I’d be lying if I said David Lynch wasn’t an intimidating filmmaker. His films are, for the most part, some of the hardest to decipher, yet his execution is brilliant. A man of few words, Lynch is an advocate of “show, not tell” and relies heavily on eerie visuals to relay his messages. He’s an idealist who exudes creative spirit, so much in fact that his ingenuity is often buried underneath an array of mismatched puzzle pieces and lost to the bromidic eye. In Wild at Heart, visions of violence and malevolence entangle a seemingly sweet love story fueled by dreams of Emerald City. A fan of the 1939 classic, Lynch ensures that his Wizard of Oz references are impossible to miss, but I saw them as little red herrings scattered throughout, fooling the audience into regarding the film as anything but an indirect representation of man’s savage nature.
From what I hear, Barry Gifford’s neo-noir pulp novel "Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula" is quite different from Lynch’s adaptation, and – while not having read the book myself – I wouldn’t doubt it. The film may be considered Lynch’s easiest to understand (it is, for the most part) but the Lynchian oddities are abundant and I’m sure the book could never dream of conceiving such bizarre kinks. Lula (Laura Dern) and Sailor (Nicolas Cage) are pseudo-reincarnations of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley respectively. They’re both jaded internally due to negligent upbringings, but sex-crazed externally. The opening scene threw me initially because I walked in with little background and was pretty stunned by Cage’s brutality. This opening number is just a taste of Lynch’s macabre world. What we have here is a world where jealous mothers send assailants to execute their daughters’ lovers, and this happens to be the case for Lula and Sailor. Diane Ladd plays Lula’s vindictive mother Miss Fortune – appropriate – and she’s the film’s brazen Wicked Witch prototype. The goons she enlists to slay Sailor can be seen as her “flying monkeys”; sentimental Farragut (Harry Dean Stanton) and sinister Santos (J.E. Freeman), both out to win Ladd’s heart by disposing of the Elvis impersonator. As the film progresses, Lynch tosses a slew of unforgettable oddballs our way and polishes the story off with a shopworn happy ending.
I called Lynch’s Oz references red herrings earlier, and this may be an unfounded opinion, but they really come across that way. After sifting through the Oz bologna, I noticed the uncanny similarities Wild shares with Godard’s Week-End. Lynch is as overtly picaresque as Godard in depicting society's callous response toward the human condition. In one scene, Lula displays her disinterest in reality by irritably flipping past chilling death reports in search of rock n’ roll tunes on the radio to lull back into her contrived fantasy. Other scenes show characters on the verge of death at relative disregard, worrying more about hairbrushes and purses (a la "my Hermes handbag!") and reminiscing past mishaps of similar aftermath. And how could you miss Lynch’s gesture during the final act’s traffic jam scene? Week-End’s more political, but you can’t deny that the two films share illustrations that suggest a frighteningly indifferent world.
On the upside, I admire Lynch’s singular approach in elucidating another creator's work; he’s better at penning his own ideas, but he makes a good effort here. The Oz bits, while inspired, are a tad excessive, and I wish Lynch would have taken advantage of his trademark obscurity to mitigate the allusions. Overall, Wild at Heart is an amusing satire – of sorts – on love, road trips and dynamic duos harking back to Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and perhaps inspiring Tarantino’s Natural Born Killers.
7.5/10
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