Beginning in Germany in the early 20th century, the Expressionist movement sought to convey the artist’s or characters’ inner emotions and desires through visual effect. In art, this is exemplified through Edvard Munch’s The Scream and Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period works. In film, however, expressionism was founded by Robert Wiene with his film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, released in 1920. Since it was released, countless directors have incorporated its style and themes into their work. Guillermo del Toro, for example, uses expressionism in his film Pan’s Labyrinth to show fantasy as a form of escapism for children under stressful circumstances such as war, in this case. Alex Proyas’ films Dark City and The Crow both take clear aesthetic inspiration from the town of Holstenwall. Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg is a pseudo-documentary of his hometown and his family life, but uses expressionism to subvert the documentary structure and create an image of Winnipeg that he shows to be ensnaring but uniquely idyllic. The influence of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari can also be seen in the works of the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York which both feature distorted versions of reality through memory sequences and manipulation of time, respectively.
Though the influence of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari can be seen in countless films over the last ninety years, the most prominent expressionist writer-director is David Lynch. Lynch directed ten films and a TV show, most of which prominently featuring dreamscapes or distorted versions of reality. Despite never having admitted to taking influence from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, at least four of his films take clear influence from its style, plot, and themes: Eraserhead (1977), Mulholland Dr. (2001), Blue Velvet (1986), and Inland Empire (2006). Because of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, David Lynch has been able to amass a body of work that not only upholds the legacy of 20th century expressionism, but transcends it to create his own modern form that will doubtlessly carry expressionism into the next generations of film.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari opens with two men seated together on a park bench as a woman, Jane (Lil Dagover), walks by. One of the men, Francis (Friedrich Feher), tells the other man that Jane is his fiancée and begins to tell a story. The film follows this story as it is told by Francis, beginning with a shot of Holstenwall’s jagged, compact buildings. Francis and his friend Alan (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski) are shown to be competing over Jane’s affection and planning to go to the town fair, which Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss) is applying to showcase something in. The town clerk accepts Caligari’s application and is later found stabbed to death. Francis and Alan go to the fair and see Dr. Caligari’s spectacle: a somnambulist named Cesare (Conrad Veidt) that Caligari claims is omniscient. Alan asks Cesare how long he lives, to which Cesare responds “until dawn.” Alan is then found stabbed to death in the morning. Investigating his friend’s murder, Francis spies on Caligari and sees him sleeping beside Cesare’s coffin. During this investigation, Cesare breaks into Jane’s home and abducts her, causing an angry mob to chase him until he collapses, dead. Francis leads the police to Caligari’s sideshow, who find that the body in Caligari’s coffin is a prop. In the ensuing chaos, Caligari escapes to the asylum that he directs. Francis leads an investigation into him there, finding indisputable evidence and locking Dr. Caligari away. The film then cuts back to Francis and the older man on the bench, who both walk to Caligari’s asylum. It is then revealed that Francis, Jane, and Cesare are asylum inmates and that the story was entirely fictional, taking place in Francis’ dreams.
Eraserhead opens with a series of surreal images of a planet, a pool of water, and a sperm-like creature emerging from a man’s head and falling into the pool. The man, Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), is then shown walking home with groceries and speaking to his neighbor across the hall (Judith Anna Roberts) about a dinner date with his girlfriend, Mary X (Charlotte Stewart), that he’s about to miss. He goes to this dinner and meets Mary’s talkative father, and her mentally unstable mother who corners him, asking if he and her daughter had sex and forcing herself upon him. She tells him afterward that Mary had his child and they were being forced to wed. The two move into his apartment, which is covered in dirt, and care for their perpetually bandaged child. This child is identical to the creature that emerged from his mouth in the opening sequence, remaining inhuman and emitting a constant, shrill noise. Mary decides that she can’t handle the pressure of motherhood and leaves, leaving the fearful Henry to care for the child. Henry begins having visions of a woman that lives in his radiator (Laurel Near) killing sperm-like creatures. In the absence of his wife, he has sex with the woman across the hall and images reappear from the opening sequence. This is followed by an elaborate dream sequence containing the Lady in the Radiator, his child decapitating him, and his head being turned into erasers. Fearing that his child will kill him in real life, he cuts open the child’s bandages, revealing its organs. He then kills the child and the film shows another dream sequence in which the child’s head grows to fill the room, replaced by the planet from the opening sequence exploding and Henry walking into a light hand-in-hand with the Lady in the Radiator.
