Wild At Heart. Phewwwww boy. Where to begin? I don’t know how to write about this film and it’s beginning to terrify me. I looked over my notes and they don’t make any sense — they’re all questions. I specifically remembering deciding not to get stoned beforehand because I knew this film was a bit of a crazy ride. Now, I’m wondering if I did get high before watching and somehow forgot that I did that. Seriously, this is a question I wrote down and I present it to you verbatim: Is this a visual representation of smoking a cigarette? Love=cigarette?
Uh, what?
First, it’s Lynch and then on top of that, it’s Nicolas Cage. Lynch and Cage together is a recipe for volcanic eruption. Then, you add Willem Defoe and it becomes the end of the goddamn world.
What’s it about?
It’s about a karate kicking guy named Sailor, who’s in love with a hyper sexual woman named Lula. Lula’s mother is a maniac in love with a mobster and she hates Sailor with a passion. She will stop at nothing to murder him in order to keep him away from her daughter. Sailor and Lula embark on a cross country trip full of every vice imaginable as they flee Lula’s mother. There is a ton of sex, multiple cigarettes being smoked at once, murder, mayhem, car accidents, a robbery gone wrong, a decapitation and of course, a snakeskin jacket. After all, it’s a symbol of Sailor’s individuality.
Is it good?
Yes, in a crazy way and definitely not a for everyone way. The film starts, right off the bat, at level 100 and only escalates from there. It can be a bit exhausting. There’s a line in the film that goes: the world is wild at heart and weird on top. That’s Lynch’s philosophy on life and here he is all about showing us the unkempt nature of blossoming love. For the record, the actors are all fantastic in their own scenery chewing ways. Cage has always been both the best and worst actor alive and here he lays the blueprint for every supernova Cage we’ll see during the rest of his career.
We can’t escape the crazy in this film — it’s all consuming. Even when the film slows down a bit as Sailor and Lula reach the town of Big Tuna, we’re only exchanging crazy for a different sort of more unsettling crazy. And then the film ramps it all up again. It is sort of mesmerizing in a reckless way.
Lynch sprinkles plenty of his Twin Peaks cohorts around in the film and also tips his hand toward what we would see in a couple years with Fire Walk With Me. Lynch is always mining himself and his viewer for a deeper understanding of what makes us all tick. Wild at Heart is more soap opera than crime flick while also being Lynch’s completely fucked up version of, The Wizard Of Oz. It’s all there and honestly pretty overt, especially for Lynch. It’s like melding Oz with the Hell depicted in The Divine Comedy.
Everything in the film is set at odds with Sailor and Lula — they are all distractions wishing to keep Sailor and Lula from their ultimate goal. It’s an awesome representation of the trials of young love when two lovers must decide if what they have is real and sustaining or flippant and fleeting. They are tested, and the cigarettes do mean something. Lynch loves the flame and loves the phrase: fire walk with me. Even if that phrase is never uttered in this film, it’s there for us to infer. The flame here represents burning desire and everything else is life after desire has burned itself out. Most of the characters are like zombies because they’ve become trapped by their own emotional failings. Sailor and Lula (really Sailor) are headed here as well until two things: Lula’s pregnancy and Sailor triumphing over his own demons. Lula makes a decision to live her life for their son and Sailor makes a decision to initially stay wild and let Lula go. He’s then assaulted by a group of random thugs after calling them an insensitive sexual slur. It’s after his beating that he realizes the error of his ways. And we realize these thugs to be a representation of Sailor’s inner demons. You cannot conquer your demons with violence and ugliness. You have to recognize them and accept them if you ever hope to walk away and move forward. Sailor finally learns this lesson and returns to Lula and his son, a (slightly) changed man and we’ve all learned a little bit about acceptance.
Next week, Lost Highway. Until then, love each other.
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