Most people have had moments, often brief and difficult to articulate, when reality feels slightly unmoored. A conversation suddenly acquires an edge you cannot explain. Someone you know well feels present but unreachable, as if the person you are speaking to is no longer quite the person you recognise. A familiar place loses its sense of safety or intimacy without any obvious change in its appearance. You are not confused about where you are or who is there. You are unsettled because the situation no longer feels like the kind of situation it used to be. The ground has not vanished, but it has thinned.
These moments are often experienced as gentle disquiet rather than terror. They can arrive as quiet unease, as a sense that something has shifted just enough to make you cautious. These are not merely changes in how we describe the world, but moments in which the world itself seems to disclose a different structure, as if different kinds of things have come into view. Standing before a vast landscape or watching a sunset can do this. The land does not simply look different. It becomes a different kind of thing. What had been a collection of locations and routes ceases to function as such and presents itself instead as a continuous field that exceeds practical organisation. The essence of the environment shifts from something navigable to something overwhelming. This is not a matter of adopting a poetic description. It is a felt alteration in what the world affords and demands. I think this is what Schelling tries to think about. The same ground is there, but what it is for you, in that moment, has changed.
Looking down a microscope can produce an even clearer example. The object on the slide does not merely acquire a new description. It is revealed as belonging to a different ontological kind than the one it previously occupied in your experience. What was a smooth surface is now a complex structure with its own dynamics, its own internal necessities. The world you are engaging with is no longer the macroscopic one in which that object counted as inert and complete. A different layer of reality has become salient, and with it a different set of truths and constraints. This is not de dicto, a shift in language or viewpoint. It is de re. The thing itself is now encountered as what it in fact is under different conditions of access.
Most of the time, we move between these ontological disclosures without distress. We trust that the world will return to its familiar organisation, that the landscape will once again be a place we can cross, that the microscopic complexity will recede into abstraction. These experiences are integrated into a stable ontology that supports identity, agency, and knowledge. Lynch’s work becomes unsettling because it explores what happens when such de re ontological shifts do not resolve, when the world remains disclosed under a fractured set of kinds that do not reintegrate. In that situation, it is not just our descriptions that fail. The things themselves no longer reliably occupy the roles that make ordinary life intelligible.
After shock, grief, or trauma, are experiences that make the world accessed unfamiliar. In these people sometimes report that the world itself feels different, flatter or more threatening, as if ordinary assumptions no longer apply. Silence becomes charged. Repetition becomes oppressive. Desire becomes anxious rather than inviting. The uncanny quality of these experiences does not come from strange beliefs. It comes from the feeling that the world is no longer reliably organised around the same kinds of things. You may know perfectly well what is happening, yet feel that knowing no longer helps.
David Lynch’s films take these moments seriously. They treat them not as psychological glitches but as clues to a deeper fragility in how reality is structured. They ask what it would be like if such experiences were not fleeting, if the world did not reassert its familiar shape, if the sense of ontological reassurance never quite returned. The result is not immediate panic but a slow, disquieting realisation that the categories by which we orient ourselves may not be as secure as we assume.
This is why I think Inland Empire feels different even from Lynch’s other work. If Mulholland Drive shows the construction and collapse of a dream that postpones grounding, and Lost Highway dissects what remains when grounding has already failed, Inland Empire begins from an even more unsettling place. It opens in a world where coherence is already fractured, but where that fracture has not yet announced itself as danger. Rooms connect without quite belonging together. Conversations drift without anchoring. Identity leaks quietly, without spectacle. Nothing is obviously wrong, and that is precisely what makes it disturbing. It presents a metaphysical situation many people recognise from life before they recognise it as a problem. A state of disorientation without alarm. A world that still functions, but no longer guarantees that what seems to be the case is grounded in what is the case.
