Lost in Narration. Post-narrative Poetics and the Critique of Auteurist Subjectivity in David Lynch’s Inland Empire

Abstract

This paper interprets David Lynch’s L.A. trilogy—especially its final installment, Inland Empire (2006)—as a critique of narrative subjectification and auteur theory. While Lynch himself is often framed as an autonomous auteur, the trilogy stages the pitfalls of precisely this mode of authorship-subjectivity: in all three films, protagonists traumatically disintegrate when narrative identity becomes untenable. In Inland Empire, this traumatic experience becomes a formal structure undermining spatiotemporal continuity, causality, and self-identical characters. While some critics see the film’s unreadability as a failure, this paper argues that it is its core poetic intervention: a post-narrative aesthetics, immersing the viewer into the trauma of ‘losing one’s plot,’ while also hinting at alternative life forms beyond narrative identity and auteurism.