‘This whole world’s wild at heart and weird on top...’
The passing of David Lynch has been keenly felt across all of pop culture. In the wake of Lynch’s death, Steven Spielberg described him as “a singular, visionary dreamer”, Edgar Wright declared “David may be gone, but his work will be eternal”, and Nicholas Cage described Lynch as “one of the greatest artists of this or any time”. It is the latter remark that holds the most relevance for this review, of course, as Cage is the co-star of Wild at Heart, Lynch’s fifth film and, unsurprisingly, a cult classic…
Young lovers Sailor (Cage) and Lulu (Laura Dern) decide to run away to California following Sailor’s release from prison for ‘manslaughtering’ an assassin hired by Lulu’s psychotic mother Marietta (Diane Ladd). Unhappy with their elopement, Marietta first hires her lover Johnnie (Harry Dean Stanton) and then her other lover Marcellus Santos (J.E. Freeman) to stop Sailer or kill him or both. This being a David Lynch film, on the journey they encounter Willem Dafoe, Crispin Glover and Twin Peaks alumni Grace Zabriskie, Jack Nance, Sherilyn Fenn and Sheryl Lee.
I’ve always been fascinated with artists who explore the dark underbelly of the American Dream. Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Waits, Edward Hopper… Lynch follows in this hallowed tradition, and as with the aforementioned (with the occasional exception of Bukowski), he does so without resorting to cynicism or nihilism. While Lynch does lampoon the symbols of middle-class suburbia (white picket fences, small-town diners, etc), he does so from a place of love. With Wild at Heart, Lynch, the clown prince of the freaks, assembled a whole cast of freaks in Cage, Stanton, Freeman, Dafoe, Glover, Nance and Isabella Rossellini and threw them together under the guise of a straightforward love story. The results are explosive.
Cage fits perfectly into this world as a snakeskin-jacket-clad dreamer who can’t resist the siren call of sex and violence, but it is Dern who anchors the film, giving an all-in performance that sees her channelling the heady mixture of vulnerability and sensuality often employed by Marilyn Monroe. The two of them together produce so much star wattage that they might as well go around with MOVIE STAR tattooed on their foreheads. Witness the two of them dancing on the side of the road to grinding speed metal and ask yourself if these two people could ever be anything other than what they are – bona fide movie stars. They occupy that rarefied air that means that they don’t really have to act at all – simply being is enough when you have this much charisma.
Wild at Heart forms an uneasy triptych with Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet in forcing the audience to reckon with the darkness that resides in all of us… as well as the love and kindness. That he does so against the backdrop of a recurring Wizard of Oz motif is about as Lynchian as it gets. Rest easy, David.