Lynch’s Eraserhead is the foremost expressionist film since the end of the Weimar Period in 1933. Released in 1977 after Lynch’s proposed 1970 expressionist film Gardenback was declined, Lynch sought to make a personal, introspective film about a man afraid of fatherhood and its responsibilities. Throughout the film, Lynch creates landscapes, characters, and situations that portray Henry’s various other fears and perceptions of his surroundings. For example, traditionally dusty areas of a house such as on top of a dresser or under furniture are shown in Henry’s apartment as covered in mounds of dirt and grime, expressing his view of them as more dirty than they actually are. Additionally, the sequences with Mary’s family that show the parents as talkative or overtly sexual are exaggerated forms of their actual character, but represent Henry’s interpretations of their behavior.
These situations, as well as the decrepit industrial wasteland the film is set in, are akin to the landscapes in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in that the city of Holstenwall, as imagined by Francis, is cramped and jagged. This expression of claustrophobia and instability in Francis’ mind conveys his status as an asylum inmate just as the piles of dirt in Henry’s apartment convey him as obsessive about cleanliness. Just as Francis’ fear of the asylum director is manifested in the murderous character of Caligari, Henry’s fear of fatherhood and sex is manifested in his disfigured and haunting child. In addition, both films feature a location that serves as an escape for the characters, maintaining the use of expressionism to symbolize escapism. The set design of Jane’s home conveys a sense of solace and tranquility for Francis as a momentary reprieve from the uncomfortable world around him. For Henry Spencer, his place of solace is the inside of his radiator, occupied by a woman that he is notably fond of. As this dreamscape paradise becomes perverted by the presence of his child, the Lady in the Radiator begins to take violent action against their presence, taking away his only source of happiness. As a result of this, Henry kills his child. Like in Eraserhead, Francis takes action to reclaim his paradise by bringing down Dr. Caligari as revenge for Jane’s kidnapping by Cesare, in addition to his murders. Lynch’s Eraserhead prominently features the expressionist style of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari but differs from its execution by using the loss of Henry’s place of solitude to lay the groundwork for the climax rather than being an additional aspect of it. Though featured primarily in Eraserhead, the theme of recovering something that was once precious is not unique to it. It is also used extensively in the hopeless romance of his penultimate work, Mulholland Dr.
The opening shots of Mulholland Dr. depict a car crash on the titular road with one survivor (Laura Harring), who wanders aimlessly into Los Angeles and breaks into an apartment. The tenant of this apartment, aspiring actress Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), returns to find the survivor there and asks her name. Due to the crash, the survivor has been rendered amnesiac and takes her name from a film poster, posing as Rita Hayworth. Betty decides to help Rita recall her life before the crash by sifting through her purse, which contains a blue key. A sequence of several seemingly-unrelated scenes follow, including a scene in which a director, Adam (Justin Theroux), is urged by mobsters and a mysterious figure named The Cowboy to choose a woman, Camilla Rhodes (Melissa George), for a role he doesn’t believe she fits. During the sequence, there is also a scene of a hitman accidentally killing three of the wrong people. The film cuts back to Betty and Rita eating at a diner where they are served by a woman named Diane, which leads Betty’s memory to a woman named Diane Selwyn. Betty is then shown performing an audition, which is highly praised. She is taken to meet Adam for a role, but he is already determined to cast Camilla. Betty returns to Rita and takes her to Selwyn’s apartment, in which they find her corpse on the bed. The duo return to Betty’s apartment, fall in love, consummate their love, and travel to a nightclub called Club Silencio because of a dream Rita had. In the club, the instruments and the singer are recordings, as stated by the emcee. The song, a Spanish rendition of Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” drives the two to tears and they leave. Betty finds a blue box in her purse, which she opens with Rita’s key. The box falls to the floor, and a sequence of fleeting dreams leads to Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts) waking up in her bed and leading her life. Diane Selwyn was driven to depression due to her failed romantic relationship with Camilla Rhodes (Laura Harring). She attends a party at Adam’s house, invited by Camilla, in which she has dinner with Camilla, Adam, an unnamed actor (Scott Coffey), and various other actors and actresses. At dinner, Camilla kisses another woman (Melissa George) and smiles at Diane, then kisses Adam. Out of jealousy, Diane hires the hitman from earlier to kill Camilla. She sees the blue key in her apartment and driven mad by hallucinations, kills herself as the singer whispers “silencio.”
