And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground There are certain people of whom it is difficult to say anything which will at once throw them into relief—in other words, describe them graphically in their typical characteristics. These are they who are generally known as “commonplace people,” and this class comprises, of course, the immense majority of mankind. Authors, as a rule, attempt to select and portray types rarely met with in their entirety, but these types are nevertheless more real than real life itself. For instance, when the whole essence of an ordinary person’s nature lies in his perpetual and unchangeable commonplaceness; and when in spite of all his endeavours to do something out of the common, this person ends, eventually, by remaining in his unbroken line of routine—. I think such an individual really does become a type o...
Wild at Heart (1990)
It was booed at Cannes and received lukewarm reviews but there remains something compelling about its lurid extremities
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Thirty years ago, Wild at Heart arrived in theaters after winning the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was greeted, according to the critic Dave Kehr, with “the most violent chorus of boos and hisses to be heard in a decade”. Such a reception at Cannes can often be a badge of honor – L’Avventura and Taxi Driver also got an earful – and Lynch would get booed again when he premiered Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me at the festival two years later. But Wild at Heart opening to polarized reviews and middling box office, and its reputation over the years hasn’t improved as much as Fire Walk with Me or Lost Highway, which both seemed ahead of their audience at the time. While other Lynch films have been treated to Criterion editions and repertory play, it was hard to find on DVD in the US for years and it’s still not available to stream anywhere. This was not the expected fate for a Palme-winner from one of the greatest film-makers.
And yet, it’s not impossible to understand why it’s slipped through the cracks a little. Wild at Heart is a film of extreme violence and ugliness, and it’s far more conceptually loaded than it needs to be, with a complicated thicket of murderous lowlifes and Wizard of Oz references that are sometimes clumsily grafted on to the action and the dialogue. Coming after a tightly constructed noir like Blue Velvet, the film feels deliberately unruly, loaded with discursive flashbacks and soap opera twists, and moments of glib provocation, as if Lynch were aiming to repulse people as a lark. John Waters once said, “If someone vomits watching one of my films, it’s like getting a standing ovation.” Perhaps that’s what those Cannes boos felt like for Lynch.
But the chaos that surrounds Sailor and Lula – “Well, we’re really out in the middle of it now, ain’t we?” she declares – has the effect of heightening their relationship, much like the pop of three-strip Technicolor when Dorothy emerges into Munchkinland. For all the scenes of them grinding away in seedy motel rooms, and for all the past traumas and injustices they can never escape, Lynch sees Sailor and Lula as innocents, so pure in their love that they would make the robin tweet in Blue Velvet. When Sailor serenades Lula with Elvis tunes, it’s easy to get hung up on Nicolas Cage’s kitschy impersonation of The King or the piped-in screams of young women from an old live recording. But Lynch is utterly sincere about Sailor and Lula, and optimistic that they can overcome the evil forces that are aligned against them.
The key to Wild at Heart is Laura Dern’s performance as Lula, who craves freedom from a pathological mother (Diane Ladd, Dern’s real mom) and from a childhood shaped by sexual assault and the death of her father under dubious circumstances. She clings to the most flawed imaginable vessel in Sailor, who’d be the type to stumble into prison stints under the best of circumstances, but who also happens to have witnessed the fire that killed her father. As she and Sailor dodge the bloodhounds and assassins her mother sends after them – Harry Dean Stanton, JE Freeman, Grace Zabriskie, Isabella Rossellini and David Patrick Kelly are only a partial list of their pursuers – Lula insists on finding some place where they can be happy together. Maybe it’s a dancefloor, maybe it’s cigarettes on a motel bed, maybe it’s a sunset on the side of the road – she will eke out pleasure in the moment, even if they have no future together.
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- Release date: August 17, 1990 (USA)Director: David LynchDistributed by: Universal Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer · See moreAdapted from: Wild at HeartBudget: $10 million
- Release date: August 17, 1990 (USA)Director: David LynchDistributed by: Universal Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer · See moreAdapted from: Wild at HeartBudget: $10 million
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