In this week’s Lynch/Love selection, Cage and Dern sear the screen in David Lynch’s indelible love story
Two Cents is a Cinapse original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team curates the series and contribute their “two cents” using a maximum of 200-400 words. Guest contributors and comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future picks. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion. Would you like to be a guest contributor or programmer for an upcoming Two Cents entry? Simply watch along with us and/or send your pitches or 200-400 word reviews to [email protected].
The Pick: Wild at Heart
Many of Lynch’s efforts plunge into nightmarish depths, Wild at Heart sets itself apart in his filmography—undeniably Lynch, but driven by a romance for the ages. Not just a winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2002, it’s also a showcase for two of the most memorable performances committed by its leads, Nic Cage and Laura Dern. A pair of dreamers, dancing their way through an absurdist, dark world. It’s at times brutal, but it’s tempered by the fire of this unconventional and searing love story.
Featured Guest
Wild At Heart opens like Casino, ends like True Romance, and carries the pixie dust of Tinkerbell throughout. The film is a hero’s journey, if the journey was paved by the promise of the American dream—lovers’ edition. Lynch wrote and directed Wild at Heart in 1990, adapted from the book of the same title by Barry Gifford. It stars Nicolas Cage as the super cool Sailor Ripley. Sailor opens the film in a Presley-inspired Sports coat, likely purchased at Lansky’s in Memphis. He transitions into his role as a lover on the run in Cage’s own Snakeskin jacket—one that in Sailor’s words, “…represents a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom.” It is no accident that the lore associated with his jacket drives the ideology of the film and Lynch’s understanding of love, Emerald City style.
Laura Dern plays Lula Fortune, the sex pot innocent with Barbie nails and kinky blonde hair that glows like a halo. She starts the movie wearing a cotton coral summer dress paired with a single black garter belt to indicate a marital level of devotion and Guns n’ Roses era sex appeal. As the film moves forward, her outfits become more honeymoon adjacent. She wears a red lace teddie, white lingerie—to indicate a connection to the divine, and, of course, black cowboy boots—because this is America. Her hair on its own is an incredible character—untamable kinky blonde curls that exist somewhere between the crimpled hair of Erin Everly and the barrel-curled glamour of Veronica Lake.
The costume designer of this film, Amy Stofsky had a special knack for capturing the era’s sex appeal without forgoing innocence. Lula embodies the changing mores between second and third-wave Feminism. Sex positivity, MTV spring break style, was in the air, as was the night-blooming jasmine scent of this couple’s Hollywood dream of a fairy tale love story. Lynch understood that here, in Hollywood, divine intervention comes from the pink glint of Glinda’s bubble. Or, as Sheryl Lee’s Glinda puts it, “If you’re truly wild at heart you won’t give up on your dreams.”
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Our Team
Jon Partridge
Watching David Lynch’s work can often be challenging. The darker recesses of his mind are brought to life onscreen, often breaking that thin veneer of life to show what lies beneath. Be it the horrors of the American suburbs in Blue Velvet, the unraveling mind of a fearful new parent in Eraserhead, or puncturing the dreams of Hollywood in the noir-esque Mulholland Drive. Wild at Heart is simplistic in its central conceit, a steamy love story about two kids, both brought up in the wrong part of town, who found that all they truly had was each other, so they decide to leave their past behind and embrace their love. Thus begins a road trip to start a new life, both determined to outrun anyone who tries to tear them apart. A road movie of the ilk of Natural Born Killers, Badlands, and Bonnie & Clyde, there is that Lynchian vein of darkness wrapped around it. A film peppered with the weird, abstract elements that characterize his works. It’s a fairytale romance where these star crossed lovers have to contend with a motley crew of relatives, cowboys, scientists, and assassins. Cartoonish visions and fantastical interludes abound, along with references, sometimes subtle but mostly overt, to Lynch’s appreciation for The Wizard of Oz, something well explored in Alexandre O. Philippe’s ruminative documentary Lynch/Oz.
Cage and Dern are captivating here, the former as the bad boy channeling Elvis and the latter as his magnetic and assured partner in crime. Both elevate figures that in another work might be cliched, instead making them vibrant characters that sit perfectly at the center of this swirling affair. Around them, notables such as Willem Defoe, Crispin Glover, Diane Ladd, Isabella Rossellini, and Harry Dean Stanton adopt an absurdist orbit, adding to the films potent chaotic energy. Wild at Hart is often ugly, painting a violent and surreal portrait of America, but this meanness is assuaged by the central love story. It’s perhaps Lynch’s most optimistic feature, in spite of his continued embrace of more abstract ideas and imagery. A gleefully abstract experience than delivers a jolt of affirmation for love, in the face of so much adversity.
Ed Travis
I think I’m ready for David Lynch.
He was and is light years beyond me in terms of creative instinct, human insight, and singular artistic expression. But I, as a cinemagoer, appear to finally be ready to genuinely appreciate his work. I grew up in the 1980s and came of age in the 1990s, and as a burgeoning cinephile attempting to explore great work, I often bounced off the surreal, “narrative-light” style of his work. Elephant Man and Dune were near and dear to me, but I didn’t “get” whatever else I consumed.