Both Mulholland Dr. and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari prominently feature a sharp contrast between the nature of dream realities and the real world around the main character. In The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Francis is shown to be dreaming up a damsel-in-distress story that features himself falling in love with the willing Jane, but that is shown to be nothing more than a fantasy he created around her. The reveal at the end of Mulholland Dr. does the same thing, in effect. At the end of the film, a series of half-real images appear on screen to signify the process of awakening from a deep sleep, followed by the reveal that Betty was a persona created by Diane’s mind to fantasize about a successful romance with Camilla and a successful film career. As she was rendered an amnesiac by the car crash that opens the film, Camilla/Rita becomes the damsel in distress who Diane/Betty must save. When Diane makes the decision to take her own life, the club singer repeats “silencio,” insinuating that like the band and the singer, the persona of Betty was just a performer of a recording, recorded by Diane as a more pleasurable reality. This twist, when executed in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, was original for the time and turned the film into a frame story, where the actions in the center of the film are framed as false by the reality of the situation that begin and end the film. Mulholland Dr. does something similar, except the twist is retrospectively made more mysterious by the lack of this plot framing. Its plot is framed on the conclusion end by their real identities, but the film opened with their dream identities, which gives more power to the twist at the end.
By contrast, the manner in which Naomi Watts acts changes drastically when the distinction is made between the two identities, whereas none of the other actors or actresses change behavior. Watts portrays the role of Betty as naïve with a mask-like, carefree manner of speaking and conducting herself. When the film shifts to Watts portraying Diane, however, she does so in a more serious and dramatic fashion: the same way Betty acted in her audition. In The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, however, it is not Veidt that makes this distinction, but the framing of the character within the story. Francis throughout the film is portrayed as sane and intelligent, determined to bring down Dr. Caligari as the serial killer. When the film shifts to show Francis and his fellow inmates outside of the dreamscape, Francis’ behavior does not change while every other character’s does. This provides an opposite image of what Francis portrayed the story as, lending heavily to the expressionist elements of the film that regard him as insane. Both films follow the same technical plot structure, whereas Mulholland Dr. molds this plot structure to fit the overarching mystery and remove the framing for the twist, which both films share. Prior to the release of Mulholland Dr., Lynch explored the damsel-in-distress storyline in his 1986 film, Blue Velvet, choosing to subvert the viewers’ expectations of the trope and focus instead on a cautionary tale about looking beyond the exterior of American life.
Blue Velvet begins with a series of shots of an idyllic Reagan-era suburb, overlaid with Bobby Vinton’s song of the same name, followed by a shot of an insect colony underground. Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) is shown returning to this town from college due to an illness in the family. On the way to visiting his father, he finds a severed ear in a field and takes it to a detective (George Dickerson). Doing so, he encounters the detective’s daughter, Sandy (Laura Dern) who directs him to a suspicious woman who may be attached to the case: Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). Beaumont investigates this lead, posing as an exterminator to enter her apartment and stealing a spare key. Jeffrey and Sandy visit her nightclub act, then head to her apartment early so Jeffrey can break in and look around. Jeffrey hides in the closet when Dorothy returns, who discovers him, forces him to undress, and fellates him at knifepoint. He hides in the closet again when they are interrupted by Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who kidnapped Dorothy’s husband and son so he could take their place and sexually, emotionally, and physically abuse her. Jeffrey leaves afterward, despite her pleas for him to stay and beat her further. Jeffrey attends another of her performances, at which he sees Frank in the corner. He follows Frank for a few days, taking note of his criminal behavior and reporting it to Sandy before having another sexual encounter with Dorothy in which she forces him to hit her. Frank catches the two together, kidnapping them and taking them to drink Pabst Blue Ribbon where Dorothy’s family is being held before driving them to a lumber yard to sexually assault Dorothy and beat Jeffrey unconscious. The police force Jeffrey to stop his investigation. After a scene in which Sandy and Jeffrey confess their love and are chased down by Sandy’s boyfriend, they find Dorothy beaten and naked on his front lawn, who admits to her affair with Jeffrey, offending Sandy. Jeffrey heads to her apartment while Sandy sends the police there. Jeffrey finds the corpse of Dorothy’s husband and hides in the closet from the pursuing Frank. He emerges and shoots Frank in the head, and the movie ends with Jeffrey and Sandy moving on with their relationship and Dorothy reuniting with her son.
In The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the main theme behind the expressionism is a cynical reflection of post-WWI Germany. The film projects a sense of subservience to an authoritarian master, which ultimately leads to the conformist committing a string of horrific crimes. Wiene was dissatisfied with the economy and politics of post-war Germany, critical of the German population’s comfort with tyranny and authoritarian policies. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari reflects the post-war paranoia through its use of the disfigured and jagged cityscape, reflective also of the main character’s internal battle with his insanity. In Blue Velvet, Lynch translates this ideology to 1980s suburbia, attempting to reveal the self-indulgence and delinquency underlying its idyllic, white-picket-fence exterior as shown in the opening sequence. The contrast of the beautiful suburb with the den of insects living beneath it is symbolic of the plot’s focus on Lynch’s own disillusionment with the pristine exterior of 1980s America. The two share a theme, yet originate from disillusionment with the opposite circumstances. Wiene was afraid of the trends he noticed in post-WWI Germany, critical of what he considered a common desperation for authoritarianism. Like Francis, Wiene saw the future of German public as having followed their own internal narrative of heroism and fallen unaware of the circumstances they are truly in: an asylum led by someone they thought they considered the enemy. Wiene considered this paranoiac complacency dangerous and sought with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to make the public aware of this.
