A Tale of Two Factories: David Lynch, Łódź & ‘Inland Empire’ at 20

Inland-Empire-Lynch-212.jpg, default, Laura Dern in ‘Inland Empire’, directed by David Lynch, 2006, photo: NG Collection / Interfoto / Forum

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David Lynch’s last film for cinemas was also a Polish co-production, shot partly in Łódź – and in 2006 it was received warmly, and with real bewilderment. Twenty years on, and a year after Lynch’s death, both the formal nerve of ‘Inland Empire’ and the sweep of its attack on Hollywood are finally legible.

Back in 2006, no one expected that Inland Empire, which had its premiere screening at the Venice Film Festival, would be Lynch’s very last full-length film. Although the American director died almost 20 years later – in January 2025 – he didn’t make any more films after it. Or rather, he made no more films for cinemas, since what actually crowned his filmography was another television project, perhaps the most ingenious in history: the 18-hour 2017 masterpiece of a return to the town of Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks: The Return. And yet it is Inland Empire, Lynch’s most hermetic, inscrutable and enigmatic film, that most urgently demands to be revisited today. Why?

The reasons are countless. As we continue to mourn Lynch, we’re inclined to revisit his oeuvre, especially all that was overlooked at the time of the premiere. The director’s final films, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, initially analysed and interpreted as nightmares growing out of a fractured identity, invite completely different readings now that the sexual abuse of women at the hands of Hollywood’s most powerful figures has been exposed. These pictures no longer appear as manneristic fiddling with film form that can easily be brushed off as such, but rather as quite literal depictions of how the machinery backstage at ‘the dream factory’ is powered by trauma and violence.

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Still from ‘Inland Empire’, directed by David Lynch, 2006, photo: courtesy of the Everett Collection / East News

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But it’s not just Lynch’s unprecedented courage as a Hollywood whistleblower that argues the case for repeated screenings of his final film. In fact, the 20th anniversary of Inland Empire ought to feature on every Polish calendar of cultural events worth the name, since the film itself isn’t just a Polish co-production – involving Polish actors, with many Polish-language dialogues and more than a few scenes shot in Łódź – but one that treats Polishness from the perspective of sunny Los Angeles. It deals with the status of being on the periphery, with exclusion, and with the constant sense of not belonging to one’s own group. To celebrate 20 years of Inland Empire, let’s review the circumstances that led to the friendship between Lynch and Poland and the making of the great master’s final film.

The film city Lynch tried to build in Łódź

As we familiarise ourselves with the different stages of the film’s production, reading old interviews and articles dealing with the progress on set, it’s difficult not to notice that the history of Inland Empire not only gives us insight into this particular work but also, in a non-obvious way, reveals the broader context of the 2000s in Poland. That’s because in those texts, what’s as important as the film itself is the plan Lynch conceived together with Marek Żydowicz (for many years the director of the Camerimage festival, to whose close ties with Inland Empire we’ll return later) to establish an interdisciplinary arts centre in Łódź, one that would bring together artists from all disciplines, enabling them to establish mutual relations, inspire each other, develop shared projects, and so on.

With guileless enthusiasm characteristic of him, Lynch spoke about transforming Łódź from an industrial city into a prominent artistic hub, which could attract directors and producers from all over the world.

However, as we now know, the plans came to nothing, and Łódź still awaits the resurrection of its legendary status in the film world, with Lynch and Żydowicz’s ideas remaining an extraordinary sign of the times. On the websites of newspapers and magazines such as Przekrój (Cross-Section), Rzeczpospolita (The Republic) and Dziennik (The Daily News), we can read about the euphoria that accompanied those first years of Poland’s EU membership, paradoxically reinforced by right-wing parties’ rise to power and the forming of the PiS-LPR-Samoobrona (Law and Justice, League of Polish Families, Self-Defence) coalition in May 2006. We can also read about a great civilisational step forward, about an unprecedented sense of openness to the world, adequately illustrated by Lynch and Żydowicz’s dreams.

In conversation with Barbara Hollender for Rzeczpospolita (2006, issue 275), when asked whether there isn’t a similar sense of possibility and creative ferment in the United States, Lynch responded:

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No, because what we see here is the hope of a new beginning. In the US, maybe there was a similar atmosphere 200 years ago. In Poland, I witnessed the anticipation of ‘the new’ that was still to come.

It’s notable how different the socio-political narrative is today, and how exotic the cosmopolitan optimism of the period before the 2008 financial crisis might seem.

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Emily Stofle, David Lynch & Karolina Gruszka, 12th Festival of Stars in Gdańsk, 2007, photo: Marcin Dławichowski / Forum

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In fact, economic matters play a significant role in this story, since a question that obsessively recurs in interviews with Lynch is about the film’s budget. As if they could scarcely believe that Łódź itself could have piqued the director’s interest, journalists immediately try to connect the dots.

‘Inland Empire is a region in southern California. But you shot your film in Łódź. Was it about the money?’ enquired Ewelina Kustra of Kultura TV (TV Culture). Beata Nowicka went even further, claiming that ‘[the film] was meant to be an experiment, a test, an answer to the question: Is it possible to shoot a film even in Poland?’ since apparently it wasn’t obvious at the time. Lynch would assure the interviewers that he wasn’t too concerned about the budget, as the film was cheap – shot on digital camera, without using up kilometres of precious film stock, at almost ready-made locations, with music recorded in the Czech Republic.

Its characteristically rough and raw texture (brilliantly brought out today in the restored version released by the prestigious publisher Criterion) was met at the time of the premiere with both admiration – the kind you feel for something peculiar, if imperfect – and mockery. Nowadays, however, it’s much clearer how the highly intentional effect of amateurishness is tied not only to the story being told but also to the creative credo guiding Lynch during the production.

Camerimage, a green room & no script

Lynch first visited Łódź in 2000, invited by Żydowicz and the team behind the Camerimage festival – ‘the Łódź gang’, as the director fondly called them a few years later. Although he intended to be a guest at the event, the city’s atmosphere kept him there for longer.

Lynch was impressed by the foggy, gloomy cityscape, the sight of the abandoned, deteriorating factory floors contrasting with the lavish palaces of local factory owners, especially since they might have made him think of Philadelphia, where he had gone to art school as a young man. Although Lynch himself did not draw such a comparison, the way he talked about them – the cities where contradictory elements come together, where beauty and ugliness merge into one – may suggest that both of them struck the same emotional chord with him.

In 2003, during his next visit to Łódź, Lynch could no longer resist his instincts – he spontaneously came up with the idea to shoot a short film there. Żydowicz offered to help with a superfast recruitment of actors – Karolina Gruszka and Krzysztof Majchrzak – who didn’t hesitate to accept the invitation, even though at that point nobody, Lynch included, had any plan as to what the project would be about.

Lynch took the resulting short film, The Green Room in Łódź, back with him to Los Angeles, but the project continued to weigh on his mind. Together with Laura Dern, his favourite actress – and neighbour, which certainly made the process easier – he began to shoot additional scenes. He eventually returned to Poland to work on further sequences together with the increasingly large local crew (with Leon Niemczyk, who died shortly afterwards, and Peter J. Lucas joining the cast).

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Jeremy Irons in ‘Inland Empire’, directed by David Lynch, 2006, photo: Kino Świat / Reset

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As the actors recalled, the film was coming into existence without a finished script, with subsequent scenes growing out of the previous ones on the fly, overseen by Lynch, notorious for consistently refusing to comment on or explain his own works. The way the film kept sprouting new sections, the way its plot branches into different storylines, sometimes related to each other in a very unclear way, and the intentional narrative inconsistency between individual levels of the story – all these things remain organically tied to the deep subject of the picture.

It tells the story of Nikki Grace (Laura Dern), a Hollywood actress about to star in a remake of an old, allegedly cursed film. Having begun an affair with the other lead actor (Justin Theroux), Grace ceases to distinguish between the film set, the story, and her own personal life. Simultaneously, she becomes submerged in a cascade of what seem to be someone else’s memories, observing and participating in the life of a woman from Łódź who may or may not also be an actress (Karolina Gruszka), who remains under the destructive, hypnotic influence of Phantom (Krzysztof Majchrzak), a figure haunting different temporal planes, equipped with dark magical powers.

Hollywood & Łódź run on the same logic

Just like with Lynch’s previous film Mulholland Drive, most interpretations of Inland Empire revolved around the main character’s psyche. Jacek Wakar wrote about the film as an ‘inner empire [in which] there are two mutually exclusive sides to the same human personality – bright and dark, human and animal – and combined, they create a unified whole’ (Dziennik 2007, issue 173). Meanwhile, Anita Piotrowska asked whether, in this ‘dark world of dreams and the subconscious, a world concealed below the surface […,] [Lynch] manages to touch the cavernous depths of our being, or whether he merely creates a suggestive sequence of psychedelic images’ – but she eventually gives no clear answer, voicing an appreciation of the film’s sweep and boldness despite her reservations.

In a slightly more critical vein, Małgorzata Sadowska maintained that the film gets stuck in its own lack of precision and discipline, simultaneously remarking, not without wit, that ‘if the [Łódź] authorities thought that David Lynch would help promote the city, they must be bitterly disappointed. If I were a tourist, an encouragement like this would only make me give it a wide berth’ (Przekrój 2007, issue 30).

Now, 20 years later, the film – inevitably seen as Lynch’s final creative manifesto – reveals new meanings. What’s most interesting is the peculiar kinship between the two factories – Hollywood as the dream factory and Łódź as the haunted factory of the past. Despite the huge distance between them, they operate according to the same logic – fuelled by dreams and ambition, they produce tinsel and capital, but the production process is dirty, ruthless and sometimes bloody. The machinery, which never stops, engulfs hundreds of lives to benefit the few who luck out. It feeds on people’s readiness for sacrifice and humiliation, but its hunger is never satisfied. Simultaneously, it conceals its nightmarish insides behind elegant façades of neo-baroque palaces, behind simple but neat brick walls, behind the closed doors of producers’ rooms, into which, discreetly and alone, young actresses are invited.

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Laura Dern in ‘Inland Empire’, directed by David Lynch, 2006, photo: NG Collection / Interfoto / Forum

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Inland Empire is sometimes accused of employing radical means that make access to the film itself difficult – after all, it lasts a full three hours, doesn’t revolve around a story that’s easy to follow, and the images significantly stand out from the professional standards of Hollywood productions. However, imperfection and ugliness are deeply inscribed into the film’s thematic tissue, and they make the refusal to visually enhance the production more effective as a gesture that exposes Hollywood’s dark side, revealing what’s hidden behind the glamorous surface. The film itself – constructed sequentially, feverishly yet with traces of methodical deliberation – turns into the third factory before our eyes, a factory of images, whose raw, grainy, ruthless shots force us to confront how our cinematic dreams are made and not dreamt.

An unfinished film, an unfinished career

After Inland Empire’s premiere in Venice – when the actors themselves, including Gruszka, watched the completed film for the first time while ‘terribly nervous’ – Żydowicz told Justyna Kobus: ‘I have the impression that this version of the film isn’t final, that it’ll continue to evolve’ (Dziennik 2006, issue 121). The film available today still contains that clearly discernible touch of incompleteness to which the director of Camerimage seems to have pointed – as if individual components of the story demanded conclusion or elaboration. And there’s something equally incomplete about Lynch’s filmography as a whole.

During production, the director maintained that his situation was comfortable budget-wise, but it’s symptomatic that he didn’t manage to secure funding for another cinema production over the next 20 years – despite the fact that, as he would state repeatedly throughout the rest of his life, he still had loads of ideas.

If we were to indulge in a cinematic conspiracy theory, we could argue that his final films, although misunderstood in the 2000s, spoke too openly about the issues Hollywood would manage to keep silent on up until the wave of #MeToo as well as the Weinstein and Epstein scandals. I think that we, here in Poland, ought to be proud that cinema’s weirdest retelling of The Promised Land – Andrzej Wajda’s 1975 epic charting Łódź’s factory boom – was not only ahead of its time, but may also have helped change how the dream factory actually makes its dreams.

_{Originally written in Polish, Aug 2026, translated by Anna Potoczny, Aug 2026}

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