Hermeneutic Decoder: The Lure of Interpretation in Complex Cinema as Exemplified in David Lynch's INLAND'S EMPIRE (2006)

Renowned narratologists, especially those focusing on film studies, have little interest in the prologue as a narrative device. I argue that this film segment is crucial in postmodern narratives, usually characterized by their nonlinearity. In films that feature it, this introductory scene/sequence is part of the work’s complex embroidery and is formally produced in the same style of the overall film, alerting to its tone, nonlinearity, self-reflexive nature, theme, and metanarrative discourse. Like all prologues, it explains part of what is to follow and engages the viewer’s curiosity. I call these segments hermeneutic decoders. However, in complex narratives they also deliberately hide the film’s full story and/or real meaning in plain sight. They engage the viewer’s cognitive abilities but manage to be as enigmatic as the rest of the film (despite containing most of the clues to its understanding). I will provide examples from several established categories of complex films and will deal with a specific case study in more detail: David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE (2006), which belongs to an undecipherable category of narratives that Kiss and Willemsen call “impossible puzzle films.” After a detailed analysis of the hermeneutic decoder, I will explain how it provides all the clues for an account of the film as an allegory of spectatorship from two theoretical standpoints: Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the time-image and Jacques Lacan’s notion of the gaze. The aporetical enunciation and the duplicated gaze, in tandem, form the key to the film’s narrative enigma, open to an intense hermeneutic activity that is nevertheless, and necessarily, frustrated.