, but he survives on the "videodrome-ether-waves". He´s even in the talk show on tv. The author is dead as far as we don´t need him to explain things to us. We have I don´t know how many thousands of years of the History of Literature, and tons of dead authors. What´s more important then? So "The Guttenberg Galaxy" was "right", or rather, McLuhan´s take on the subject was pretty valid.

 so I guess authorial intent still rules the roost
You mean, like the Japanese Girl and JUDY rules the monkey(s)? And incidentally, in "After Hours", Miss Beehive plays the Monkeys for Paul. Gee-Whiz.

Your reading of IE was influenced by other movies you've already seen. I found myself similarly influenced by not just movies, but also stuff I've read and general info I've picked up over the years. The amazing thing about this is - only you have had the exact set of experiences required to make your interpretation - in other words, you wouldn't be making connections to EWS if you hadn't seen it.

And isn´t what you just described nothing more than the definition of the Lynchian "Red Room", a place which is a different thing for the different people who enter it, but also one that offers potential convergences/intercourses, analogous to the Psychodelic Experience, which, mutatis mutandis, finds the expression of this "intercourse" in a sort of special kind of ESP - see Cronenberg´s "Crimes of the Future" as the best example in film - FWWM script: MAN FROM ANOTHER PLACE (subtitled): Going up and down. Intercourse between the two worlds (and between the "souls" once they´re in there). This Red Room (Red being an important color in Inland Empire) has as its key, of all things, the alignment of the planets (another "2001" connection). Mike´s advice to Cooper before solving the case points (without chemicals) to the fact that only Cooper has what it takes to adress the situation, since the situation was created for him, and him alone, to solve (hence Laura´s dream of the Red Room even before she was dead). So yes, Cooper was "born" before he even began (like Twin Peaks was born before it even began, once Lynch created the Red Room sequence without apparent connection with the rest of the story, and Frank Silva´s Bob was born before Lynch even knew what he was messing with). Or rather, Cooper was "half-born", pretty much like every other Lynch character. Jeffrey was "half-born" because, as a young adult, he still hasn´t experienced the original oedipal scene, and his father is a vacant lot, his mother a mute who watches TV without sound, so it is left for Dorothy and Frank to enact it for him.

A German film critic uses the term "der nicht zuende geborene Mann"
(the man born "unfinished") as a recurring theme in Lynch´s films and it struck me watching the Grace Zabriskie scene.

BOB (subtitled): Light of new discoveries.

MRS. TREMOND (subtitled): Why not be composed of materials and

combinations of atoms?

The Lynchean symbol depicting these possibilities is found in Blue Velvet. Within Blue Velvet’s narrative Jeffrey Beaumont briefly holds Dorothy’s son’s hat in his hands. His hat includes a cone shape overtop of which hovers a twirling rectangle. In order to personalize the big Other ideally we must reach that idiosyncratic egalitarian traumatic moment where the particles of the Real reconstruct themselves and the rectangle’s spinning is arrested. Basically, we must slowly melt down the rectangle into the cone in order to meld the two and congeal them within emptiness. 

(...)the personalized big Other is precisely what is required for the beginning to begin: for the historical world to arrest its incessant and traumatic recycling of the same moment in time; for ‘us’ to move beyond “this mysterious/monstrous in-between which is no longer the Real of prehuman nature (the ape in Kubrick´s 2001, but also the monkey in FWWM) . . . and not yet the horizon of Clearing and what comes forth within it. (...) We must personalize the authorial big Other’s symptoms in order to personalize everything else in order to expose its inherent trauma and destroy our links with time and Bob. (Twin Peaks Bob collectable card, which points to his "origin" as being from the "beginning of time")

http://www.lynchnet.com/tp/tpcard58.html

From the dugpa board:

it seemed like Leo was trying pretty darned hard to connect the plot in Inland Empire to everything else Lynch has ever produced. I thought the posts started out interesting but ended up somewhere beyond the realm of over analyzing. Though certain things fit thematically each film is it's own thing. 

Well, that´s what Zizek would say about Nochimson´s reading of Lynch.

Lynch's cinema allows, to a certain degree, the possibility of reading in it a particular, 'New Age' discourse, which, as Zizek puts it: focused on the flow of Life Energy that allegedly connects all events and runs through all scenes and persons, turning Lynch into the poet of a Jungian universal subconscious spiritualized libido. However, what must be admitted is that what is present in Lynch, as it is implicit in Benjamin is some idea of a 'soul'. This concession must be made to the 'New Age' commentators (for instance, Martha P. Nochimson), but, as I intend to argue, Lynch's cinema critiques traditional conceptions of soul through the synthesis of sound and aura, which I have termed aurality. Benjamin mainly discusses objects, such as works of art in his essay but one may extrapolate a loosely essentialist position implicit in 'aura' as it relates to human subjectivity and selfhood. To be most pertinent to Lynch, or, at least, to Mulholland Dr, the approach to aura must begin from a certain generality of the Western philosophical concept of 'soul'. Traditional conceptions of the soul in the West, are essentially judaeotheistic, or, to put it more simply, Christian. However, this becomes complicated when we arrive at the modern philosophical tradition which is usually (and for good reason), conceived to begin with Rene Descartes.

http://www.mulholland-drive.net/studies/silencio_griff.htm

Since I make an effort to gel my reading with the author´s intentions, even if his intentions are that we ought to read it according to our own intentions (or desires), I still think that Lynch, like Kubrick, is extremely consistent, so not using all of his films as a means of unification tends to be a waste of a fruitful opportunity, to say the least.

