Dan and I just got back from seeing INLAND EMPIRE, a three-hour stream-of-consciousness dark David Lynch movie extravaganza which — oddity of oddities — just might possibly perhaps (if you look at it a certain way) have a Happy Ending. In a nightmarish David Lynch sort of way. This is not a spoiler. Some of the best, or, well, the paid critics see it differently. Your mileage may vary.

The way I see it is colored by the fact that I’m currently clinging mercilessly to the characters and plot and world of a novel that I’ve just completed and am still polishing. So I’m sensitive to how easily one’s characters take on a life of their own; how much the author/creator has vested in them; how deeply one loves them; and how strong a draw they have on the author’s life energy when one should be doing other things.

So I think I understand just what the inland empire of INLAND EMPIRE is. Laura Dern plays at least two nested characters (an actress and the character in the movie she’s playing) and possibly as many as four. And it’s just possible (I’ll try to do this without spoilers, which, in any case, might be wrong) that an even higher level of creation envelopes the whole enterprise. Maybe two.