Misunderstanding Lynch: Wild at Heart, Part 1
Every single part of this movie is completely insane.
This is a weird one. It took me longer to write this one out, even compared to Blue Velvet. For mostly unrelated reasons, it ended up being the longest piece so far as well.
The next movie will almost certainly change this.
I’ve heard Wild at Heart described as the most accessible of Lynch’s movies. This is bullshit.
The plot itself is simple on the surface - crazy kids in love run away from domineering mother to go on sexy road trip - but holy balls, every single plot point and scene feels like a fever dream.
And that’s the fun of Lynch. Surface level, things can seem uncomplicated (like the lawn at the beginning of Blue Velvet). But Lynch knows it’s underneath, in the dirt and grime and messiness of real life, where things get really interesting.
The snakeskin jacket in this movie belongs to Nicolas Cage. It’s important to me that you know this. It’s one of the more normal things about Wild at Heart.
Strap in, kids.
//cj//
Wild at Heart
In the interest of full disclosure, let’s be clear: I love Nicolas Cage. I think he’s both a brilliant actor and a complete scene-chewing fucking lunatic. Sometimes in the same movie. I unironically enjoy most of the terrible films he’s made. His real life sounds like a David Lynch character. It felt right to warn everyone of my bias.
A lit match plays behind the opening credits.
I love how the title comes flying out like it’s a goddamn action film.
WILD.
AT.
HEART.
*EXPLOSIONS*
Except the soundtrack playing over these extreme opening credits is beautiful, soft, and instrumental. We watch the flames burn to a gentle tune.
I miss when movies had credits at the beginning. Get off my lawn.
We start off in Cape Fear, ‘Somewhere near the border between North and South Carolina.’
Camera pans through a glorious old building. There appears to be a party going on.
This movie is aggressively eighties. If I’d seen this when it came out in theaters I would ave thought, ‘Why is Lynch trying to be so timely?’
Nicolas Cage (Sailor) and Laura Dern (Lula) walk out of the party. Lula wears a pretty pink dress and hair large enough to consume a grown man.
I can’t explain what Sailor is wearing. Costumes from two different characters, maybe. No sane person dresses like this.
As they’re leaving a guy chases after Sailor with a ‘Hey, Sailor!’ He pauses to perv on Laura Dern, who is visibly uncomfortable.
Wait, Sailor is his actual name? Why? Who would name a child Sailor? I thought it was a cat call. Or his job.
The guy accuses Sailor of trying to have sex with Lula’s mother, Marietta (Diane Ladd). Cut to who I am assuming is the mother. She’s an older blonde with big jewels and a lot of makeup. Some would say too much.
Marietta paid this guy to murder Sailor in front of her daughter, which is A+ parenting.
The guy tries to stab him, as he was paid to do. Sailor goes berserk and beats the man’s head in. It takes a while. It’s graphic. There are noises.
Dead man at his feet, Sailor leans against a wall and lights a cigarette in an admittedly badass pose. He points a bloody hand at Marietta. She remains unmoved.
Cut to Pee Dee Correctional facility. I don’t know if that's a real place but I laughed. I am immature.
Sailor is in jail.
An old woman’s hand with a jeweled ring and black nails passes over a crystal ball.
22 months, 18 days later.
Sailor calls Lula from prison. Marietta answers the phone. She tells him never to call again and hangs up. Lula and her mother argue about Sailor.
Her mother chugs a martini with death in her eyes and murder in her heart.
His full name is Sailor Ripley. I keep thinking of Sailor Moon.
The guards let Sailor go free, on parole. Lula picks him up in a convertible, because fuck mom.
David Lynch really loves a good convertible. Ditto.
Lula gives Sailor his old snakeskin jacket, which is very important and a metaphor for his personal ideology.
Unless told otherwise, I choose to believe this is Nicolas Cage’s very own personal jacket. Edit: I was right. I am delighted.
They go off to celebrate his release. Naturally, this involves some very Lynchian sex.
No, I can’t explain ‘Lynchian sex.’ You know it when you see it. It does involve very bright lights in a variety of colors, though.
Sailor lays on the bed in the hotel room while Lula gets ready in the bathroom. They talk about sex, specifically Lula’s sex talk with her mother at 14. Sailor mentions Lula was raped at 13 by her Uncle Pooch.
Lula says her mother never knew about it.
Flashback to a younger Lula, curlers in her hair and blood on her face and between her legs. Disheveled and scared.
An older man calls her a pumpkin and throws a rag in her face. He leaves without another word. Lula sobs and shakes.
Her mother walks into the room. Runs screaming after Uncle Pooch, enraged.
Cut to a car rolling off a hill and bursting into flames.
It was Uncle Pooch. Good.
Lula is very concerned about the ozone layer. She was right to be.
