David Lynch's Inland Empire: What Do We Know? What Have I Seen?

David Lynch has collaborated with Digidesign on a free promotional DVD. It is obviously intended, first and foremost, to promote Avid products but as bait there's an interview with Lynch and, excitingly, a full scene from "an upcoming David Lynch project".

Definitive identification is deliberately side-stepped time and time again throughout the DVD, but it does seem that the showcase scene comes from Lynch's upcoming feature film Inland Empire. The Digidesign host who introduces the Lynch interview specifically refers to the scene as coming from a "feature", rather than a "short". It's fairly safe to assume that Lynch is only making one feature at the moment.

So, assuming I have indeed been privy to a scene from Inland Empire, what did I make of it? I'm afraid that I will have to preface my opinions.

Blue Velvet is, I think, the greatest American film of the 1980s. Eraserhead is the absolute tour de force of impressionistic film making. Lost Highway is the only film to have actually ever scared me. The Straight Story is a beautiful example of a great craftsman truly honing a film. Twin Peaks is my favourite TV show of all time. The Grandmother ranks amongst my favourite short films. I adore the Julee Cruise albums and Industrial Symphony No 1 film.

The (apparent) Inland Empire scene on the DVD looks like an awful, dreadful mistake.

The scene shows, first of all a conversation and then a sing-a-long between two women and a man sitting in deckchairs. The actors seem to be Stanley Kamel, Emily Stofle and Kristin Kerr - the latter two of which have long since been linked with Inland Empire, providing further suggestion that this is indeed taken from the feature film, though certainly not proof: Lynch's online project Rabbits featured the leads of Mulholland Drive.

As the scene plays out, it's suggested that the man isn't literally there with the women, at least not corporeally - and in fact, it might be argued that the woman sitting on the right is the only character to be "real", certainly in the last couple of minutes. Denied any context it's hard to make any further assumptions about what might be going on or what it might mean, but the physical execution of the scene can be studied nonetheless.

Either Lynch has adopted a lax attitude to his image making or he has quite deliberately left a number of aesthetic hurdles in place for the audience to stumble on. The video footage is alienating. Often, shots cut together in a jarring, displacing fashion.

Around two thirds of the way through the scene, something fairly typical for a Lynch film occurs: the diagesis shifts, everything in the film's universe is altered by an unexplained force. Sadly, the visual means and representation of this moment are ugly, impossible to emotionally connect with, even laughable. Lynch superimposes two layers of image and also creates a black and white image in post that looks more like early 80s pop promos than an acceptable texture for a feature film. Certainly a feature film in which the audience are supposed to lose themselves, forget artifice, invest their senses and emotions.

Lynch has been one of the most organic and tactile of filmmakers - remember the fine textures of wood, say, or the hot blaze of an otherworldly light, expertly captured in sound and image? His direct, sensory films have been incomparable in creating immersive universes full of menace, stained erotica, complex, slithery tensions. David Lynch found ways to film and edit thought and feeling that other filmmakers have yet to learn.

And now he's trashed it all.

It's not shooting digitally I object to - it's that he's seemingly abandoned all of his skills, turned out something that appears, at best, to be indifferent or a little careless, or at worst, to be a lazy, cynical pastiche of his former glories with all of the details out of joint.

When Inland Empire is unveiled at Cannes this year, we'll see if does contain this scene. We'll also find out if it's the masterpiece I'd expect from an artist of Lynch's stature.

I'm hoping that Digidesign are just trying to dine out on Inland Empire hype without having any claim to it, trying to get the blogsphere muttering (yes, I know, just like I am doing now) when, in fact, all they are showing is a snippet of David Lynch hobby project, experiment or digression.

I'm hoping. But I'm not feeling very hopeful.