Frame 2

Saturday, October 16

Maxine Cooper (as Velda in Kiss Me Deadly) escapes a dangerous place. Laura Dern (as Nikki Grace in Inland Empire), meanwhile, enters a dangerous place. There is a woman named Elizabeth Hand. She is a writer. In her novel Generation Loss she wrote this:

"But then you tilt a daguerreotype just right, and the shadows and light fall into place, and what you're looking at becomes a 3-D image. It's an effect impossible to reproduce in a book or print, or even with computer imaging technology: the purest example of generation loss I can think of. A daguerreotype portrait always seemed like the closest you could come to actually seeing someone who had died a century and a half ago."

There is so much death in Kiss Me Deadly and Inland Empire. It practically spills out of the frames. And it doesn't matter whether these women--these women in trouble--are escaping or entering dangerous places. There is a freedom to both movies because we understand that escaping is not the point.