Flashback to Lula remembering fire and flames.
A woman laughs in the hotel room next to theirs. This freaks Lula out.
Lula has a lot going on.
Sailor is so indifferent. Just laying on the bed with his his back against the mattress and his legs up against the headboard.
Marietta wants to kill Sailor, so she calls Harry Dean Stanton (Johnnie).
Harry Dean Stanton is the best.
Johnnie promises to help Marietta deal with the whole Sailor Ripley situation.
Johnnie is sweet on Marietta. He suspects she’s stepping iut on him, but she distracts him. By pretending to be a sexy panther. Or tiger. Some sort of big cat.
Exposition! Johnnie talks about how Sailor isn’t a murderer, he’s a hero for protecting himself and Lula from a knife-wielding maniac. Johnnie reminds Marietta she was actually there when this event took place.
Flashback to the party. Marietta sees Sailor go to the bathroom. She follows him into the men’s room. While he’s peeing.
‘How would you like to fuck Lula’s mama?’ Jesus Christ.
Present day, Johnnie promises Marietta he’ll bring Lula home.
Sailor wants to go dancing. Lula warns him that Johnnie is on their tail, so they have to keep a low profile. Lula is the more reasonable of the two. Of course, the bar is pretty low with our old pal Sailor.
Flashback to the party. Sailor and Marietta are still in the men’s room stall.
Marietta starts spouting off that she knows about his job as a driver for criminals.
She suggests something happened involving a fire.
Cut to broken glass and rippling flames.
Back to the bathroom. Marietta straight up calls Sailor trash, although she spells out ‘shit,’ which is hysterical.
Sailor tells Marietta she’ll have to kill him to keep him away from Lula.
Marietta loves this idea, but promises to castrate him first. She has a fancy little knife.
Sailor storms out. I really hope nobody had to pee while all this was happening.
Present day. Sailor says he’s going to break parole and take Lula to California.
‘Rockin’ good news.’ I’m going to make this a thing.
I unabashedly love how Nicolas Cage manages to throw an Elvis impression or reference in so many movies. When he’s not playing an Elvis impersonator himself, of course.
Lula, excited about their future, starts dancing barefoot on the bed.
Fade to her feet in high heels rocking out in a club under neon red lights.
Watching Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern grind at a punk show like they’re in Saturday Night Fever is sensational.
‘We better be careful,’ Lula said an hour before doing yoga moves and writhing around on the floor wearing panty hose as actual pants while her 6’2” boyfriend flails around in a snakeskin jacket.
Sailor sees Lula get pushed away from him by a guy. Not even aggressively, especially for a punk show.
Sailor raises his arm and the punk show stops. This is good etiquette at a punk show. If someone falls down in the pit, or you see someone in distress (or a snakeskin jacket) you stop the show.
This proves David Lynch actually went to punk shows. Not that I ever doubted him.
Sailor is wasted with a cigarette dangling from his lips. He points at the poor guy unlucky enough to have existed between him and Lula.
Sailor asks the man if he wants to apologize or fight. Lula finds this arousing. A stiff wind arouses Lula.
The guy not only refuses to apologize, he insults the snakeskin jacket.
Now Sailor’s pissed. He drops the still-burning cigarette to the floor.
‘It’s a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom.’ Sailor. Buddy. We’ve heard this before. Nobody cares.
The guy is unmoved. They fight. Sailor knocks him to the ground and holds his hand on the cigarette. Points for originality.
Sailor demands the dude apologize. He does so. Again, he just bumped into Lula. Not hard.
Sailor asks for the microphone from the lead singer, and sings Elvis to Lula. The band backs him up. Sailor sings under those red lights.
Is he going to do the whole song?
He’s not bad, to be fair. Shocking no one, Lula is super into it.
Piercing screams of excited women keep cutting through the music. The audience is either really into this performance or Sailor is having a fun little hallucination.
Oh, it’s real life. Good for him. Extra subtle and discreet.
I don’t know where they got the smoke machine from. Maybe the band brought it.
Cut to a brief sex scene featuring a well-placed blanket.
Burst of flames.
Mid-sex, Lula asks Sailor why he didn’t sing his favorite song, ‘Love me Tender.’ Sailor tells Lula he’ll only sing that to his wife. They’re having sex during this conversation.
A match lights a cigarette in the dark.
Post-coitus,Lula and Sailor enjoy some well-earned cigarettes. Lula talks about how she keeps thinking of the Wicked Witch - who naturally looks like her mother.
Cut to fire and broken glass.
Lula tells a story about smoking in eighth grade. She asks how old Sailor was when he started smoking. She calls him ‘Sail,’ which is somehow worse than ‘Sailor.’
‘Four. My mamma was already dead from lung cancer.’ Sailor drops a whole lot of childhood trauma on Lula, who adores every second.
