Scary Every Time

Our television is far too large for the room. If your smartphone were as needlessly titanic as our television, you would need a crane to hold it to your ear. This means that when we watched David Lynch's Inland Empire last week, all of the ridiculously close close-ups were all too uncomfortably close, as in let's-tally-the number-of-pores-on-Laura-Dern's-nose close. If you've seen Inland Empire, then you know that there are a couple of extra-scary close-ups, which, when Laura Dern's face is three feet away from you and roughly eight times the size of your own face, are just unacceptably scary.

Take, for instance, this scene (viewer beware!). It starts (starts!) with a scary clown, and it only gets scarier. Well, perhaps this is not scary for those of you who may be sitting at respectable distances from your televisions, but for those of us who must constantly clean the nose prints from our tv screens, this shot is debilitating.

I am watching this scene again on my tiny little computer screen, without even embiggening the movie window, and it is still scary. It's a formulaic if not cheap scare; Sue's approach turns into an unexpected lunge, which is accompanied by a starling audio track. David Lynch (or at least his hair) is saying "Boo!" It's a cheap scare, or should be, and yet it's not. This must be because of the expression on Laura Dern's face, which appears to have suffered some kind of Lynchian re-sculpting, as if Lynch got in there and situated a bunch of toothpicks behind her face somehow, or perhaps a bear trap.

And (and!) this isn't the scariest Dern face Inland Empire has to offer. If you don't know what I'm talking about, Google it sometime when you don't want to sleep for a few days.

In fact, when David Lynch asked Laura Dern to be in his movie, the conversation must have gone something like this:

"Hello, Laura, it's David. I have this idea for a movie, and it basically involves you looking worse than you thought possible in an uncountable number of ways for almost three entire hours. I think it will be a good career move for you. Also, my babysitter used to burn me with cigarettes. Happy Bastille Day!"

All of this is to say that I haven't been reading, because I've been too busy having nightmares. If you're concerned about no trees having been harmed in the making of this blog post, then you should know that during the scene mentioned above, I pretty much ran out of the tv room through the wall, so there are some studs to replace.