In this section of our Colossus Movie Guide for Inland Empire, we will explain the film’s ending.
Cast
- Laura Dern – Nikki Grace / Sue Blue
- Jeremy Irons – Kingsley Stewart
- Justin Theroux – Devon Berk / Billy Side
- Harry Dean Stanton – Freddie Howard
- Julia Ormond – Doris Side
- Diane Ladd – Marilyn Levens
- Peter J. Lucas – Piotrek Krol / Smithy
- Grace Zabriskie – Visitor #1
- Mary Steenburgen – Visitor #2
- Karolina Gruszka – Lost Girl
- Krzysztof Majchrzak – Phantom
- Ian Abercrombie – Henry, The Butler
- Nae – Street Woman
- Terry Crews – Street Man
- David Lynch – Writer and director
The end of Inland Empire explained
Recap
For this explanation, we’ll cover the final 30-ish minutes of Inland Empire. This gives us quite a bit of material to chew on as we explore the ending and its meaning.
After being stabbed with a screwdriver, Nikki stumbles across the street and collapses next to a few homeless people. One woman tells a strange story about her friend Niko, who has a pet monkey that shits everywhere. Then the other woman turns her attention to Nikki. “I’ll show you the light now,” she says as she lights a lighter in front of Nikki’s face. “It burns bright, for heaven. No more blue tomorrows. You goin’ high now love.” Nikki then dies—only for it to be revealed that she’s on the set of Kingsley’s movie, On High in Blue Tomorrow. Kingsley congratulates her on an amazing performance, but in a daze she barely registers the compliment as she wanders off.
Nikki walks out onto the studio lot. We then cut to the Lost Girl, who is watching live footage of Nikki on her television. Nikki walks into a theater, where the footage of her interview with the policeman is playing. “I guess after my son died, I went into a bad time,” Nikki says on screen. “When I was watching everything go around me while I was standing in the middle. Watching it, like in a dark theater, before they bring the lights up.” On the screen, Nikki looks down at the screwdriver in her hand, and then walks across a room towards a red lamp. Then Nikki inside the theater sees the policeman from the screen walk through the theater, then up a set of stairs. She follows him, then walks through a door labeled “Axxon N.”
In that room, she walks up to the red lamp she saw on the theater screen. She opens a dresser and picks up a gun. She walks through several hallways and finds a door marked “47.” From around the corner, the Phantom appears and walks towards her. Nikki shoots him with her gun and a bright light shines in his eyes, practically blinding him. He stands still, dazed by the light. Then Nikki’s terrified face is superimposed over the Phantom’s face. She shoots one last time, and blood pours from the superimposed face’s mouth.
We then cut to a shot of the human rabbits in their apartment. They turn towards the door, which slowly opens. A light from the hallways flashes across their room. Nikki then walks backwards from the hallway into the room, revealing that the rabbits inhabit apartment 47. The rabbits are now gone, and in the room is a bright shining light.
We then cut back to the Lost Girl, who is watching two prostitutes run through the hallway of the apartment building on her television. They appear to be running away, apparently freed by Nikki after killing the Phantom. Then the Lost Girl’s television shows Nikki walking into her room. Nikki and the Lost Girl embrace and kiss. As they kiss, Nikki disappears. Then the Lost Girl exits her apartment and walks down several hallways. She reaches the room marked “Axxon N” and embraces a man and a boy who appear to be her husband and son.
We cut back to the shining light from apartment 47, which fills the screen and fades into a shot of Nikki, who stands in a room as a light shines brightly on her face. A dancing ballerina is lightly superimposed over Nikki’s face. The camera cuts to reveal that the bright light is coming from the projection booth of a theater. Then the camera fades back to the Lost Girl and her family, then fades into the scene from the beginning of the movie when Visitor #1 comes to Nikki’s home. This time when Nikki looks over at the couch, however, she sees herself calmly sitting alone in a powdery blue dress.
Then a credits scene initiates. This scene features several people—some new, some who were referenced at certain points, and some characters we’ve never seen. The movie ends with a song and dance number from several women.
Meaning
As we’ve discussed throughout this guide, it’s difficult to construct an objective reading of Inland Empire‘s story. Lynch shot the film over several months as ideas came to him for scenes, and there was never a master script. Dern herself said that she wasn’t sure what her character’s story was. “I understood who each woman was and I understood what her pain may be about,” Dern told MacLachlan on the special features of Criterion Collection’s Blu-ray release of the film, “but not necessarily how I got there or where I would go next.”
Still, I believe there’s a way to read this ending that lines up with the two main themes we discussed in the Themes and Meaning section: “our changing perception of cinema” and “the scattered fragments of our selves.” While I don’t believe anyone will ever provide a 100% conclusive reading of Inland Empire, I believe my theory about the meta nature of this movie comes close.
My theory involves two parts. First, let’s take a broad, philosophical look at the ending. This will then allow us to answer some more specific questions.
The broad, philosophical look
As we discussed in the Themes and Meaning section, the scattershot structure of Inland Empire inherently addresses our fragmented psyches. We often vacillate between the person we’d like to be and the person we feel pressured to be and the person we’re afraid to become. In order to inhabit such a tumultuous character that would embody this universal feeling, Lynch never gave Dern a hint about her character journey beyond that she was “a woman in trouble.”
So let’s address the scene where the homeless woman lights a lighter for Dern’s character as she dies on the sidewalk (we’ll come back to the monkey that shits everywhere later). It’s a beautiful moment that serves a very meta purpose—for both Nikki (inside the movie) and Dern (outside the movie). Because, as it’s revealed, this scene is actually a moment from the movie Nikki is filming, On High in Blue Tomorrows.
Let’s consider a quote from Dern about this specific scene: “David wanted me in the same position at the audience, which is: We don’t know what’s unfolding. We don’t know the miracle of one thing a person’s going to tell you who’s a stranger in your life and how it may impact the rest of your life.” This is a key thing to understand: neither Nikki nor Dern understand their character’s journey at any moment. They are simply responding to what is happening at any given moment. This is crucial to understanding the ending of the film.
The movie itself situates this scene within a narrative where Nikki is filming a movie, but gets lost in her character. Thus, when she realizes the scene with the homeless woman was for a movie, she’s dazed and confused. But then the ethereal scenario she’s been stuck in the whole time continues, and Nikki wanders off into a strange, ethereal realm where she must kill the Phantom and set the Lost Girl free. In one moment, we are led to believe that Nikki has been transported back to reality. But before long, she’s lost in the labyrinth of Inland Empire once again.
This constant back-and-forth is a key component of the movie. As beautifully detailed by Jodi Brooks in her analysis of the film, Lynch constantly makes poetic use of the shot/reverse shot structure in Inland Empire. Typically, the technique is used to depict a conversation between two people. But in Nikki’s case, she is constantly subjected to a shot/reverse shot that thrusts her between several characters and settings, upsetting the logic of time and space we’re used to in cinematic narratives:
In scene after scene, Nikki fractures into versions of herself and versions of her character that she does not recognise in sequences that seem to endlessly delay or trouble a reverse shot. This dynamic is established in opening scene when Nikki is visited by the mysterious so-called neighbour (Grace Zabriskie). In scene after scene, Nikki fractures into versions of herself and versions of her character that she does not recognise, in sequences that seem to endlessly delay or trouble a reverse shot. This dynamic is established in the opening scene when Nikki is visited by the mysterious “neighbour” (Grace Zabriskie). After a number of shot/reverse shots of the two women’s faces in distorted close-up, we move to a close-up of Nikki’s face as she turns to look at the place where (she is told) she will be sitting tomorrow. Nikki slowly turns her head and looks off-screen, and this look is answered by a long shot of Nikki and some of her friends seated on a sofa in the far distance of the palatial room. The shot/reverse shot structure here serves to fracture any sense of a coherent narrative space or time, instead throwing our attention to the blind field that it traces. This establishes the particular shot/reverse shot structure or logic that the film will be structured around, one in which the reverse shot always problematises the ‘here’ of the shot.
Jodi Brooks, “Cinema, Disappearance and Scale in David Lynch’s Inland Empire“
The movie Nikki is trying to complete—which is actually a remake of a movie called 47 that was never finished—is constantly unraveling and revealing new layers. As the movie progresses, the movie continually disappears as well. Which is disorienting. Thus, the shot/reverse shot technique that Brooks writes about instills a crucial component of the film: that neither Nikki nor Dern understand their character’s journey at any time. They are moving from one scene to the next, dealing with the pain of the present moment as an actress. Which, when you think about it, is what life feels like. We go through this world shifting between various personalities, trying to discover who we truly are. And what better way to visually capture that journey than through an actress? Or, better yet: an actress playing an actress?
Dern agrees. “In a way,” she told MacLachlan, “the performative aspect of multiple characters, the woman inside the woman inside the woman, is: Whose fantasy is it? Is the actress playing this broken homeless woman in trouble? Or is this woman in trouble dreaming of these different lives? And that was awe inspiring. And so that put me on my own internal journey so I could discover it for me.”
You could think of the entire film as an internalization of Nikki’s vulnerable state. While she was once a prominent actress, her career had been dwindling—until On High in Blue Tomorrows, which potentially presents a comeback moment for her. She’s anxious about whether she’ll get the part. And, technically, she never gets the part—she only imagines herself getting the part after Visitor #1 initiates a vision. As Brooks details, this shot/reverse shot moment sets up the inherently manipulative, incoherent aesthetic of the film. What we’re watching is completely inside her own head, meaning that every character, every scary situation, every twist and turn is nothing more than a representation of her fears and anxieties as she awaits to hear whether she’s secured this new role.
All of this applies to Dern as well. She didn’t know what she was signing up for when Lynch approached her with a 14-page monologue that, over the period of several months, warped into a three-hour cryptic epic called Inland Empire. Philosophically, the movie becomes an exploration of walking down that scary path towards discovering who you are. And by doing that, both Nikki and Dern are able to find catharsis.
The specifics
To me, this mentality helps explain several of the other outstanding questions you may have about the ending. For instance, because 47 was never completed, the Lost Girl was trapped in the apartment building. As she played a young prostitute character in the movie, the actress was eternally trapped in this terrible role that kept her separated from her real-life family. And until the movie is completed and her character is freed—which Nikki does—she cannot return to her husband and son. Thus, by freeing this woman from the curse of her uncompleted movie, Nikki symbolically addresses her own fears about reentering the movie business and discovers her true self through the Susan role.
Through this reading you can think of the apartment building in which the Lost Girl is trapped as a symbolic display of those fears. The Lost Girl sees everything that happens in the apartment building on her television. As we eventually find out, the apartment building exists on a movie set, meaning she’s been trapped there since being murdered. Thus, everything on screen serves as a source of torture. The rabbits, for instance, say the most inane, mundane statements in a sitcom format. She cries as she watches it. The Lost Girl is essentially forced to watch mindless television for eternity.
But, eventually, Nikki appears on that television. And before long, Nikki is able trace where the Lost Girl resides and kill the Phantom (with her own face superimposed over the Phantom, Nikki comes to envision herself as her own biggest adversary). Her ability to traverse the apartment building and eventually embrace the Lost Girl is, once again, a moment of self-realization for her character. In this imagined scenario where a woman was murdered on the set of 47, Nikki essentially crafts a maze in order to ready herself for On High in Blue Tomorrows. And at the center of that maze is a woman who can be freed from the horrors of her unfinished movie. It’s a symbolic way of Nikki confidently saying, “I’m ready to make my comeback.”
So after the Lost Girl is freed and returned to her family, Nikki fades away from this torturous labyrinth and appears in a movie theater with a light shining on her. This, in my opinion, is a nod to Dern the actress. As we’ve noted, Inland Empire is meta in multiple senses, as Lynch sent Dern down a winding path of self-discovery by inhabiting so many different characters. And Lynch seems to be acknowledging her and the movie itself both times she appears in a theater.
The first time was right after filming the death scene for On High in Blue Tomorrows. She wanders off set into a theater, where her discussion with the policeman is playing. This, it turns out, was the original 14-page monologue Lynch wrote for Dern that initiated the entire Inland Empire experience.
The second time Dern is in the theater, the ballerina superimposed over Dern’s face is a short film from Lynch called Ballerina that he shot while making Inland Empire. These two meta entities fuse to connect Dern the actress with Lynch the filmmaker—the interpreter with the creator. It’s an awe-inspiring alignment that speaks to the power of art to transcend the screen and capture the surreal beauties of life. Lynch created a movie that pays homage to the power of film, that allowed Dern to discover new parts of herself through a myriad of roles, that illustrated the universal pains of humanity for anybody watching. It’s a moment of meta cohesion that brings catharsis to the film’s vast array of ideas.
This, then, explains the rest of the movie. After completing their journeys, both Nikki and Dern return to the real world. But instead of envisioning a nightmarish scenario, they now see themselves dressed in angelic blue on the couch. They are content and ready for whatever comes next.
You can then think of the credits scene as a celebration. Many characters return—yes, even the monkey who shits everywhere—to dance and sing and smile for the women who made it through such a trying experience.
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