Several years ago at a Nic Cage marathon, I finally experienced Wild At Heart and now, revisiting it in celebration of Lynch’s life, I feel like I’ve been able to go full circle from disliking his work, to cautiously experiencing it and analyzing it, to just vibing with it and genuinely connecting with it. What I perhaps might have perceived as weird for weirdnesses sake in the past, and therefore bounced off of, I now understand to be a genuine expression of the broad human experience (not to mention trauma, isolation, and a “lack of parental guidance”). What I might have understood to be “gratuitous” sex as a hormonal but hyper religious teen, I now perceive as genuine, primal human expression.
I guess what I’m saying is, Lula and Sailor’s “lovers on the run” odyssey – weird, winding, Oz-filled, and traumatic as it is, is touching and aspirational to me these days. Maybe the world has just gotten more fundamentally “wild at heart”, or I’ve grown in my understanding of the rarity of genuine partnership, mutual respect, and deep human connection. But either way, these metal-loving, fucking-like-rabbits, cigarette aficionados are less trashy weirdo and more “life goals” in my present estimation. And I’m rooting for those crazy kids to make it, together, in this ruinous hellscape we call American life.
Spencer Brickey
Like many cinephiles probably experienced after the loss of David Lynch, we became the go to “which David Lynch movie should I watch?” person to a lot of our non-film people friends. Most probably pointed towards starting with Twin Peaks. Others might have directed them to Blue Velvet, or Mulholland Drive if you thought they were ready to dive in head first. I’m sure a few of you sicko’s probably told them to start with Inland Empire and left it at that. When it comes to a great intro to Lynch, in my personal opinion, Wild At Heart is best as both an easy enough introduction, while also being a Rosetta Stone to the rest of Lynch’s filmography.
Wild At Heart is Lynch at both his most tender, but also at his most unhinged. A film about youthful love, that also contains a brutal, viciously violent murder in the opening 90 seconds. It never lets up from there, easily becoming Lynch’s most energetic film, as we move at the speed of cocaine between set pieces, watching both Cage and Dern love each other sweetly, while the world around them is filled with violence, murder, and insanity. Just like a fair share of Lynch’s work, it is about finding, and cherishing love, in a world that is filled with hate and violence.
It is filled with the usual Lynchian touches; the surrealism, the nightmarish underbelly of America, the Wizard of Oz references, women being in truly frightening situations, and a host of actors putting on performances unlike anything they’ve ever done before (except Cage, a performer like no other, who seems to be the “unstoppable force/immovable object” to Lynch’s style). Yet, it is also surprisingly linear for Lynch, especially in this era; it’s a real point a to point b affair, even if the trip along the way is filled with assassins, voodoo magic, metal concerts, and Dafoe playing the sleaziest motherfucker who’s ever lived.
In the world of Lynch, very little of his filmography is of the “easy viewing” variety. But, for those who are looking to dip a toe into the maestro’s work, Wild At Heart is a great place to start.
Eddie Strait
As I watched Wild at Heart this morning, I was dumbstruck by the whiplash I felt as Nic Cage croons “Love Me Tender” while he and Laura Dern hold each other against the backdrop of the blue sky. I found the beginning of the film to be so off-putting that I didn’t think it would be able to win me over. Yet here I am, giddy that Sailor (Cage) and Lula (Dern) managed to find a version of happiness by the end. That’s the magic of Lynch.
As we’ve all been revisiting Lynch’s work over the past month, the thing that constantly awes me is the way Lynch can draw out the most impactful emotional moments from a menagerie of things that should be too disparate to work. With Wild at Heart, the opening stretch feels like a speed run through signature Lynchian elements: extreme trauma, tonal shifts between the harrowing and the absurd, the soap-opera melodrama. If you come out on the other side of that, the rewards are immense. That starts with Dern and Cage, both of whom are never less than captivating onscreen. When they’re together? Electric.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to view any David Lynch film through anything but the lens of Twin Peaks. His early films feel like test runs for the ideas that would come into bloom on Twin Peaks. His later films riffed on the show’s ideas and themes. This is, of course, not fair to the films themselves. Watching Eraserhead a few weeks ago in preparation for the site’s Two Cents post, I couldn’t put down any thoughts without going back toTwin Peaks and that didn’t feel right for this series. But spending time in the world of Lynch, that always feels right.
Justin Harlan
Second only to Dennis Hooper in Blue Velvet, Willem Dafoe’s role in Wild at Heart is the most slimy, horrifying, and impactful villains in Lynch’s work, as far as the impression he has left on me at least. While I think a lot of great stuff has already been said about this offbeat love story, I wanted to do two things with my brief words here… first, an additional highlight on the brilliant and terrifying work of Dafoe’s Bobby Peru. And, also, to share a podcast episode I recorded on this film for my podcast CAGEMATCH! It’s linked below if you are interested… and if not, “You look like a clown in that stupid jacket”
Join us for the rest of our Lynch celebration for the rest of the month:
