(NOTE: For those who don't know, "Apologia" is a literary term, referring to a written justification regarding a contentious subject.)

Whenever a new David Lynch movie comes out and the critics start saying that it's for "hardcore Lynch fans," I always get excited; and that's because I'm one of those hardcore Lynch fans the critics are referring to, and I know that I'm going to love the movie. I make no apologies, in fact; I think Lynch is one of the most brilliant artists ever to tackle the genre of Surrealism, and I think has succeeded more than almost any other artist in history at the Surrealists' original goal of literally capturing a dream using the tools of the conscious mind. And I've been lucky, too; with the exception of The Straight Story, I've gotten a chance to see every other film of Lynch's on a big screen in a movie theatre, which is where they really should be viewed for maximum effect. And so it was earlier tonight that I got a chance to see Lynch's latest, Inland Empire, over at the Music Box Theatre in my neighborhood; and I found it not only the best film he's ever made, but so brilliant that I finally felt compelled to sit down and explain why I like Surrealism in the first place, and what I think it can capture that no other art form can. So for those who need it, I guess let's start with a little primer, based partly on history and partly on my own interpretation...

First, a scientific fact; that the human brain works in at least two different modes, what we call the "conscious" mind and the "unconscious" or "subconscious" one. The more we learn about the brain, in fact, the more we learn just how many of our day-to-day decisions are actually made in our unconscious mind; indeed, that some seemingly conscious actions we perform (like yanking our finger away from a hot fire) occur and are finished long before our conscious mind even realizes our finger was hot in the first place. It's our unconscious mind that "remembers" to breathe and to circulate blood; that works out simple mathematics and files phone numbers; that sizes up a stranger and gives us our "first impression" of them.

Perhaps the most mysterious thing the unconscious mind does, though, is dream; or at least it's the thing that most captures our conscious imagination, and that we still have almost no answers concerning. Why do we dream? No one's quite certain. Why is it that we need to dream -- that we will go crazy if we don't? No one quite knows that either. Why do we dream the things we do? Do these images stand metaphorically for issues our conscious mind can interpret? Do they recur over time, like themes, so that they can be tracked and analyzed? Is it possible to achieve a conscious state while simultaneously in a dream state?

These questions have haunted humans for thousands of years, and of course all kinds of theories have bubbled up over the centuries as well. One of them, for example, says that it is our conscious mind that is actually the weaker of the two; that while it's busy trying to understand the world by creating clumsy traditional narratives and myths, our unconscious is interpreting reality in a much more complex, non-narrative way, the way the natural world much more works itself. And indeed, if you really stop and look at what dreams exactly are, there's a strength in the Surrealist argument that's hard to deny; in a way, our unconscious really does interpret the world in a faster, more thorough and more complex way than our conscious mind does, precisely because of the limitations our conscious mind has in terms of what it can take in. For example, it's only in dreams where we can accept contradictions about life at face value; where we can find something both erotic and repulsive, optimistic and pessimistic, without the schism in logic that occurs in our conscious minds in the same situation. The unconscious mind, the Surrealists argue, doesn't worry about morality or societal harmony, how to best serve the State, or any of the other thousand issues our conscious minds wrestle with; it's therefore more capable of understanding reality than our cluttered conscious minds are.

The greatest challenge an artist can face, the Surrealists argue, is to capture the complexity of the unconscious mind using conscious tools, in a way so that other conscious minds can view that material and be taken into their unconscious minds themselves. In other words, the process of literally recording a dream -- not just the 'story' that took place, but all of the complex patterns and rhythms our unconscious creates while constructing a dream. And this of course is where the original Surrealist aims first got bastardized, and is what today now makes a lot of people roll their eyes when they hear the term; that there is a fine line between "literally recording a dream" and "throwing up a bunch of weird shit that makes stoners freak out," and that too many people over the decades have used the Surrealist label to get away with the latter. I acknowledge that there's a "Pop Surrealism" out there, and that it's probably more well-known by the mainstream public than the Surrealists' original aims; you know, the "Dali posing bug-eyed for a portrait" Surrealism, the "Dude, there's a dwarf in a '70s tuxedo talking all backwards, I shit you not" Surrealism. The original goal of the Surrealists was much more complicated and arguably darker than any of that; as mentioned, it was to try to capture the elusively complex patterns and links that are created by our unconscious while in a dream state, using our limited conscious minds to interpret and recreate the situation. And Lynch is an old-skool Surrealist like I am, which is why it's important to bring all this up; although it's bitter irony, I suppose, that Lynch is simultaneously one of the guiltiest parties ever when it comes to the subject of Pop Surrealism.

