Inland Empire End Credits Dance Sequence
“...sweet.”
Yesterday, Crisis magazine ran a piece saying, in effect, “maybe this Nick Fuentes guy has some good ideas”. You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to, it’s not very good, and perhaps you could already guess that from my summary of the piece. I don’t want to make fun of the essay or point out the absurdity of Crisis going, for the first time in its history, “wow we may disagree on some things but life is a rich tapestry and we should listen to the good points that people make even when we disagree with them”. You should probably know that the piece exists, although I doubt you’re surprised that it exists. I made a joke about Fuentes going on Robert Barron’s podcast on May 21, 2024, and it remains one of my two favorite pieces of writing I’ve ever done for G.O.T.H.S. (the other one, of course, being this one); at the rate we’re going, that interview will probably happen in real life before the end of 2026.
One of my dear friends, a brilliant person and someone who regularly writes for Catholic media, visited Chicago earlier this year. I had brunch with them, got to introduce them to my family, it was a wonderful Sunday morning. But at one point, I mentioned how hard it was for me to keep writing essays here and how everything for months had just felt like pulling teeth, and they said “yeah, I got a column due at [REDACTED] today, I have zero words right now.”
“There’s nothing left to write about, is there?” I asked them.
“There’s nothing left to write about,” they said. They’re right. I mean, maybe there will be something to write about at some time in the future, but…they’re right. There is a great deal of work to be done, of course; it’s just that none of it involves Posting.
2006’s Inland Empire was David Lynch’s final theatrical film, and probably the purest expression of his dream-logic process, as he would hastily write up new pages of the script every day during shooting, based on whatever weird visions he had while doing his twice-daily Transcendental Meditation, and then hand them off to his usual collaborators like Justin Theroux, Harry Dean Stanton, and, of course, Laura Dern, whose towering three-hour performance in the film is even more impressive when you realize that she had no idea what any of these scenes were leading to or how they fit together.
Inland Empire kind of maybe has a plot, something like this: Laura Dern plays an actor who just got cast as the lead in a Southern Gothic romance film, and she has an affair with her co-star. Unfortunately, the film’s story is based on a cursed Polish folktale and Laura Dern apparently gets sucked into the story of the script, which becomes her new reality along with a different parallel reality involving Polish sex workers and a corrupt cop and a radio play and maybe three talking rabbits. I’m not really sure how all 180 minutes of the film fit together, but there are many wrenching scenes and subtle fractal callbacks to throwaway lines of dialogue, and, I think, at the end, Laura Dern does battle with some kind of monster and defeats it, and reality is restored to the way it should be, or at least the way it always has been, and that feels very cathartic. I did not understand very much while watching the film, but I certainly felt a lot, which is really as “David Lynch” as David Lynch can get.
The end credits, though: the cast of the film, plus some other people that weren’t really in the film but who David Lynch had worked with before, are just all hanging out on the set, in this big ornate ballroom, and the actors who played the sex workers come out, and some other extras come out, and they all start partying and lip-syncing and dancing to “Sinnerman”. You just sat through three hours of the formless and empty void, darkness over the surface of our consciousness, you felt everything and understood nothing, and after all of the chaos, you finally get to hear the voice of God - who sounds an awful lot like Nina Simone - commanding light itself to exist, and we all get to dance. There are worse things than this that I could have emailed you this morning.