The best film of the 2000s is a David Lynch film

...And it isn't Mulholland Drive.

As I alluded to in my last entry, people rarely like being taken out of their comfort zones. In a rather unfortunate twist of fate, there are few things I enjoy more, but it rarely happens. I've not seen nearly enough films to be desensitised, of course, but the films that are accepted into the general zeitgeist as "great films" are hardly ever brave enough. I'm not merely talking about the general Oscar fodder, like Crash, Brokeback Mountain, There Will Be Blood, the latest Clint Eastwood film, etc., but even the also-rans that come up when the surface is scratched. The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford is currently being held up by a small but loud minority as an all-time classic Western, and even, I've heard, a deep and philosophical masterpiece that was simply too ambitious to be mentioned in the Academy Awards. Yes, a Brad Pitt film is apparently too cult-y for the status quo. It's like Fight Club all over again.

This isn't snobbery. I was, after all, a big fan of No Country For Old Men. I'm not going to pretend, however, it was particularly groundbreaking. The problem is that even the aforementioned reactionaries still pull for films that have standard (albeit wandering) narratives and beautiful cinematography. Occasionally there might be a "great" Hollywood performance to buck up its chances. The main mistake is defining a film by the Oscars it did or didn't win.

I don't think even David Lynch, the supposed king of cult, understands this. He after all campaigned two years ago for Laura Dern's Academy credentials, recalling to mind Robert Rodriguez' championing of Frank Miller and acrimonious departure from the Director's Guild. Although I have never been a huge fan of Lynch, I would be sad to see him fall into the Tarantino Club for sidelined directors who appeal to teenagers angry at an unseen, disembodied force tentatively labelled as "the Establishment." (if he hasn't already.)

Lynch's film Mulholland Drive is not quite in the Assassination of Jesse James... category, owing to the fact it is a vastly superior work, but the murmurings of discontent still bubbled to the surface when Lynch failed to win Best Director and had to settle for a round of Golden Globes. You've heard most of the acclaim, I'm sure: it's the best film of the 2000s, it's the film Lynch has been working towards his whole life, etc. Even Roger Ebert, who was a vehement critic of the director's earlier efforts, praised it for being a Lynch film that didn't "shatter the test tubes."

For me, the fact it didn't is why it isn't Lynch's crowning achievement. Like Blue Velvet, a work that seems to be unanimously accepted as Lynch's other masterwork, it is fascinating in parts and cherishable, but doesn't push the envelope as much as I have now been convinced Lynch can.

By contrast, no test tube could ever hope to contain Inland Empire. The film is in parts beautiful, thought-provoking, embracing, alienating, funny and genuinely terrifying. It never limits itself to anyone else's philosophy, never sells itself short through references. One is reminded of Felini's 8½, another film that refused to compromise or bend to what had gone before, but with respect to the Italian master, even that comparison does not do justice to how far Lynch has allowed himself to go. All conventions are shunned, all pretentions of coherent storytelling are cruelly torn down to make way for a psychological rollercoaster.

The character listed in the credits as The Phantom is perhaps the epitome of this. He haunts the film (truly I would love to draw lines between Dern's character's world, her subconsciousness and the film-within-the-film just to organise my thoughts, but this would be doing a disservice to Lynch's anarchaic blending that has rendered such concepts as metafiction irrelevant until they adapt to the film and begin to take on new meanings), silently, without introduction or narrative explanation. The theme, and the reactions of the characters, are the only elements that acknowledge him as a threat, and therefore so do we. His final appearance is the pinnacle of shocks in cinema, too unconscious and unreasonable a fright to be made sense of by a mammal reliant on his reasoning and functioning frontal lobe.

I want to tell you more, but truly this is the most Brechtian and Lynchian of films in the sense that it requires you to bring more of yourself to the table than any of its predecessors. It's one of about three films that has ever taken me outside of my comfort zone, and the first while I've been an adult. It is only the second film (after Tarkovsky's The Mirror) that I have felt deserves to share György Lukács "criticism" of Joyce's Ulysses as an ultimate example of borgeois decadence.

Unfortunately, it's seemingly been shunned in every which way. A book I own, called The 1001 Films To See Before You Die, offers Little Miss Sunshine, The Prestige, Pan's Labyrinth, Children of Men, The Last King of Scotland, Borat, Babel, The Queen, Apocalypto and The Departed as better uses of your time from the same year. One cannot help but wonder, though, whether Vertigo would have been listed had the book been compiled in 1958. The truth is that whatever popular opinion change now, it is guaranteed to change in the future, and there is perhaps no more fickle area of criticism than film (does anyone remember when There Will Be Blood was being offered up not only as the film of the year, but a classic superior even to Citizen Kane or The Godfather?). I am confident that in 20 years Inland Empire will be accepted as the cinematic landmark it so deserves to be, rather than the brave folly it is perceived as now. Hey, maybe even Tarr's Satantango is only 10 years short of that particular club membership.

29/11/08 revision: A Freudian slip on my part, as I misattributed a criticism of Ulysses to Terry Eagleton rather than György Lukács