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Lost Time

Watched Inland Empire recently and none of it made sense to me. The only other Lynch movies I've ever watched at Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive both of which I found unique and memorable. But this one was quite impossible to comprehend. Yet, it is the kind of experience that you don't forget. I read about how the movie was made after watching it, in hopes of better understanding what I had seen but that did not help. There wasn't a plan so the movie is like a collage that each viewer will see as a different thing. For some it may be the scene with three folks in rabbit masks - maybe it speaks to them. For others, the movie in movie scene with the girl crying on a couch. For me it was the scene where the the character Nikki (sometimes referred to as Sue) lies dying on the pavement from being stabbed by a screwdriver while the Japanese girl who lives there tells the story of her friend in Pomona whose monkey shits everywhere. The impending death of the woman has not made any noticeable impression on her or the other homeless people around. 

Life goes on, sometimes it ends - these things are natural and likely experienced more viscerally on the streets once the safety net of society has been ripped away. While the scene is bizarre there is a deeper truth there - death becomes trivial when a person lives very close to encountering it all the times. Nikki talks about not being able to tell the past, present and future apart - that forms the foundation of many scenes in the movie. It got me thinking about how the orderly passage of time is essential for us to keep our sanity and losing one's mind is to get out of sync with the clock. My friend A lost his father recently. The old man had been struggling with memory loss for years. Towards the end he could no longer tell day and night apart, seasons were all mixed up. He would dress for summer in the dead of winter and wonder if a year had passed without his awareness. A told me that it was a sad and painful sight to see his father's sense of time crumble and fall apart. He was relieved at his passing because his pain of not knowing his place relative to time had ended. 

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