David Lynch
Cuore selvaggio

At the end of the first half, the lady in front of us turns around, looking for the comfort of someone else’s opinion. “I didn’t think it would be so violent,” she says, though it’s clear that adjective stands in for so many others that could say much more.

“Wild at Heart” turns 35, and here we are, watching it together at an open-air cinema. Most of the seats are taken, the tension is high. I have never reviewed Lynch before, and I like approaching his cinema with the eyes of a child, not seeking critical references or using words already spoken by someone else. I try to put my thoughts in order.

Emptied genres
Released between “Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks,” it seems to me the film begins from a distorted idea of genres, a hallucinatory vision of events and reality. The two lovers (Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage) are wildly over the top, caricatured in their way of speaking, making love, dancing, chatting. Sometimes the actors don’t even seem to be acting, so alienating (and sometimes senseless) is what they say.

So, the romantic drama loses its credibility and seems like a farce. But even the “crime thriller” twist turns in on itself. There’s a detective (Johnnie Farragut), lover of Lula’s mother, and a second, much grimmer lover who, in addition to looking for the woman’s daughter, hunts down the first investigator and rival in love to kill him. He is the criminal Marcellus Santos. Two forces that conflict rather than collaborate.

Later in the story the crime genre appears dismantled as well. The delirious Bobby Peru (a spectacular Willem Dafoe) involves Sailor in a botched robbery not without shadows, which degenerates into a splatter bloodbath.

Repellent details
And here enters the most disturbing side of Lynchian aesthetics. The world is observed with a morbid gaze, an overwhelming bad taste perhaps meant just to unsettle us, but more likely intended to advance a double-sided vision of existence: the outer one, rhetorical and flat, and the sick, distorting, grotesque one. A world with a “wild heart” that hides (but not too well) its most senseless and contradictory horrors, a gangrene that infects the seemingly healthy tissues of society.

And so we see cousin Dell putting cockroaches where the sun don’t shine, Lula’s mother in her delirium painting herself entirely red with lipstick, the tribal and absurd rituals of Santos’ killers, the detachment from reality of the crash girl. There’s a great love for blood that drips slowly, painting patterns on faces, puddles on the floor. This isn’t normal blood—it’s morbid, a symbol, an epiphany of Lynch’s horrific vision.

A language that falsifies
Another important aspect is the use of words. The characters’ statements are constantly put into question, truths are multiple and fragmented. For example, Lula’s stories often indulge in great naïveté, while her mother Marietta keeps pretending with her two lovers, but even we, as viewers, don’t know where her true will lies, which of the two she truly prefers. She moves like a pendulum and can’t decide, adrift. Not to mention Sailor, who builds a fictitious, evasive world to keep Lula close—a persona very far from the real one. His crimes are easily omitted, and the girl deludes herself about his sincerity, rarely asking questions.

Then there’s the language of eros: that is powerful, poetic, precise. The “cazzo tenero” of the lover who seems to speak to the protagonist, the menacing one (a cobra) of Bobby Peru, who, however, harasses Lula mainly with his words—the violence of a language that dominates and rapes.

The road movie
The essential element of the film, the road trip, is actually emptied and reinvented. The car sequences don’t build a complex plot; they are mere containers. The chase and the journey are not exciting; in fact, they almost bore (deliberately). The real journey is psychological, found in the protagonist’s growth and the regression of her lover. The locations matter little; America has never been so abstract, spectral, inconsistent. The investigators have no chance of catching the lovers; at most, Farragut and Santos can only hinder each other, amid the constant second thoughts of the neurotic mother Marietta.

Lula
Finally, here is a character magnificently built out of visions and memories that are not always true or coherent. The images that represent her memories are deeply subjective, partial, often senseless. From her father’s death to the violence she suffered, from her cousin (the bad thoughts that torment her, but she seems to laugh them off). A woman who appears exuberant in her gestures and dress, but who ultimately shows her fragility and good faith—the only decent human being in a world of monsters, liars, johns, murderers.

In the end, she does much better on her own, but she does not for that reason turn her back on love, regardless of the (yet to be evaluated) goodness of heart of that ugly man she has fallen madly in love with.

And there he is—Nicolas Cage disheveled, in his snakeskin jacket, finally singing “Love Me Tender” for Lula, embracing her as she stands on the hood of the car in the middle of honking traffic. And, in the meantime, he sends his thanks to the Good Fairy, who set him straight.