Their pillow talk is. Interesting. Lula tells Sailor his taste in women and long nose remind her of her father. Then she asks if Sailor knows how her father died.
Fire.
Lula’s dad poured kerosene on himself and lit a match.
Cut to Lula’s father running through the house on fire, setting everything ablaze. The now-familiar shot of broken glass against flames.
Does Sailor have a really bad tattoo on his shoulder? I can’t tell.
Having sex while still holding cigarettes feels unwise.
Meanwhile, Johnnie is on the hunt. Marietta is hysterical. Marietta is usually hysterical. It’s her default setting.
Marietta flashes back to Sailor when he murdered that guy, cigarette between his teeth and blood on his face. It is an admittedly badass shot.
Present day Sailor and Lula cross state lines, making Sailor officially a fugitive by breaking parole. Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern look iconic: sunglasses on and cigarettes burning in a sexy convertible.
Lula says she wants to let her mother know she’s alive. Lula is nicer than I would be in this situation.
Johnnie is still, reluctantly, on their trail.
An intense, unsmiling Santos asks a smitten Marietta if she wants him to shoot Sailor in the head.
Marietta is visibly aroused by the idea.
Santos tells Marietta the best way to shoot someone. He’s speaking from firsthand experience. He’s another detective/bounty hunter type. He asks why she didn’t send Johnnie. Marietta claims he couldn’t handle it.
Cut to Johnnie driving.
Marietta tells Santos to look for Sailor and Lulu in New Orleans. Santos asks if he can kill Johnnie. Marietta says no. Santos doesn’t seem to care.
There’s a character named Mr. Reindeer. I haven’t been this happy since early November.
Marietta begs Santos not to kill Johnnie. Johnnie is such a tragedy. Killing him would be mean.
Lula and Sailor are bopping along to the radio as they drive around in a convertible, blissfully unaware of the deluge of bullshit about to rain down on them.
Santos makes a call from a telephone booth. The dude who answers it looks like Simon Pegg from the Mirror!verse. He thanks Santos for all the good drugs. He’s in a tuxedo.
Santos says he needs Mirror!Pegg’s help. Dude agrees. Cut to dude, who is sitting on the toilet in a very fancy bathroom with his pants around his knees talking on the phone while a young half naked woman waits in the doorway. She dances for him. He sits on the toilet and drinks tea.
I’m not trying to analyze this.
Sailor and Lula continue to have a lovely road trip.
Johnnie continues to hunt for them, chain-smoking and looking haggard.
Cut to a dude sitting in an armchair with a woman on each side of him. They’re wearing sexy little maid aprons, and nothing else. They hold metal trays. Mirror!Pegg talks on the phone. His life is very different from my life.
Cut to shots of New Orleans. A phone rings in a dark room.The silhouette of a woman in spiked boots holding a riding crop answers the phone. I immediately love her. Her name is Juana (Grace Zabriskie). The dude tells Perdita she’s getting a silver dollar and an assignment. I’m assuming for an assassination.
Oh shit, that’s Mr. Reindeer (William Morgan Sheppard).
Mr. Reindeer calls someone living in a small ranch home.
Same shot of Bourbon Street in New Orleans as before.
Cut to Lula and Sailor having more sex. This time we only see their hands, bathed in red light, while we hear them.
These two sure do talk a lot.
Close up of the burning match head.
More post coital smoking and chatting. Lula raves about how great sex with Sailor is.
The dynamic duo hits the town. The only person who loves Elvis more than Sailor Ripley is Nicolas Cage.
Some super gross old guy comes over to the bar and stares a little too long at Lula. Sailor catches his eye.
The man starts talking in a voice that sounds like he's been sucking on helium. He makes a weird fucking noise, which amuses our lovebirds.
Johnnie is still driving and listening to great music. He’s almost in New Orleans.
Marietta calls Santos in a panic. Says she’s having second thoughts. Santos responds with a fuck you I’m killing everyone vibe. Santos tells her he saw Johnnie in the streets of New Orleans and knows Marietta has been lying. Marietta panics again.
Marietta stares in the mirror, lipstick in hand. She takes the pink tube and rubs it in a thick horizontal line across her wrist.
A very elegant room where a very elegant older woman is telling a table of elegant you ladies how best to make Mr. Reindeer happy. There are fancy people milling about, as fancy people do.
A tall handsome man in a white hat holds a silver coin over his eye and smiles. Under other circumstances it might even be called a nice smile.
These are not the right circumstances.
Mr. Reindeer sent Hat Man the silver dollar ‘I need you to murder people’ alert without giving him the actual assignment, which is why Mr. Hat showed up at the fancy party.
‘Show it just before the dead.’ Well that’s not ominous at all.
Believe it or not, the insanity goes up a notch in part two. Stay tuned.
//cj//