Wild at Heart
(1990)
(SPOILERS) 1990 was a banner year for all
things David Lynch. In April, Twin Peaks
began, exposing him to a far wider audience than he had probably envisaged, and
a month later Wild at Heart premiered
at the Cannes Film Festival, going on to win the Palme d’Or. Sometimes the
recipients of the award are richly deserved, sometimes it’s a case of “What
were they thinking?” and certainly, the film was greeted with as many boos as
cheers when victory was announced. Controversy followed in its wake, agitating
critics over its sex and violence. While I was (and am) a cheerleader of Twin Peaks, I can’t say I was ever that
wild about Wild at Heart. I found it
distinctive and fitfully inspired, but in general I didn’t vibe with the
adulation it received. As such, this is the first time in several decades I’ve
revisited the picture, and even given my non-committal response then, I have to
say it hasn’t stood the test of time.
One would almost think Lynch was actively
trying to offend with the film, which is turned up to 11 throughout; it has a
similar kind of intentionally in-your-face quality to Oliver Stone’s later Natural Born Killers, and variation in
pitch and tone, which made Blue Velvet
so impactful, is entirely absent.
Indeed, even the expected Lynch oddness,
that sinister world that underpins surface reality, is rather undercut by the
decision to make everything come back to The
Wizard of Oz. After a while, the references serve only to emphasise this as
a big, bold, gaudy cartoon, one with brains splattered across the pavement,
wicked witches (or mothers) on broomsticks and leads who caricature unbridled
rebels without causes (a midpoint doodle between Badlands and True Romance,
but without the emotional resonance of either, since the only pitch here is one
of hysteria).
Lynch was adapting Barry Gifford’s novel Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula.
He and Gifford obviously hit it off, as they would later work on Hotel Room for HBO and then Lost Highway, but producer Monty
Montgomery had assumed it wouldn’t be the director’s kind of thing. Lynch saw
it as “a really modern romance in a
violent world – a picture about finding love in hell”, so it’s ironic that
the passions of Sailor and Lula, despite the clear commitment of Nic Cage and
Laura Dern, amount to little.
While Blue
Velvet depicts a resonant, haunting world, leaving the viewer with a sense
of the whole picture despite the aspects that leap out (such as Frank Booth), Wild at Heart sticks in the mind purely
because of the surface reality; the fly-blown vomit in Lula’s room; the dog
running out of a robbed bank with one of the teller’s blown-off hands in its
mouth; and Cage’s ridiculous, mashed-up nose prosthesis in the final scene.
Which actually suggests it’s a lot wackier
than it is. While Lynch seems to have thrown the kitchen sink at the picture
(the title graphics promise something much more seductive and stylishly
melodramatic than what we get), he appears to have done so in an entirely
random way. The film is so languorous, it’s easy to forget it even has a vague
trajectory (it is, after all, a road movie). There are competing villainies and
passions, but they seem incidental or unfulfilled, and the red-lipsticked
visage of Diane Ladd, amped up and over-acting all over the shop (she got an
Oscar nom, but hers isn’t really especially entertaining over-acting, unlike
some of the performers here) as she attempts to dictate the fates of Sailor and
Lula, never attains the status of threat.
Obviously, Lynch would express disdain or
indifference to any such traditional narrative considerations (such that he waivered
over changing the ending from the novel to a happy one, even though it felt
right to him, because it might be considered too commercial), but it leads Wild at Heart into a kind of formless
territory where it’s only the incidentals that engage; Blue Velvet works so well because it has the luxury of play,
content in the knowledge that its basic structure is solid. Here, Lynch’s tics
and cuts and fades and inserts seem affected, almost self-parodic, like he’s
aware that this is what he does now; they seem mechanical (and sometimes
arbitrary). Perhaps it’s from working off someone else’s material, but Wild at Heart’s impact is only
intermittent.
Sailor: It’s too bad he couldn’t
just visit that old Wizard of Oz and get some good advice.
You have the great Harry Dean Stanton, used
entirely forgettably. JE Freeman fares better as gangster Santos (he would
later have an amusingly nasty role in Alien
Resurrection), but the only substantial part that lingers is Willem Dafoe’s
hilariously perverse Bobby Peru, with his revolting gummy teeth, pencil tache
and twisted menace (forcing Lula to say “Fuck
me”, he reduces the odious assault to a punchline as he makes off with “Someday I will, but I got to get going!”)
