If you like David Lynch, and especially if you like Mulholland Drive but haven’t seen this, you’ll want to, although in my opinion it’s not as good. Although Mulholland is disjointed and obscure and contains a number of things that I never figured out, it does have a story which is intelligible in its broad outlines, and quite powerful (see my opinion here). Empire is more enigmatic, just as strange, just as disturbing, and half an hour longer (three hours). And although there appears to be a story in there somewhere, it’s only suggested, and it’s obscured by a great deal of disconnected Lynchian weirdness.
I like Lynchian weirdness, but I began to get exasperated with it here. I can only see so many hypnotic dream-edging-into-nightmare snippets before my hunger for narrative sense begins to make me impatient with the repeated stops and starts; every time things seemed to be falling into place they went off in some new and crazy direction. There’s an entire parallel sub-…something…I was going to say sub-plot but, like the main thread, it only seems like a series of hints and suggestions, scenes cut randomly from a normal movie.
And there’s the matter of tension. Lynch is a master at creating a sense of menace and foreboding, and he keeps you thinking that something terrible is going to happen at any moment. Three hours of that kind of tension is exhausting.
I found the thing fascinating, but in the end was more or less of the same mind as the Los Angeles Times critic who wrote “the film, which begins promisingly, disappears down so many rabbit holes (one of them involving actual rabbits) that eventually it just disappears for good.”
I wouldn’t say it quite disappears for good. I should mention that there seems to be an overarching theme here which is, on an elemental level, very much in keeping with the Christian view of things, though I don’t assume this is deliberate: I mean the themes of sin, guilt, punishment, and redemption. Or, on second thought, maybe it is deliberate: the last scene is accompanied by an old folk hymn, “Sinner Man.” I should also mention that Laura Dern’s performance is strikingly good, if only with respect to its range.
Oh, and about those rabbits: this crew makes frequent appearances. That picture only suggest the foreboding emptiness that suffuses their little stage.
I’m not sure I want to see this again, but I may. Lynch’s world is alluring in a way that is probably not very healthy. I’m also not sure whether I want to see the other two highly regarded Lynch works that I haven’t seen, Lost Highway and Wild At Heart, as they’re said to be more explicitly violent than the others.
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