What follows takes that feeling seriously because I recognise it as a feeling I know quite intimately and think many others do too. I also think it is often mischaracterised as something psychologically grounded rather than something rooted in the world itself. The terror is one where you don't know who you are, what you are or what to do because the conditions of the world no longer tell you anymore. I think much panic and sadness and fear arises from this situation and I think Inland Empire is an extraordinary staging of a world in which grounding relations have become unreliable, how identity, knowledge, and agency begin to thin without immediately collapsing, and why this produces a specific form of dread, the dread of living in a reality that no longer does its part in holding things together.
Not long ago I was watching the news and footage of a man driving his car into celebrating Liverpool supporters, hearing him shout as he did so, and feeling a particular kind of unease that went beyond shock or anger. It did not feel adequately captured by the familiar language of psychological breakdown, mania, or loss of control. Nor did it feel fully addressed by the legal categories that would later be used to classify the act. Those frameworks are necessary and important, but in the moment they seemed to slide past something essential. What I felt, watching it happen, was that something in the structure of the situation itself was profoundly wrong, as if the ordinary boundaries that separate celebration from threat, crowd from danger, agency from compulsion, had collapsed without warning.
It felt as if the man had, for reasons I could not see, lost contact with our world in a very literal sense. Not that he no longer knew facts, or could not distinguish right from wrong in the ordinary way, but that the world itself no longer seemed to present itself to him as the kind of place it presents itself to the rest of us. It was as if the grounding relations that normally hold reality together for a person, the relations that make a street a place for walking, a crowd a group of people, a car a means of transport, had come apart for him. What I saw did not register as confusion so much as a terrifying kind of reorganisation, where objects and people were still there but no longer occupied their usual ontological roles. And I thought how difficult it must be to try and articulate that, and how desolate and frightening it must be to find oneself in such a situation. This is only a speculative description of how the scene struck me in the moment.
But the horror, as I experienced it, was that his actions seemed to arise from a world in which everything had become monstrously ungrounded at the level of essence for the driver. The car no longer appeared as something whose essence constrained how it could be used. The crowd no longer appeared as a collection of persons whose presence demanded recognition and restraint. It felt as if he was acting within a different ontological field altogether, one in which the basic kinds of things had been reclassified in a way that made his actions intelligible within that distorted world, even as they were incomprehensible and horrifying within ours. That sense of a person slipping into a reality where the shared grounding of our world no longer applied is precisely the kind of terror Lynch captures, a terror that is not well described by the language of mania or breakdown alone, because it is experienced as a rupture in reality itself rather than merely a failure within a mind.
So if Mulholland Drive stages the construction, strain, and collapse of a dream as a way of postponing grounding and Lost Highway works as an autopsy of lost grounding, Inland Empire begins somewhere more radical and more disturbing. It does not begin with a dream that masquerades as coherence. It begins with a world in which coherence is already fractured, but not yet recognised as such by the characters who inhabit it. It is murky, hesitant, and oddly banal. Doors open onto rooms that do not feel continuous. Conversations drift without anchoring. Identity is not suspended in hopeful possibility. It is already leaking, but quietly, without spectacle. It is best understood as a world in which grounding relations are no longer reliably trackable, but where the agents have not yet realised that this is so. It is a metaphysical situation prior to panic. It is about disorientation without alarm. And that is precisely what makes it so unsettling.
The film opens with fragments that resist narrative assimilation. A distorted record player. A young woman in Poland. Rabbits in a sitcom like living room. These are not symbols to be decoded. They are modal intrusions without grounding. They appear as if they belong to different ontological registers, but the film refuses to tell us which. Marcus’s insistence on intensional contexts is immediately relevant. From the opening frames, we are placed in a space where substitution fails everywhere. Scenes cannot be assumed to refer to the same world. Names, locations, and temporal markers do not latch onto stable referents. Yet the film does not present this as confusion. It presents it as ordinary. This is the crucial difference from Lost Highway. In Lost Highway, breakdown is experienced as threat. In Inland Empire, breakdown is the default condition. The characters behave as if this is how the world normally is. That behavioural normalisation is the film’s most radical move.
