Wild at Heart
Directed: David Lynch
Screenplay: David Lynch, based on the novel by Barry Gifford
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, Willem Dafoe, Diane Ladd, Harry Dean Stanton, J. E. Freeman, Crispin Glover, Isabella Rossellini
Synopsis: A sincere-but-damned rebel misfit and a sexually willing, independent woman fight her deranged, uptight Mama for the right to preserve their forbidden love. In a supreme act of defiance, they grab their cigarettes, snakeskin jackets, and bubblegum; hop in a classic convertible and barrel down a road littered with fatal car crashes, violence, and a doomed sense of romance. Their adventure climaxes in a lonely, remote place, where they meet a man in black whose presence will threaten their love for each other. Despite being surrounded by loss and destruction, no one can keep them apart, not even themselves.
“Finding Love in Hell”
David Lynch has called his 1990 Palme d’Or-winning film Wild at Heart “a picture about finding love in hell,” which may be the closest Lynch has ever come to saying what any of his films are actually about.[1] Despite his assertion, Wild at Heart is the Lynch film that scholars and fans alike most often cite as a “a litter of quotation marks,”[2] “a parade of surfaces behind which is no significant depth,”[3] “a kind of cinematic vogue-ing that passes for the play of human emotions,”[4] “a violent collection of images and clichés in search of stability and meaning.”[5] While critics unleash most of their ire on the film’s absolutely bonkers ending (which I won’t spoil here), detractors save some venom for the film’s two major motifs, Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) and 1950s rock ‘n’ roll iconography. No matter whether you’re revisiting the film or seeing it for the first time tonight, I’d encourage you to read these motifs not as drawbacks but rather the film’s key components. The film is not about rock ‘n’ roll—it is rock ‘n’ roll. It does not allude to The Wizard of Oz—it transplants the Yellow Brick Road to the American road, Highway 61 to be exact, making the search for Emerald City into the American Dream itself.
Mike Miley teaches literature at Metairie Park Country Day School and film studies at Loyola University New Orleans. His work has appeared in The Atlantic.com, Bright Lights Film Journal, Film International, Moving Image Source, The New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. His essay “David Lynch at the Crossroads: Deconstructing Rock, Reconstructing Wild at Heart” was published in Music and the Moving Image in 2014.
1. Chris Rodley, Lynch on Lynch, p. 193.
2. Kathleen Murphy, “Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round.” Film Comment 26, no. 6, p. 60.
3. Eric Wilson, The Strange World of David Lynch: Transcendental Irony from Eraserhead to Mulholland Dr. , p. 106.
4. Murphy, p. 60.
5. Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam, p. 72.