With Blue Velvet, Lynch takes the same approach but sought to dispel the American public’s infatuation with aesthetic perfection without minding the problems welling up beneath. Around sixteen minutes into the film, Jeffrey is shown conversing with a blind man before holding up four fingers and asking the man to guess how many he was holding up. The blind man responds correctly, to which Jeffrey responds with astonishment. This single exchange is representative of the theme of the film. The possibilities are that either: the blind man possesses some extrasensory gift, and therefore Jeffrey is awestruck; or that the blind man isn’t blind at all and putting on a show for Jeffrey, hiding the scam and who he truly is. Lynch uses this as a brief comparison to America. He saw the American public as awestruck by the beauty and perceived perfection of Reagan’s America, blindly looking past the sustained corruption and debauchery underlying it. Throughout the film, Lynch cuts between scenes of love and humor and scenes of sadomasochism and violence, displaying the duality he noticed in America. Lynch implores the audience with this film to look beyond the painted houses and the manicured lawns and see not only the criminal intent surrounding them, but the domestic violence and injustices within, symbolized by the relationship between Dorothy and Frank. Both films represent the directors’ wishes to make the public aware of the issues they were noticing occur in their countries, imploring their audiences to change before the underlying problems overtake them. Wiene noticed involuntary complacency, which he believed would lead to another authoritarian government; while Lynch noticed voluntary complacency, which he believed would lead to a perpetuation of corruption and violence. Lynch carries the theme of disillusionment with the 1980s American lifestyle into the 2000s Hollywood lifestyle when he released his currently-declared final film, Inland Empire, partially focusing on the underlying loss of soul beneath the glitz and glamour seen on television.
Lynch opens his most abstract and surreal film, Inland Empire, with a gramophone playing the longest running radio play, overlaying a woman crying on her bed. This woman, the Lost Girl (Karolina Gruszka), is watching Lynch’s 2002 miniseries, Rabbits, which centers on three anthropomorphic rabbits (Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, and Scott Coffey) in a green room speaking in non-sequiturs while canned laughter plays over a haunting score. The film then cuts to Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) being visited by an old woman that insists the film Nikki has been cast in is about a murder rather than romance. She tells of a girl who wanders as if half-born through an alley behind the marketplace to reach a palace. The film introduces Nikki’s costar Devon Berk (Justin Theroux), who plays “Billy,” and the director Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons). The three are shown on their soundstage, discussing the film’s history as a remake, and the murders of the original Polish cast. They are interrupted by a noise, but the origin cannot be found. As Nikki becomes more immersed in her role, the distinction between the film and Nikki’s reality begins to blur, cutting to a scene in which Nikki is shown walking through an alley door and wandering into the soundstage, causing the noise she heard earlier. She flees into the set, finding herself in a suburban home, at which point her life begins to unravel in a sequence of surreal scenes that parallel the life of an unnamed Polish prostitute. Nikki is shown conversing with an unidentified man about a history of sexual and emotional trauma. The woman who plays Devon’s character Billy’s wife is shown speaking to an officer about being hypnotized to kill someone with a screwdriver before being shown with a screwdriver embedded in her abdomen. Throughout these seemingly unconnected scenes, Nikki is shown asking people whether they’ve known her before. A character named The Phantom (Krzysztof Majchrzak) begins to appear frequently, described only as a hypnotist. In the final scenes, Nikki/Sue is shown wandering down Hollywood Boulevard with her fellow prostitutes, noticing her Polish doppelganger across the street. She intends to investigate this woman, but is stabbed by Billy’s wife and left to die among a group of homeless people. Off screen, Kingsley calls for the scene to cut and the camera pans out to reveal the set and to further blur the line between Nikki’s reality and the audience’s. Nikki/Sue stands up, wandering off set into a nearby theater, seeing her movie on screen. A hallway to stage left is illuminated green, and she enters to confront the Phantom. She shoots him and a distorted, bleeding form of her face is superimposed over his. Nikki flees into the room that formerly contained the rabbits before finding the Lost Girl and kissing her, causing herself and the rabbits to fade away. The Lost Girl is shown embracing her family, and the film ends with Nikki at home conversing with a crowd of people, including Laura Harring.