In ordinary experience, facts are grounded in other facts in ways that allow explanation, prediction, and responsibility. In Inland Empire, grounding relations are not absent, but they are opaque. Events happen, but it is unclear what makes them happen. Conversations occur, but it is unclear what they presuppose. The world has not collapsed into randomness but into under explanation. This becomes clear when Nikki Grace is introduced. Nikki is an actress, married to a wealthy man, living in a large house that feels less like a home than like a set of rooms that fail to cohere. Her identity appears stable on the surface. She has a name, a career, a marriage. But none of these function as grounding bases in the strong sense. They do not anchor her in a world of determinate facts. They are roles she occupies without fully inhabiting. Nikki appears to know who she is. She can answer questions about her career. She can perform social roles competently. But this is not knowledge in the normatively robust sense. It is not knowledge that constrains rational action across contexts. It is local competence. The opening scenes are filled with such local competence, people doing what they do without knowing what their actions commit them to beyond the immediate situation. The visit from the neighbour early in the film is a perfect example. The neighbour speaks in riddles, delivering prophecies that sound like non sequiturs. But Nikki does not react with fear or disbelief. She listens politely, even bemusedly. This interaction reveals something crucial. The neighbour’s statements violate ordinary epistemic norms. They do not present evidence. They do not ground claims in reasons. And yet they are treated as socially acceptable. The epistemic standards of the world are already degraded. The neighbour’s statements create a belief context without a clear object. Nikki is invited to believe something about her future without being able to specify what that something is. This is belief without content in the ordinary sense. It is underdetermined belief. The film normalises this state.
In a grounded world, prophecies would either reflect essential features of a person’s nature or be dismissed as accidents or errors. Here, the prophecy floats. It is not grounded in Nikki’s essence. It is not grounded in causal law. It simply exists as a modal pressure. This is the film’s first clear signal that necessity and possibility are no longer properly sorted. The casting of Nikki in the film within the film, On High in Blue Tomorrows, deepens this instability. The director and producer reveal that the film is a remake of an unfinished Polish production, cursed by murder. This is not presented as superstition in the usual sense. It is treated as background information, as if the existence of a curse were simply another fact about the project. This casual treatment is significant. It shows that the world of Inland Empire does not maintain a clear boundary between grounded explanation and narrative myth and is a collapse of the distinction between extensional and intensional discourse. A curse is an intensional object. It does explanatory work by narrative association rather than by causal mechanism. In a world with intact epistemic norms, such explanations would be bracketed or questioned. In Inland Empire, they are absorbed seamlessly. This absorption signals that the standards governing explanation have already shifted. When explanations are accepted without regard to whether they could ground knowledge, agents lose the ability to distinguish between reasons that justify belief and reasons that merely accompany it. Nikki accepts the curse narrative not because she knows it to be true, but because the world she inhabits does not require knowledge in that sense to proceed. Action is no longer constrained by epistemic entitlement.
The rehearsal scenes further illustrate this. Nikki and Devon rehearse lines that bleed into their real interactions. At first, this seems like a familiar metacinematic device. But the film refuses to let us stabilise the boundary between rehearsal and reality. Lines spoken as part of the script resonate emotionally in ways that exceed performance. But this excess is not thematised. Normally, the distinction between acting and being grounds our understanding of responsibility and identity. An actor’s actions on stage are grounded in a role, not in their essence. In Inland Empire, that grounding distinction erodes. Actions performed as part of a role begin to feel as if they belong to the actor’s life. But the film does not say that the actor becomes the role. It shows something more unsettling. It shows that the criteria by which we decide what grounds an action have become unreliable.
If Nikki is Nikki, then she is necessarily Nikki in every possible situation in which she exists. If the character she plays is someone else, then that character cannot simply slide into her identity. Yet the film shows precisely this sliding beginning to occur, not as a metaphysical claim, but as a lived confusion. This suggests that the film’s world is one in which identity is no longer tracked by necessity, but by narrative proximity. This is a breakdown in epistemic agency. Nikki cannot tell which actions are hers in the sense that matters for responsibility. She can still act, but she cannot reliably ascribe her actions to a stable self across contexts. This is a world in which the epistemic conditions for agency are quietly dissolving.
The rabbits’ scenes provide a crucial counterpoint. They are a demonstration of what it looks like when language persists after grounding has failed. The rabbits speak in canned dialogue. The timing is off. The laughter does not correspond to jokes. This is language detached from meaning and intention. It is speech without assertion. Assertion carries a commitment to truth. In the rabbits’ scenes, speech carries no such commitment. It is pure form. These utterances lack grounding. They do not obtain in virtue of anything. They are not true or false in any meaningful sense. And yet they occur, repeatedly, as if they belonged to a world. The Polish sequences reinforce this. The young woman’s suffering is intense, but it is not narratively anchored. We do not know what she has done or why she suffers. The scenes feel like memories, but of whom? They feel like flashbacks, but without a present to flash back from. This is memory without a subject. These scenes present what looks like experiential content without an epistemic subject. There is suffering, but no one who can know it as their own in a way that would ground agency or response. This is the first hint that Inland Empire is not merely about identity confusion, but about the possibility that subjectivity itself is fragmenting.
Throughout these opening scenes Nikki’s emotional responses remain oddly muted. She is curious, sometimes anxious, but rarely panicked. This is not because nothing is wrong. It is because the world has not yet made demands that require a grounded self. As long as actions remain local and consequences deferred, Nikki can continue to function without fully knowing who she is. We can all do this. Essence is what determines what a thing is and what it can be responsible for. In these opening scenes of Inland Empire, essence is bracketed. Characters are not yet forced to confront what they are in a way that would constrain their possibilities. Everything remains provisional. The film is not presenting alternative possible worlds. It is not asking us to imagine how things could have been. It is showing us a world in which the distinction between the actual and the possible has become unstable. Scenes feel as if they might be actual, remembered, imagined, or scripted. The film refuses to say which, because the characters themselves do not have access to that distinction. This is what makes Inland Empire so unsettling and so different from Lynch’s earlier work. The dream is no longer a refuge from grounding. It is the ambient condition. There is no clear transition into unreality, because unreality has become the medium of experience. Yet, as with Mulholland Drive, this cannot last. The first third of Inland Empire is a prolonged delay. It shows a world in which grounding relations are eroding but have not yet collapsed, in which identity is thinning but has not yet shattered, in which knowledge is no longer required but has not yet been replaced by terror. It is the calm before a different kind of storm. When grounding finally returns in Inland Empire, it will not return as recognition or explanation. It will return as suffering that cannot be located, responsibility that cannot be assigned, and agency that cannot be reclaimed.
As Inland Empire unfolds, the film moves from a condition of quiet under grounding into one of active disintegration. The first third allowed identity, agency, and explanation to thin without resistance. Then the thinning becomes painful. The world no longer merely fails to explain itself, it begins to demand responses that no longer have a stable subject to issue them. If the first third normalised epistemic erosion, the next phase makes its consequences unavoidable. This is the phase in which the film ceases to feel merely strange and begins to feel relentless. What changes first is not the imagery but the status of action. Nikki is no longer simply drifting between scenes, roles, and conversations. She begins to act in ways that have consequences she cannot track. The boundaries between the film she is acting in, the life she is living, and other narrative strands become porous in a way that no longer feels playful or benign. Lines spoken in rehearsal begin to wound. Scenes from the film within the film bleed into Nikki’s emotional life without mediation. What had previously been a metacinematic ambiguity becomes a lived confusion with stakes. Before, Nikki could function with minimal knowledge because nothing she did yet demanded accountability across contexts. Now actions begin to generate commitments. Words spoken bind. Gestures provoke retaliation. Emotional responses persist beyond their immediate setting. Knowledge is now required to navigate the world, but the conditions for knowledge have already been undermined. This produces not scepticism, but panic.
