I’m a huge David Lynch fan. Mulholland Drive‘s one of my favourite films. Lost Highway, Twin Peaks and The Straight Story are up there too. I even love Dune, despite it being regarded as sacrilege by most fans of the book, of which I’m also one: I just treat them as two totally separate works of art, each with their own merits. And Eraserhead, oh god, Eraserhead. I’ve been hooked ever since I saw it as a teenager, and had my mind permanently blown. Which, while I’m on the subject, should be a forced experience for everyone at that impressionable age. Even if they don’t enjoy it, and most wouldn’t, it would at least set the bar for weird, unconventional storytelling high enough in their minds that it might inoculate them from a dependence on cosy, banal, mainstream entertainment for the rest of their lives.
I’d therefore eagerly anticipated Lynch’s latest film, Inland Empire… and then failed to get around to watching it for six years. I even had a naughty copy on my computer, but watching it on a little laptop screen isn’t really appropriate for the sort of immersive experience Lynch’s films usually are, and somehow it never seemed quite the right time to commit three hours of my life to its promised hallucinatory mindscrew.