Indeed, it was Inland Empire that first smacked me in the face with this contradiction; because let's face it, as silly as they can get, a lot of us can't help but to love the poppier moments of Lynch's career, the stuff that bored teenagers will be quoting to each other at sci-fi conventions for decades to come. ("The owls are not what they seem." "BWAH-HAH-HAH!") If we're to set the Wayback Machine, though, to the mid-1970s when Lynch started his career, and forget all the pop stardom that came later, we'll see that he's a pretty hardcore Duchampian Surrealist; and that, indeed, his entire career from the beginning could arguably be called the decades-long quest to literally film a dream. This was the goal of the original Surrealists in the 1910s and '20s, through such party games as Exquisite Cadaver and solitary activities as Automatic Writing; and it's what contemporary proponents are still aiming towards.

It's hard to argue that Lynch's most jarring film still remains his first, Eraserhead, made as the final project for his Masters degree in his twenties, back when one can weather such things as an on-set nervous breakdown and personal bankruptcy, both of which actually happened to Lynch while making the movie. But is it successful as a Surrealist project? Under a Pop definition, yes; between the biomechanical alien baby, the vagina-bleeding Cornish hens, and the rotting Atlas controlling the Grand Lever of the World (don't ask), Eraserhead has enough weird shit in it to keep any 18-year-old art major ecstatic for months. But does it succeed at actually trying to get across the complex patterns and links found in a typical dream? I don't know about you, for example, but in my dreams there always seems to exist a certain type of twisted logic, that makes sense in the dream itself but that always makes me ask after waking up, "How could that possibly have made sense?" That's the real challenge the Surrealists gave us; can we create an artistic project via our conscious minds that simultaneously makes sense and doesn't, much like anyone can do off-handedly while in a dream state? Those who care about the answer have been arguing over Eraserhead for years now; there are entire books devoted to the subject, in fact, for those with an interest.

After Eraserhead, then, came a brief and disastrous introduction to Hollywood, via the one-two punch of The Elephant Man and Dune, the latter such a catastrofuck that it literally caused the closure of an entire movie studio. Wisely, then, Lynch at that point decided to go back to his weirdo Surrealist roots, and make the challenging Blue Velvet that no one expected anyone in public to pay the least bit of attention to. It was this film, though, and especially the career-reviving performance by Dennis Hopper, where Lynch first learned the lesson that was to become both his biggest curse and biggest blessing; that you could sell the goofier moments of Surrealism ironically to Generation X for humorous effect, and that they'd eat it up.

This brings us to Lynch's so-called "Golden Years," where he became the first Surrealist artist in history to turn big profits from his projects; indeed, one of the first Surrealist artists in history to not get pelted with rotten fruit and then arrested afterwards because of his projects. And sure, I was along for the ride with everyone else; my friends and I threw weekly Twin Peaks parties complete with pie and black coffee, all dosed on acid an hour before seeing Wild At Heart on opening night. And that's because I'm a member of Generation X, and I like having the goofier moments of Surrealism sold to me ironically for humorous effect. Everyone who's fucking tired of Generation X, raise your hands!

In any case, things got better and better/worse and worse, depending on how you look at it, until the nadir/spectacle which was Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, wherein Lynch voluntarily spiraled into the pit of self-parody, and Generation X all lost their scholarships and had to go out and get real jobs. And what Inland Empire made me realize is that this is when the Pop Surrealism bubble burst for Lynch as well; the moment he obviously got sick of being "that dude who puts that funny weird shit in his movies" and decided to go back to "that creepy guy who doesn't make much sense and who we're all a little scared to talk to." This, I argue, is when Lynch first shrugged off all the Wizard of Oz references and snakeskin jackets and self-referential cameos, and went back to what he was trying to do with Eraserhead; literally construct a dream using the tools of the conscious mind, so that it too can project multiple realities we simultaneously accept and understand, just as we would in an actual dream state.

If you look at Lynch's career post-Twin-Peaks, then (and again not count The Straight Story, which I can't explain any better than you can), you can see him returning again and again to the ground he first covered in Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, getting better each time at stripping away the Pop veneer his work had gotten buried under in the '90s, helped of course by his decline in popularity among hipsters. Lost Highway? Yeah, I'd argue that that's a little better than Blue Velvet in terms of the original aims of Surrealism; that Mulholland Dr. is a little better than that. And yeah, after now seeing Inland Empire, I'd argue that it's Lynch's best attempt yet at actually capturing a dream on film, maybe even the best attempt ever made by a filmmaker.

