Laura Dern wears a Fred Belay

In Inland Empire, the camera settles on a wristwatch lying face-up on a patterned carpet and holds there, the long deliberate look a film usually saves for an object that turns the plot. Nothing in the plot turns on it. It is a gold-tone watch on an integrated bracelet, a pale dial with green-lumed markers and a triangle at nine, and a maker's name in script under the twelve that the frame will not let you read. Laura Dern plays Nikki Grace, an actress losing the line between herself and the part she is shooting.

David Lynch made the film over roughly three years on a consumer-grade Sony DV camera, mostly without a finished script, handing Dern her pages shortly before each scene. He films the ordinary objects in it, a lamp, a doorway, this watch, as closely as he films faces. So the camera goes in hard on the dial, and the one detail a close-up of a watch should settle, the name under the twelve, dissolves into a gold smear.

On record the watch is a Fred Belay, a cheap fashion label: gold-tone cases over Japanese quartz, worth twenty or thirty dollars secondhand. Why the name is illegible is its own small mystery. It may be the consumer camera, but films also routinely obscure a brand they have not licensed, smearing the logo so an unpaid name never quite reads on screen. Either way, the film takes more trouble over the name of that watch than the watch ever cost to buy.