From the dugpa board:

"There are some interesting takes on IE at these sites,

http://www.beyondhollywood.com/?p=1367

http://thoughtsonstuff.blogspot.com/2006/12/inland-empire-second-viewing.html

http://cinemathematics.blogspot.com/2006/12/third-times-charm.html

I like the end of Brian Holcomb's review were he states...

'Like an abstract painting, what you see in the movie is more a reflection of who you are than what the film is really about. That’s why films like “INLAND EMPIRE” can be watched over and over again, year after year. As you mature and change, so do the films. They never completely give up their secrets, mostly because those secrets are really your own.'

.... interesting thought."

And let me add that I would´t have posted anything that I did here if it wasn´t for the very specific moment in my own life that I´m going through which led me to find some quite potent (mythic) ressonances in Inland Empire. And no, I´m not crackin´, and I´m not an actor, and I don´t rule a prostitution cartel. As for the rest... What I can say (aside from confessing that I do have my own "muse" somewhere out there) is that my choice of films that I watch again and again includes Eyes Wide Shut, Cronenberg´s Crash, eXistenZ, Dead Ringers, Spider, 2001, After Hours, La Double Vie de Veronique, A Short Film About Love, The New World, The Thin Red Line, and everything by Lynch. So that´s that.

Call it a distant cousin "New Journalism" (à la Hunter S. Thompson) version of film appreciation reporting. Why not? Talk about an "Inland Empire" (my own), ruled by the "Faraon". "To each his own" (cinema) - which is in fact the collection of shorts presented at this year´s Cannes Film Festival.

And wasn´t Cronenberg´s Naked Lunch about writing reports from the Interzone, and doing so with the Clark Nova typewriter, which in the film has "Mythic Resonance"?

What´s interesting to me is that I have just justified for myself the reason for my own pseudonym, which, like the Red Room sequence from Twin Peaks, was first created by Lynch without any apparent reason (although I must confess Bruno Dumont´s "L´Humanité" did have something to do with it in my case). Thanks guys!

Like BOB would say: I HAVE THE FURY OF MY OWN MOMENTUM.

Absolutely. That's certainly the vibe I've got from reading your thoughts.

Here's an interesting one: you mentioned that red is an important color in INLAND EMPIRE, and I agree - I think green is, too. But does Jack Rabbit say "it was red"?

In my view, he says "it was read".

Know what I mean?   

Yes, I do. In more ways than one. But that´s part of my own secret. 

Leonard Cohen´s
"In My Secret Life"

I saw you this morning.
You were moving so fast.
Can´t seem to loosen my grip
On the past.
And I miss you so much.
There´s no one in sight.
And we´re still making love
In my secret life.

I smile when I´m angry.
I cheat and I lie.
I do what I have to do
To get by.
But I know what is wrong,
And I know what is right.
And I´d die for the truth
In my secret life.

Hold on, hold on, my brother.
My sister, hold on tight.
I finally got my orders.
I´ll be marching through the morning,
Marching through the night,
Moving cross the borders
Of my secret life.

Looked through the paper.
Makes you want to cry.
Nobody cares if the people
Live or die.
And the dealer wants you thinking
That its either black or white.
Thank god its not that simple
In my secret life.

I bite my lip.
I buy what I´m told:
From the latest hit,
To the wisdom of old.
But I´m always alone.
And my heart is like ice.
And its crowded and cold
In my secret life.

That god damn trailer's more popular than Uncle's Day in a whorehouse!

I absolutely agree with LWAPOM - I think if you look too hard for clues, you will inevitably come away slightly disappointed, because you'll never arrive at a watertight "answer". One of my favourite comments about the movie comes from the Sight & Sound review by Michael Atkinson:

"Either way, the surest way to find disappointment in Lynch's Byzantine, exhaustive howl is to hunt for codes and readings, while ignoring the sensual textures of life in the underlit corridors of his imaginary space."

Now, while I'm the first admit that it can be great fun thinking about "codes and readings" - the pleasure of DL movies is, for me, first and foremost about enjoying them in an intuitive way, and just riding the waves of emotion from start to finish. 

IE in particular is a movie which raises subtext up to the level of text - and for that reason alone I consider it to be one of the most important movies of all time.

