Wild at Heart arrived on Home Video today in 1991, after an August 17, 1990 theatrical release.
If Blue Velvet whip-cracked the suburban smile to show what’s festering underneath, Wild at Heart drags it out into full-on operatic nightmare territory. Psychosexual violence, grotesque comedy, doomed romance, and snakehip swagger – with the radio cranked high enough to make your eyes bleed. But this time, the clean-cut masks are gone. Everything’s on fire, and everyone’s dancing around the flames.
And somehow, beneath all the pulp and ash, there’s a drive towards a state of grace.
This is a road movie only in the sense that there’s a lot of asphalt. At the centre of the firestorm are Sailor and Lula, two people who’ve already hit bottom and keep digging, propelled by lust and something resembling hope. It’s The Ballad of Bonnie & Clyde remixed by an Elvis impersonator who reads Kerouac.
Lynch takes a handful of mid-century pop cultural obsessions – Elvis, The Wizard of Oz, Muscle cars – and throws them into a surrealist collage of deep fried Americana trash. There’s no tonal control here, and that’s deliberate. One moment it’s a gonzo farce, the next it’s trauma rubbernecking, and right when you think it’s tapped out, Lynch sends in the Good Witch. Not metaphorically. Literally. In spite of the human wreckage, he still dares to drop in a fairytale ending. Not because it makes sense, but because he wants to see what happens when you try.
Critics at the time were split: some saw brilliance, others called it indulgent chaos. But even then, people knew it was something. It won the Palme d’Or, but also got booed at Cannes. Which kind of tells you everything.
Wild at Heart is grotesque and it’s exhausting. But everything about it is absolutely fascinating to watch well past the end credits. He’s not here to shine a critical light on the American dream. What Lynch does is light a road flare next to the crash site – and lets the cameras roll.