The Filmic Event: On Lynch's Nomads

Inland Empire immediately throws us into the fray, into an encounter of flesh and film. At first, we try to make sense of a whole new universe, a whole new world of relations and signs, forging itself before us. And soon enough, that all too familiar feeling, that lurking panic, hits us: what if sense doesn't emerge? What if I never figure this movie out? Hollywood films—and most other films, too—make it easy on us: it is almost always a replication of some cliché or other. Sense is practically guaranteed. But it is a castrated sense, bereft of synesthetic possibility

Not here. With Lynch, our panic never disappears and sense never emerges—it oozes and undulates through us: it is an affective flow, indifferent to the conventional filmic seeing. There is no ground here. For Lynch, film operates in a different plane that allows for the odd meeting of senses: the film is not just seen but felt, not just a meting of visual and auditory but a relentless bleeding of sense.

Inland Empire, then, is a truly filmic film, a film that works not merely according to the logic of words but that moves with image and sound as film, in film: like a synesthetic piece of music or work of art, it turns its back on any sense of narrative or representation. This is the affect-sign, a sign that never points outside itself: signifier and signified are continous; they are constituted simultaneously.

But this affect-sign is never still: it is always and already folding into itself, always and already creating new ways of going, new modes of being. Sound and image, dream and reality, past and present, self and other—these Lynchian affect-signs interact to create ever new synesthetic-events throughout the film, events that operate as nomads and never stop folding amongst themselves to inaugurate further synesthetic-events.

This is no longer the synesthetic-event. This is a nomad-event, always and already on the go, always and already poised to take a line of flight, never allowing itself a ground. This is our liberation: nomads pave the way to the anti-castration-event.