Watched "Sunset Blvd." again last night and noticed that the "cast away this wicked dream that has seized my heart" scene with the Polish Girl in Inland Empire is actually a homage to Erich von Stroheim´s "Queen Kelly", shown by Norma Desmond to Joe Gillis in Billy Wilder´s movie. There´s also the "They´ll love it in Pamona" dialogue which has been mentioned before.
So it seems that not only an appreciation of INLAND EMPIRE would benefit from other movies we´ve already seen, but also, to Lynch, that other movies are essential to the creation of his own. There´s nothing new to saying this, but it´s clear that "Sunset Blvd." is the distant cousin of IE. Obviously the Nikki part draws a great deal from Norma Desmond´s. And we all know how obsessed Lynch is with Sunset.

Another point that struck me as interesting: Betty Schaefer´s fake nose (a result of plastic surgery) is, like Sailor Ripley´s, an indication that whenever a willful intention takes center stage, the opposite result will come to surface. Betty changes her nose to become a star. People like her new nose, but not her acting. She then becomes a script-girl of sorts, reading other people´s works and adapting them to suit her needs. As Sailor walks away from Lula, he gets hit by the angry mob, and finds the Good Witch, who teaches him a life lesson. This marks the beggining of Lynch´s rewrite of Barry Gifford´s original ending, but the indication of the rewriting´s forcefulness is Sailor´s prosthesis, like the mechanical Robin in Blue Velvet.

Finally, there´s Laura Dern´s dreaful petrified smile (also a prosthesis of sorts), which is seen three times in the film - first when she runs towards the camera, superimposed to the smiling clown´s image, reminiscent of "Black Dahlia" as written by Brian DePalma; when the prostitute Sue smiles to her doppleganger from the other side of the street, echoing the words of the Polish Girl at the very beggining of the film; and then at the end, in of the most threadbare images in cinema´s history, just before she kills the phantom - a neighbour down the hall - in an orgasmic and relieving shooting rampage, but not before we see the phantom´s expression of ecstatic pleasure/post-coitum pricking numbness. (Notice the way Lynch chooses to shoot the gun blasting, an image that calls attention to iself, which is even present in one of the menu screens on the DVD).

That Smile is Norma Desmond´s smile, the decadent phantom actress frozen in time, by means of a constructed image. Nikki´s mansion is like Desmonds´s mansion, and in visitor #1 scene, Dern islooking beautiful, but she plays Nikki with the same self-satisfied and frozen smile. Like Oscar Wilde´s Dorian Gray, the moment when Dern, the metaphysical method actress, is confronted with her smile brings the realization of her own Otherness to herself.

Once again, I conjure Videodrome when Max Renn, loosing control of his life, gets a gun, only to have a vagina grow on his stomach: yet another instance of the dicotomy of Masculine will X feminine receptivity finding a brilliant translation on screen. Of course, Jeffrey Beaumont shoots Frank, a father figure, in a similar manner. The phantom neighbor is like the incestuous father of Juliette Lewis in "Natural Born Killers" (they are even dressed in a similar fashion, and, surprise, in NBK, Mallory Knox recollects her childhood as if it was a sitcom, the same genre of the "Rabbits" program. It will be interesting to see how The Brave One negotiates this by having Jodie Foster, a woman with a gun, ocupying the vigilante role that she was once in the periphery of, in "Taxi Driver". And this all in the same week of release as Cronenberg´s EASTERN PROMISES, which begins with a scene of hemorrhagic miscarriage. Let´s see what that brings in.

And now, a dubious Wikipedia citation:

"The Lithuanian-French philosopher, Levinas, was instrumental in coining contemporary usage of "the Other," as radically other. He also connected it with the scriptural and traditional God, in the The Infinite Other.

Ethically, for Levinas, the Other is superior or prior to the self, the mere presence of the Other makes demands before one can respond by helping them or ignoring them. This idea and that of the face-to-face encounter were re-written later, taking on Derrida's points made about the impossibility of a pure presence of the Other (the Other could be other than this pure alterity first encountered), and so issues of language and representation arose. This "re-write" was accomplished in part with Levinas' analysis of the distinction between "the saying and the said" but still maintaining a priority of ethics over metaphysics.

Levinas talks of the Other in terms of insomnia and wakefulness. It is an ecstasy, or exteriority toward the Other that forever remains beyond any attempt at full capture, this otherness is interminable (or infinite); even in murdering another, the otherness remains, it has not been negated or controlled. This "infiniteness" of the Other will allow Levinas to derive other aspects of philosophy and science as secondary to this ethic. Levinas writes:

"The others that obsess me in the other do not affect me as examples of the same genus united with my neighbor by resemblance or common nature, indivudations of the human race, or chips off the old block... The others concern me from the first. Here fraternity precedes the commonness of a genus. My relationship with the Other as neighbor gives meaning to my relations with all the others."

I don't know if this is true, but the only character I noticed say 'Inland Empire' in the film is a total dead ringer for Lynch - the man who appears from inside the metal shed in the woods scene. What's that all about?

He is also in the dream (not sure how much sense calling one scene a clear dream is in IE but anyway) where they're having the barbeqeue.

It's an abstract scene more than most in the film in that I have trouble relating it to anything else. Why also does this character ( I am not sure if his name is Wally? ) throw his coffee cup on the floor? That's just obviously a sign of his annoyance?