Worthy at Heart

One title conspicuously absent from Criterion's David Lynch playlist is 1990's Wild at Heart. Although it's generally been ranked among the films definitive of Lynch's most celebrated stylistic preoccupations, discussion of it has been scarce in the past fifteen years. Perhaps Straight Story is more neglected but at least it's available on Disney+. Wild at Heart isn't stocked on any streaming service and there's been no talk of a director approved blu-ray release, whether by Criterion or otherwise. Nicholas Cage, one of the stars of the film, randomly brought the film up on Stephen Colbert recently to a crowd that didn't seem to know what he was talking about. I found a copy on Japanese Amazon for just over 900 yen, or less than eight dollars, so I bought it and watched it.

It's been at least fifteen years since I watched it, I think. I certainly hadn't watched it since first watching Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017. I might have drawn a comparison between how Lynch comments on American culture in both projects. They're both road movies with lots of hotels and motels. A trip to Texas seems like a trip to an underworld in both.

Wild at Heart's Texas is filled with demons led by Willem Dafoe in one of the roles that established him as an excellently revolting bad guy. The scene where he intrudes on Lula (Laura Dern) really crystalises the film's themes.

He seems like he's going to rape her but instead he ends up making her say, "Fuck me," and mean it. In a movie about liberation, where Sailor and Lula's sexual freedom is shown as a means of expressing their love honestly, the idea that Lula could actually respond physically with as much arousal to anyone else is devastating. The tension in the movie is between freedom and anarchy. Is freedom the potential for all people to realise their good will and pursue happiness, or is it chaos in which all needs can be boiled down to chemical compulsions?

A film that specifically comments on culture and media would seem inevitably to be a postmodernist commentary. But it is in the Texas segment that I think Lynch takes aim at the dehumanising tendencies of deconstructionism. Jack Nance, as one of the Texas demons, is the only character in the film aside from Lula and Sailor who references The Wizard of Oz. He tells her he has a dog and points out how she's compelled to picture a dog before he describes one, and suggests perhaps she imagines Toto from The Wizard of Oz. She seems intrigued before he laughs in apparent mockery of his own insight.

Bobby Peru, Dafoe's character, similarly possesses intelligence and insight when he perceives that Lula is pregnant. But he does so only with the intent to degrade and destroy. Much as deconstructionists, in their analyses, also exhibit insight, but generally only with the intent of undermining the substance of narratives, sometimes even, as Laura Mulvey stated in her essay on the gaze, with the express intent of extinguishing the pleasure of the viewer, "to make way for a total negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film."

Although it wouldn't be the first or last time Lynch referenced The Wizard of Oz in film, Wild at Heart is certainly the Lynch film that's most explicitly concerned with The Wizard of Oz. Lula and Sailor refer to their path as "the Yellow Brick Road". Lula has a vision of the Wicked Witch (in the form of her mother) and Sailor has a vision of the Good Witch (played by Laura Palmer herself, Sheryl Lee). The Wizard of Oz is the closest thing Lula and Sailor have to a religious text, a narrative anchor they use to keep their lives from spinning into chaos.

The dying girl played by Sherilyn Fenn functions a little like one of the demons. The brain damage she incurs after the accident reduces her to complaining randomly about her purse and her brush, her concerns disconnected from the reality at hand, an apparently damning demonstration of how the human mind is compelled to create narratives at variance with reality. Lula recalls a story about her cousin Dale, played in flashback by Crispin Glover, who had paranoid theories about aliens destroying Christmas. His compulsion to make hundreds of sandwiches in one night is not a practical method of satisfying his stated goal of making his lunch. But both of these fractured, counterproductive narratives arise from exterior or chemical forces doing damage to the brain. I wonder if Dale was also meant to be a reference to Mark Frost, Lynch's co-writer on Twin Peaks, who was interested in introducing a story about aliens to the series. Dale may have been a parody of Twin Peaks' protagonist Dale Cooper under that scenario.

A big part of Wild at Heart is devoted to Lula's mother, Marietta (Diane Ladd), who may serve as an example of someone without a narrative or with a very weak one. She's characterised by wildly inconsistent motives and indecision. First she wants to have sex with Sailor, then she wants to kill him. First she sends Harry Dean Stanton after Lula and Sailor, then the hitman, Santos. She regrets doing both. She ends up following Harry Dean Stanton but can't seem to decide if she wants to commit to a relationship with him.

Sailor and Lula are as wild at heart as Lula accuses the whole world of being. But their wildness is coupled with love, vulnerability, and compassion making them one of the more appealing, and romantic, couples in film history.

Twitter Sonnet #1699

Adornments swamp the swanky sobbing ball.
Aggrieved, the lizards pass the skull around.
Behold the drinking tree, a mile tall.
Revenge a penny begs a vengeful pound.
Of shattered webs, the stars have softly told.
Traversing roads of words, the riders go.
Derived from books of death, the angels hold.
Defense against the ice demands the snow.
Purveying phony jackets doomed a man.
Disaster beans were counted dead and dark.
Embedded fire roasts the coffee can.
Excited birds erased the actor's mark.
Abusing baubles close blockades ahead.
Enchanted claws enclose the frightened dead.