One of the key moments marking this transition is the escalation of Nikki’s relationship with Devon. Their interactions become charged with jealousy, suspicion, and resentment that exceed the script they are rehearsing. The film refuses to tell us when they are acting and when they are not, but the important point is not that the distinction is unclear. It is that the distinction no longer matters to the characters. Emotional harm occurs regardless of its supposed fictional status. This signals a collapse of the grounding distinction between role based action and personal action. In a stable world, actions performed under a role are grounded in that role and do not attach to the agent’s essence. That is why actors are not morally responsible for the actions of their characters. In Inland Empire, this grounding relation fails. The role no longer absorbs the action. The action seeps into the agent. Nikki’s jealousy, fear, and desire are no longer safely bracketed as performance. They attach to her as facts about who she is becoming. This is not because Nikki has forgotten that she is acting. It is because the world has stopped supplying the conditions that make that distinction meaningful. The film within the film is itself unstable, haunted by an unfinished Polish predecessor and by violence that was never resolved. The curse narrative, which in the first third floated as an oddity, now becomes active. It is not that the curse is real in a supernatural sense. It is that it functions as an explanation where no grounded explanation is available. When causal grounding fails, narrative myth rushes in to fill the gap.
The curse is an intensional explanation. It does not specify mechanisms or necessary conditions. It explains by association and repetition. In a world where extensional explanation has collapsed, intensional explanation becomes dominant. This does not make it true, but it makes it irresistible. Characters begin to orient their actions around it. Nikki’s fear grows not because she knows she is cursed, but because the world no longer offers any competing account of why things are happening. Nikki’s identity fragments more visibly. She begins to appear in scenes that are not clearly connected to her life as an actress. She appears as a woman in distress, wandering unfamiliar streets, encountering men who treat her as if they know her, or as if she belongs to a different social world entirely. These scenes are not presented as dreams or hallucinations. They are presented with the same ontological weight as the scenes set on the film set or in Nikki’s home. If Nikki is Nikki, then she should be necessarily identical to herself across contexts. But the film now shows Nikki occupying positions that cannot be reconciled with a single identity without contradiction. She appears as a sex worker. She appears as a victim of abuse. She appears as someone with a different history, different relationships, different vulnerabilities. The film does not tell us that Nikki is imagining these lives. It shows her inhabiting them.
These new positions are not grounded in acting contracts or conscious decisions. They do not have the structure of performance. They feel imposed. Nikki does not choose to be these other women. She becomes them. This suggests that identity is no longer grounded in essence or even in personal history. It is now grounded, if at all, in situational force. Whoever the world treats you as, you are. Knowledge of who one is normally constrains action. It allows one to resist certain interpretations, to correct misunderstandings, to assert boundaries. Nikki increasingly lacks this capacity. She cannot say, in a way that would be epistemically authoritative, “that is not me”. The world does not recognise such claims. Her agency erodes accordingly.
The Polish woman’s storyline becomes more prominent, and its relation to Nikki grows more intimate. The woman’s suffering intensifies. She is beaten, humiliated, degraded. These scenes are not framed as allegories or as metaphors for Nikki’s emotional state. They are presented with an immediacy that resists symbolic containment. The viewer is forced to experience them as events, not as representations. Suffering normally grounds moral claims. It demands response, responsibility, and explanation. In Inland Empire, suffering proliferates without a stable ground. We do not know who is suffering in the relevant sense. Is it Nikki? Is it the Polish woman? Is it a character in the film within the film? The suffering floats free of subjecthood. Pain exists without a clear bearer.Williamson’s insistence that knowledge requires a knower makes this explicit. These scenes show experience without epistemic ownership. The pain is real, but no one can know it as theirs in a way that would allow action to address it. This is suffering without agency, and it is far more horrifying than suffering with a cause.
The rabbits’ scenes continue to punctuate the film, and their significance deepens here. They sit in their living room, delivering lines that do not respond to one another, accompanied by inappropriate laughter. These scenes no longer feel merely odd. They feel accusatory. They mirror the main narrative’s breakdown. Language persists, but communication fails. Roles persist, but identity dissolves. The rabbits speak, but they do not assert. Their utterances do not commit them to anything. They are not answerable to truth or falsity. This is language emptied of epistemic normativity. It reflects the broader collapse of the conditions under which speech can ground knowledge or responsibility.
As Nikki’s disorientation increases, time itself becomes unreliable. Scenes do not follow one another in a way that supports temporal ordering. Events repeat with variations. Nikki appears to remember things that have not happened, or to forget things that have. This is not simply a psychological breakdown. It is a metaphysical one. Temporal grounding fails resulting in a collapse of temporal dependence relations. Normally, later events are grounded in earlier ones. Causes precede effects. Memory tracks the past. In Inland Empire, these relations no longer hold reliably. Nikki encounters outcomes without causes and causes without outcomes. This makes planning, regret, and responsibility impossible. One cannot choose differently if one cannot locate oneself in time. Rational choice presupposes a temporal structure in which actions lead to consequences. Without that structure, action becomes mere movement. Nikki moves, reacts, flees, but she does not choose in a way that could be evaluated as rational or irrational. Agency thins to reflex.
One of the most harrowing aspects of the film is the way violence escalates without clear motivation. Nikki is threatened, assaulted, chased. Men appear as predators without backstory or explanation. This is not a simple depiction of misogynistic danger. It is a world in which violence no longer needs grounding. It occurs because it can. This is violence after explanation. Violence normally demands justification, even if that justification is condemned. It is grounded in desire, power, fear, or ideology. Here, violence is groundless. It does not serve a purpose. It does not resolve a conflict. It simply happens as a metaphysical symptom rather than a moral act. When violence is groundless, it cannot be resisted by reasons. Nikki cannot argue her way out of danger. She cannot appeal to norms that the world recognises. The very idea of “ought” has lost traction. Deontic language would be meaningless here. There is no system of duties to violate or uphold.
The film within the film continues to intrude in unsettling ways. Nikki finds herself speaking lines from the script in situations that are no longer recognisably part of a production. The distinction between rehearsal and life collapses entirely. This is not because Nikki confuses the two. It is because the world no longer differentiates between them. The grounding relation that would normally separate fictional action from real action is gone. Statements are uttered, but they do not function as assertions about the world. They are not believed or disbelieved. They simply occur. This is language after knowledge. As the film progresses, Nikki’s fear becomes explicit. She realises that she is trapped, though she cannot say in what. She senses that something is wrong, though she cannot locate it. This is meta ignorance. She knows that she does not know what she needs to know, but she also knows that there may be no way to know it. This realisation is devastating. Essence is what tells us what we are and what we can be responsible for. Nikki’s essence has become opaque to her. She does not know what kind of thing she is in the world she inhabits. Without that, there is no stable standpoint from which to act.
As it develops Inland Empire thus marks the transition from under grounding to mis grounding. Identity has not yet collapsed into a final configuration, but it is no longer merely thin. It is distorted. Knowledge has not yet returned as recognition, but ignorance has become painful. Agency has not yet ended, but it has become reactive rather than deliberative. Everything feels exhausting rather than merely frightening. The viewer is forced to inhabit a world in which the structures necessary for rational life have been progressively dismantled. There is still movement, still speech, still desire, but there is no longer a stable self to which these can belong. The film offers sustained exposure to what it is like to live when grounding has failed but consequences have not yet stopped accumulating.
If the first third of Inland Empire shows grounding thinning into opacity, and the second third shows mis grounding turning that opacity into suffering, the final third is where the film passes beyond collapse into something even more disturbing. It is not the return of order, not a revelation of truth, not even a final annihilation of illusion in favour of reality. It is the exhaustion of the very distinction between grounding and ungrounding. What remains is not chaos but a peculiar, flattened necessity, a world in which things happen, suffering occurs, and identities flicker, but in which no metaphysical repair is any longer available. Now Inland Empire is best understood as the depiction of a world in which identity has ceased to be essence grounded, knowledge has ceased to regulate belief or action, and agency has ceased to function as a unifying standpoint. What makes this final movement so difficult is that it does not offer any final recognition that re anchors responsibility to a single self. Instead, the film stages what it looks like when the self itself has become irretrievably dispersed across narrative, temporal, and modal fragments.
The first major shift is the transformation of Nikki into what appears to be a woman lost in a hostile urban underworld. She wanders streets, enters rooms, encounters men who treat her as disposable, violent, or already known. These scenes are often described as Nikki becoming a prostitute or a victim, but this language risks importing a stability the film refuses. Nikki is not adopting a role. She is not playing a character. She is not imagining herself as someone else. She is simply there, subjected to relations that define her position without reference to her previous identity. If Nikki were numerically identical across all these contexts in the ordinary metaphysical sense, then there would have to be a way of saying that this same individual is now occupying radically different social and existential positions. But the film denies us the resources to do that coherently. There is no chain of memory, no continuity of intention, no causal explanation that would ground these transitions. Identity is no longer something that persists through change. It has become episodic. Normally, identity across time is grounded in persistence conditions, bodily continuity, memory, or essence. As we approach the end of the film none of these function reliably. Nikki’s body is present, but it does not secure continuity. Memory flickers but does not unify. Essence, in the sense of what she is, no longer constrains what she can become. The result is not multiplicity in a liberating sense. It is fragmentation without recomposition. Knowledge presupposes a stable subject who can bear beliefs, revise them, and act on them. Nikki cannot do this. She experiences events, but she cannot integrate them into a cognitive economy. She reacts, but she cannot deliberate. She suffers, but she cannot know herself as the one who suffers in a way that would ground response or responsibility. This is not madness in the clinical sense. It is the breakdown of the epistemic conditions of personhood.
The violence Nikki encounters intensifies and becomes more explicit. She is threatened with knives, mocked, abused, chased. The men she encounters are not characterised as individuals with motives or histories. They function as forces. This is not because the film is dehumanising them for moral effect. It is because, within the film’s ontology, agency itself has thinned. These men act, but their actions are not grounded in reasons that could be understood or contested. They are not villains in a narrative sense. They are expressions of a world in which grounding has failed. Violence here is not grounded in essence or intention. It is not even grounded in social structure in a way that could be analysed or resisted. It is groundless occurrence. This is why it feels endless and purposeless. Violence without grounding cannot resolve anything. It can only continue.
The Polish woman’s storyline converges more fully with Nikki’s as the film progresses, but not in a way that clarifies identity. Instead, the convergence intensifies ambiguity. The Polish woman’s suffering, humiliation, and despair mirror Nikki’s experiences, but the film never confirms that they are the same person, nor that one is imagining the other. The film resists any explanation that would reduce one to the other. The Polish woman functions as an intensional object of identification. She is someone Nikki can be without being identical to. This is identification without identity. It is a powerful phenomenon in ordinary life, empathy, projection, recognition. But here it is unbounded. There is no stable self to limit how far identification can go. The result is a collapse of personal boundaries. Nikki does not know that she is the Polish woman. Nor does she know that she is not. The distinction has lost its normative force. Without that distinction, rational agency cannot be sustained. Nikki cannot decide whose pain this is or what to do about it. She can only endure it.
And now the rabbits’ scenes take on a new resonance. They no longer merely parody sitcom language or empty communication. They appear as a kind of ontological remainder. They persist unchanged while everything else dissolves. Their world is artificial, looped, and emotionally flat, but it is stable. The laugh track remains. The furniture does not move. The dialogue, however meaningless, continues. The rabbits inhabit a world that is fully grounded, but in a minimal way. Their actions are grounded in a script. Their world has no depth, but it has structure. Nikki’s world has depth, suffering, and intensity, but it lacks structure. The film seems to suggest that shallow grounding may be preferable to none at all. A scripted existence, while empty, at least allows persistence. This is a deeply unsettling suggestion. Rational life requires structure, even if that structure is imposed. Without it, freedom becomes meaningless because there is no standpoint from which to exercise it. The rabbits have no freedom, but they have continuity. Nikki has neither.
