Digital Lynch: Framing the Media's INLAND EMPIRE

Julian Murphet

Wednesday 26 March 2008 @ 6pm
Room 327 Webster Building UNSW Anzac Parade Kensington 2052




The release last year of David Lynch’s first digitally shot feature not only raised a number of questions about the survival of a certain idea of cinema today, but presented a long-overdue bill to America’s violent cultural imperialism from within its own clotted intestines, with a formal poise and tonal sobriety unprecedented in the annals of “independent cinema”. This paper takes INLAND EMPIRE as a point of departure, to evaluate the fortunes and prospects of critical “motion pictures” in a digital imperium, to read the runes of dead and dying media as they are remediated by code, and to determine whether or not a political unconscious of today’s media ecology might be taking shape in some few residual signs of cinema. It will be suggested that Lynch’s last “movie” stands as an exemplary attestation to the powers of thought and creation that Empire has made possible despite itself. INLAND EMPIRE is a call to arms.

Julian Murphet is Professor of Modern Film and Literature in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts at UNSW. He is the author of several works on modern and postmodern culture, including the forthcoming Multimedia Modernism.