Now to be sure, Inland Empire is still full of goofy crap that will make you inwardly delighted, no matter how ashamed you are outwardly of the fact; I in particular quite enjoyed the room full of teenage meth whores doing a synchronized group dance to "The Locomotion." And yes, all the familiar iconic elements of Lynch's particular unconscious make appearances as well; the film is unsurprisingly full of half-destroyed industrial landscapes, rotting hallways filled with fallen paint peelings, rooms of mystery covered in red velvet, convenient strobe lights whenever an act of violence is perpetrated, and lots more "Lynchian" things, synchronized of course to a soundtrack of ambient industrial noises and sickeningly sweet 1950s melodies. And yes, once again the main plot deals with a person suffering a severe identity crisis; Laura Dern's character in this case, who at various points in the movie appears as a pampered Hollywood actress, a Southern belle lost in Poland, an abused redneck truckstop hooker, a suburban wife whose entire house just happened to be inside a movie studio, and a Hollywood streetwalker with a bloody screwdriver sticking out of her abdomen. (Don't ask.) Oh, and with all of them obsessed by this Surrealist television sitcom, consisting of three adults in '50s suburban outfits and full-body rabbit costumes, making ominous oblique references to "the thing the husband did," and how the wife was bound to find out what it was at any time. Believe me, stoned art-major undergraduates, you won't be disappointed.

What's different this time, though, at least in my opinion, is that Lynch captures much better the sense of acceptance we have for such situations while dreaming; that even as a little voice in the back of our head is saying, "Wait, that doesn't make any sense," the majority of our rational mind is saying, "Take this magical train to reach the Kingdom of the Dark Raven, where I am in fact a secret ninja? Sure, okay, sounds good to me." (In fact, this moment I mention is the key behind so-called "lucid dreaming," also known as "waking dreaming;" of being able to acknowledge during a dream that weird stuff is going on, without the realization making you wake up.) The paradigm shifts Dern goes through in Inland Empire are no more shocking than, say, Bill Pullman inexplicably turning into Baltazar Getty halfway through Lost Highway, or Naomi Watts turning into a junkie topless lesbian at the end of Mulholland Dr. (rowr); but I don't know, it's hard to describe, but here Lynch and Dern just seem to get across much better the unconscious acceptance of such situations. And this of course, the Surrealists would argue, is the ultimate example of a successful Surrealist project; when your audience knows that something important just happened, but lack the conscious words to describe exactly what it was. More than any of his other movies, with Inland Empire I was ready to move with Dern's character from reality to reality, never questioning what was "happening" (in the limited conscious narrative aspect of the word), simply accepting that the entire thing is connected in these strange, tenuous ways that my subconscious is totally grooving on right now, and that my conscious mind can sense and pick up on.

Now to be sure, there's another big new thing to get used to with Inland Empire; that after years of being known for his lush film-based cinematography, Lynch has not only switched over to digital video for the first time, but even to cheapie consumer video, the kinds of cameras you find for sale on holidays at Best Buy. And as other critics have mentioned, this shift in medium is jarring to Lynch fans at first; far from being the perfect Boschian nightmare paintings his previous films can come off as, Inland Empire is more like the most deranged home video ever shot, one where no one's taken their medication and a mad scientist has spiked the town's water supply. But again as other critics have mentioned, by the time the film was halfway over I was not only suddenly seeing the crappy digital video format as an asset to Lynch, but also understanding why he so profoundly fell in love with the medium while filming, and has famously declared that he will never shoot on physical film again.

And the weird thing is that it's the same reason I didn't like it at first; because when you combine Lynch and consumer digital video, you get the most deranged home video in the history of the medium. We Lynch fans are used to his films coming across as perfect formal creations, things that are as beautiful to look at as they are difficult to interpret; but when you let go of this expectation, you'll see that home video actually fits the Surrealists' original goal much better than film does, that of creating a situation that seems both familiar and dreamlike at once. A Lynchian home video is truly a magnificent thing, almost like a magic trick that you find yourself dissecting afterwards; of how exactly it is that he can make certain things come off as just so damn creepy and surreal, using absolutely nothing but the same technology all of us have at home already. Sure, it's easy to make something creepy and surreal when you have a quarter-million dollars worth of film, a half-million dollars in lights and a couple of miles of red velvet; but how much more impressive is it when the same thing is accomplished with a camcorder, Laura Dern, a lightbulb and an empty room? I can see why Lynch liked the experience so much, because it strips away any formal pretense a Surrealist director was previously tempted to use; it forces a person not to rely on visual gimmicks to achieve a Surrealistic effect, but rather to dig deep into the unconscious and try to actually replicate what you find there, a much more difficult but ultimately rewarding task.

Anyway, as you can tell, I was a fan of the movie, and I highly recommend others checking it out as well, as long as you go into it with the right frame of mind. And Surrealism is something I've been both studying and practicing for over 20 years now myself, something I can go on about at nauseating length if given just the hint of a reason to do so, which is why I thought I'd pontificate a little today. And hey, how's this for the ultimate Surrealist experience? 20 minutes before the end of the film, the movie theatre lost its electricity and I never saw how it ended! In fact, it wasn't just the theatre either; it was an entire two city blocks, which in Chicago terms means an entire quarter of a mile (0.4 km). I think Lynch would be tickled to know that one of his showings ended in such a way; I'm sure he wishes he could schedule every showing of his movie to end in such a fashion.