Don't Pause Inland Empire!

David Lynch's Inland Empire is of course a horror classic. Universally accepted.

I agree...  and yet I've only seen the first half. And I will never finish it.

Not cos it's rubbish or cos it's not scary...but... cos I paused it and now I am trapped in a very Lynchian paradox.

This post is rambling round a fairly obvious point. All suspense relies on sustaining unbroken attention. You can't wander off half-way through a ghost story, and return with a can of coke expecting to pick up where you left off.

A very good, very strange movie...just donlt go to the loo...

The problem is, Inland Empire is 3 hours long...and it depends - for its tension - on long close ups, awkward pauses, long takes, and then after dragging out the unreal suspense to breaking point, gives you a sucker punch edit to a new scene, in a new narrative time-frame. It all works perfectly if you are trapped in a cinema... but in any other environment, at some point Inland Empire will make you pause it while you fuck off and do something else.

Then it is almost impossible to restart the tension and suspense. I re-started Inland Empire half way through about 5 times over 3 years. And it just never worked. Without re-watching the start, strapped to a chair..and doing the full 3 hours ...its a doomed exercise.

If you try to pick it up half way through.. all the cinematic tricks that seemed so spooky in the first half seem incredibly mannered and tedious.. the pauses, the long takes, the sound effects, the broken dialogue.. its practically unwatchable.

The reason I'm mentioning this is because of Kitty Horrorshow's "Anatomy". A computer game that demands you replay it multiple times - consecutively - to experience the full horror.

If you can manage that.. fine. But most people will break, have a sandwich, watch some rubbish TV, sleep, wake up.. and 8  hours later try and pick it up where they left off.. and it will be rubbish, just like Inland Empire is rubbish if you stop and re-start it.

Whats the moral? At the risk of repeating myself....all horror is short stories, a 10 minute bedtime ghost story; or a maximum 40 minute read late at night under the covers. Anything that takes longer necessitates a toilet break/cigarette/phone call interruption and then - in terms of tension - its game over.

Ok, end of post - you can relieve yourselves now...