America’s most vital filmmaker has a new movie coming out — his first in five years. It’s apparently three hours long, and I’m going to hazard a guess that it’s a surreal and often nightmarish exploration of identity, the subconcious, and the dark heart of American culture.

Anyway, the always-chatty (seriously) Lynch spoke with the NYT about his upcoming “Inland Empire”:

The vertiginous “Inland Empire” is sure to provoke questions about meaning, literal and metaphoric. Still without a United States distributor, this may be his most avant-garde offering since “Eraserhead.” In tone and structure the film resembles the cosmic free fall of the mind-warping final act in “Mulholland Drive.”

“Inland Empire” refers on one level to the landlocked region east of Los Angeles but also evokes the vast, murky kingdom of the unconscious. Like “Lost Highway” and “Mulholland Drive,” the new movie is hard-wired into its protagonist’s disintegrating psyche, a condition that somehow prompts convulsive dislocations in time and space.

YES.

General