Lynch knows he has something to savour with
Dafoe, although he never quite makes the most of the potential. That said, a
close-up is his leering, gargoyle mug in a stocking goes a long way, and his
gleefully slapstick demise (blowing his own head off by accident) is
illustration that, if Lynch is aiming for something very different tonally,
he’s only able to capture it fitfully.
But there are some resonant incidentals en route. Most of the gathered Twin Peaks alumni have little impact
other than visual (Grace Zabriskie in a blonde wig – Isabella Rossellini
likewise, both emphasise the raven eyebrows – Sheryl Lee as the Good Witch,
David Patrick Kelly as a heavy), but Sherilyn Fenn’s car crash victim is a rare
moment of genuine emotional weight, even if Sailor attempts to undercut it
(asked if she will make it, he comments “I
don’t know, but she’s going to bleed all over our car, I’ll tell you that”).
00
Spool: Mentally,
you picture my dog, but I have not told you the type of dog that I have.
Perhaps you might even picture Toto from the Wizard of Oz. But I must tell you that my dog is always
with me.
Jack Nance makes more of an impression in
his one scene than his previous two features with the director (“My dog barks some”). A hotel sequence
could have come straight out of Twin
Peaks, with its eccentric tableau of a hotel manager (Peter Bromilow) on crutches
and doddery old guys with walking sticks.
Then there’s the standout lunacy of Crispin
Glover’s cousin Dell, a basket case who actually is, unlike Peaks’ Johnny Horne, believing aliens with
black rubber gloves are following him around, intent on destroying the spirit
of Christmas, controlling the rainfall (aliens will recur in Peaks of course), and who stays up all
night making sandwiches (“What are you
doing?”; “I making my lunch!”)
The tale reaches its antically mirthful climax as Lula recounts how Dale was
prone to infesting his underwear with cockroaches, and “One day they found him putting one big cockroach right on his anus”,
to which Cage’s delivery of “Hell,
peanut!” takes some beating.
Indeed, while the love story between Sailor
and Lula leaves me entirely unmoved, both deliver some memorably amusing
moments. There’s Lula’s response to the stream of effluent on the news (turtles
released into the Ganges to reduce human pollution, and thence crocodiles to
devour floating corpses) and Cage (who did a good backflip back then) at the
conclusion, after being beaten up by the gang, intoning in drawling Elvis deadpan,
“I want to apologise for referring to you
gentlemen as homosexuals”.
Sailor: I didn’t have much parental
guidance. The public defender kept saying that at my parole hearing.
Cage has always been a marmite actor, but
there’s little doubt he was at his creative peak during this period, even if
his method antics (he cites working with Lynch and the constant script
revisions for helping ween him off method crack) had been a bit much. The likes
Of Birdy, Peggy Sue Got Married, Raising
Arizona and Moonstruck had shone
a flattering spotlight on his talents, and Wild
at Heart fully taps into his larger-than-life capacities (he’s basically
doing Elvis to Dern’s Marilyn) in a way we wouldn’t see again until the end of
the decade.
But, like Lynch’s directorial approach,
there’s something of the embodied parody to Sailor. This is what comes to mind
when you think of Cage doing crazy; bashing in brains and extoling the virtues
of a snakeskin jacket, singing Treat Me
or Love Me Tender, or even delivering
a winningly goofy geek laugh. Yet Sailor, like a Lula, is simply a surface
sketch of a character; as Lula, Dern couldn’t be more different from her
performance in Blue Velvet, but
without any interior life, the flashbacks to rape, or her encounter with Billy,
lack depth.
Maybe because it attracted so much
attention, Wild at Heart merely seems
attention-seeking in retrospect, without much else to support its case. Variety’s review exploited colourful
adverbs to the hilt (“joltingly violent”,
“wickedly funny”, “rivetingly erotic”, and “seethingly sexy”), but to be honest it
isn’t much of any of those things; it’s trying too hard to shock and so feels
faintly passé. It flourishes a fine soundtrack; I’ll give it that much
(including Chris Isaak and his signature song).
Perhaps, if he had kept his focus on Twin Peaks, that series would have
maintained its quality, but as it is it’s fortunate he had his contributions to
the show as a pointer to what he could
do, otherwise the drop-off from Blue
Velvet would seem much more dramatic. Wild
at Heart has its plus points, but it’s a shame it’s one of Lynch’s most
renowned works when other, more deserving efforts, have less exposure.
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.