Inland Empire centers on a young actress who accepts a role in a film that has already been filmed, finding herself mirroring the footsteps of the Lost Girl, the previous actress in her role. At the end of the film, Nikki encounters the Phantom and defeats him, at which point an evil form of Nikki is superimposed over his face to represent his identity. With Nikki’s evil defeated, she is able to meet the Lost Girl and free her and the rabbits from their purgatory. On a deeper level still, Nikki does not exist. Nikki is the Lost Girl’s redemptive fantasy self, reliving the same events over again in hopes of saving herself from her past mistakes. As suggested by Nikki’s Polish visitor from early in the film, both Nikki and the Lost Girl wandered half-born in their lives until reaching the end of the film in which redemption is had and the two are able to combine and live the happy life that chronic abuse deprived her of.
One of the most important aspects of the film to note is the television show revolving around the three rabbits. The three rabbits are the focus of a web series that Lynch directed for his own website, which combined a surreal take on 1950s family life and sitcoms with Jean-Paul Sartre’s story, No Exit, the plot of which helps sanitize Inland Empire. In this story, three people find themselves trapped in a room with only each other, each striving to determine what they did to deserve their placement. The room is representative of the afterlife. When Nikki finds herself wandering through the room at the end of the film to meet the Lost Girl, her soul has been lost. Her spirit traverses Purgatory to find the Lost Girl’s trapped soul, redeeming her sins and freeing her to live the happy life she’s always dreamed of. The Lost Girl concludes the film happy, with her husband in a suburban house while Nikki concludes the film surrounded by friends, implying that their time in purgatory has been served and they are now resting peacefully in heaven.
Due to its inconclusive and surreal execution, Inland Empire is open to countless interpretations. Despite this, the film represents the coalescence of Lynch’s various themes over the years, combining the style of Eraserhead with the general plot of Mulholland Dr. and the disillusionment and cynicism of Blue Velvet. In the film, Lynch utilizes expressionist elements to signify that Nikki’s reality is simply a fantasy of the Lost Girl, executed through indistinguishable combinations of histories and events in the Lost Girl’s life that Nikki is noticing to be relived. The mental instability felt by Francis, Henry, and the Lost Girl are expressed in the same way in their three films. All three characters are forced to wander through dark, grimy spaces to represent the true characters’ internal struggles with perceiving reality. The Lost Girl’s abusive past and history with prostitution are unwillingly substituted into the positive and hopeful narrative of Nikki, signifying the repeated poisoning of hope and promise before Nikki reaches her ultimate redemptive conclusion. Like Mulholland Dr. and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Inland Empire focuses on a person living another life, whether real or imaginary, as a form of escapism from the situation they had found themselves in in real life. The asylum inmate Francis imagined himself as a hero investigating a string of murders, the struggling actress Diane Selwyn reimagined herself as a successful actress in a loving relationship with her former flame, and the dead actress Lost Girl reimagined herself as a successful actress that would eventually overcome her demons and free herself from the purgatory she’s found herself in. As in Blue Velvet and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a major theme of Inland Empire is a disillusionment with the world. In Inland Empire, Lynch expresses a disillusionment with dreams of fame, likening it to losing your soul. Wiene uses the theme of insanity to express fears of authoritarian regime taking advantage of the paranoid complacency he saw in Germany at the time. Lynch in Blue Velvet uses the theme of underlying infestation to express his distaste for the obsession with beauty and Reagan-era suburbia while ignoring greater problems within American and the household alike. Lynch in Inland Empire uses death and Sartre’s purgatory to warn against dreaming of Hollywood because as Nikki and the Lost Girl did, actors and actresses can quickly lose their lives and souls to fame. Inland Empire combines the three main elements that Lynch’s previous works shared with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and uses them to tell a complex, multifaceted story about the dangers of fame.
Since the release of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1920 and the subsequent Expressionist Movement, countless films and artworks have sought to capture its essence of instability and introspection. David Lynch did so in many of his works, culminating in his magnum opus, Inland Empire. Though Mulholland Dr. has more in common with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in terms of plot structure and character development, Inland Empire combines its various themes and plot structure to tell a strikingly similar story in a more modern, fully-realized expressionist fashion. Though Lynch’s films are less mainstream now than The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was in its day, Lynch’s impact on both surrealism and expressionism will likely have a similar impact on the future of filmmaking.
Edit: While the analysis of Inland Empire is simplistic, the argument still stands. At base level, the analysis works, but the plot description oversimplifies the film completely. It is simply one of the most complex films ever created, and therefore cannot be explained so easily.
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