Time itself ceases to function even minimally. Scenes do not merely repeat. They fracture. Nikki appears to relive moments with slight variations. She encounters herself, or versions of herself, without recognition. This is not time travel or recursion in a science fiction sense. It is the collapse of temporal grounding, the loss of diachronic dependence relations. There is no fact of the matter about what is earlier or later in the way that matters for explanation. Without temporal grounding, causation dissolves. Without causation, responsibility cannot attach. Nikki’s actions no longer have consequences in the ordinary sense. Rational action presupposes that one can foresee outcomes, learn from past mistakes, and revise beliefs accordingly. By now none of this is possible. Nikki cannot learn, not because she is cognitively impaired, but because the world does not preserve information in a way that could support learning. Knowledge cannot accumulate. Each moment is epistemically isolated.
The appearance of the screwdriver stabbing scene marks a critical turning point. Nikki stabs a man, seemingly in self defence, and then staggers, wounded herself, into a street where she collapses. This scene is often read as climactic violence or catharsis, but read through our lens it is something else entirely. It is the moment when action occurs without agency. For an action to be attributable to an agent, it must be possible to say that the agent knew what they were doing and could have done otherwise. In this scene, neither condition clearly holds. Nikki acts, but she does not act from a standpoint that could support responsibility. This does not absolve the act in a moral sense. It shows that the conditions for moral assessment have disintegrated. The stabbing is not grounded in intention, character, or narrative necessity. It is not grounded at all. It is an event without a sufficient ground. This is not because the film endorses randomness. It is because the world it depicts can no longer supply grounds. The moment Nikki collapses on the street and experiences what appears to be death is not framed as an ending. It is framed as a transition. She enters a room with a television playing scenes from earlier in the film. She watches herself. This is the final collapse of subject object distinction. Knowledge requires a separation between knower and known. Here, that separation fails. Nikki sees herself as an object, but there is no subject left to integrate that knowledge. Some philosophies give an account of non-self as enlightenment but this is not enlightenment. It is epistemic annihilation as horror.
When Nikki enters the rabbits’ space, shoots the monstrous figure, and is reunited with lost women in a dance like celebration, this is often interpreted as a form of redemption or release. But such a reading seems to me deeply suspect. What we see is not redemption grounded in responsibility or forgiveness. It is re absorption into a minimal, flattened structure where suffering ceases because agency has ceased. The women smile, dance, and seem relieved. But nothing has been repaired. No wrong has been righted. No identity has been restored. What has happened is that the film has retreated from depth to surface. Pain has been silenced, not resolved. The final whisper of “Axxon N” or the closing song does not signal transcendence. It signals closure of a different kind. The world has sealed itself against further grounding demands. It is not the restoration of essence. It is the elimination of depth. When there is no essence, there is no responsibility, but also no suffering in the full sense. The film’s final images suggest that this flattening is the only escape available once grounding has been allowed to collapse completely. The final state is not one of rational reconciliation. It is one of silence. Silence is what remains when assertion, belief, duty, and identity can no longer function. The whisper at the end is not an answer. It is the cessation of questioning.
Knowledge is not merely one value among others. It is what allows a life to be lived as a unified project. Without it, experience fragments into episodes that cannot be owned or redeemed. Inland Empire does not argue against knowledge. It shows what a world without it feels like from the inside. Seen as a whole the end of Inland Empire is not a resolution but an exposure. It exposes the cost of living in a world where grounding relations have dissolved, where identity is no longer essence grounded, where modal freedom is untethered from actuality, and where agency cannot be sustained. Inland Empire leaves us in a metaphysical wasteland where even tragedy has lost its structure. This is why Inland Empire is Lynch’s most unsettling film. It does not offer horror, dream logic, or revelation as genres. It offers a sustained phenomenology of life after grounding, a philosophical thought experiment of extraordinary severity. It asks not what happens when we are deceived, or when we flee responsibility, but what happens when the very conditions that make identity, knowledge, and responsibility possible erode beyond repair. The answer the film gives is not chaos, but something colder and quieter. Silence.