Wild at Heart

Roadside accidents or a fire in every cigarette

From the very first scene, all the cards are on the table. To the sound of a popular jazz standard from the big band era, the camera moves vertiginously from the ceiling of a ballroom to the encounter between Nicholas Cage's Sailor and Laura Dern's Lula on the staircase. Without further ado, a knife glints in the night, Cage beats his tormentor to death, and Dern screams at the top of her lungs, while heavy metal notes invade the soundtrack and blood spills down the steps. Soon the couple will set off in a Bonnie and Clyde-style convertible, crossing the southern states, while the girl's crazy mother (a superb Diane Ladd) tries to prevent the amour fou, calling on countless other pursuers. The wild escape provides a narrative framework, but all that matters here are the accidents along the way: the collection of parallel lines unleashed by David Lynch, the inventory of increasingly unusual characters and situations, the framework of dissonant sensibilities — between Cage's coolness and Dern's exuberance —, the ever-new extravagance of gestures. There is always a wallpaper that screams, a colour that stands out, a hairstyle that escapes, an unexpected note that pierces the eardrum.

«This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top», Lula says at one point, as if offering a key to understanding all of Lynch’s films — and this film in particular. «Wild at Heart»: this cinema feeds on the guts of this place called the United States of America; on its most untamed creatures, its morbid energies and passions always on the verge of exploding. The exacerbated sexuality, the brutal violence, the music always at full volume (or everything at once, as in the anthological sequence in which Juana de Grace Zabrinskie screams «fuck me now, Reggie!» while the henchman commits a murder). «Weird on top»: as if its eminently strange nature were not enough, the surface of the film mobilises an arsenal of exorbitant forms, from unusual angles to hammy performances, from sudden slow motion to abrupt changes in tone, from the omnipresent soundtrack to sudden bursts of trauma in the form of memory or mirage.

If Wild at Heart can be «classified in almost every genre» — from noir to musical, from horror to comedy — and is made up of «visitations to all of them», as João Bénard da Costa wrote, this is due to the fact that Lynch's maximalism has perhaps never been in better shape, perhaps never so deliciously unbalanced between the reinterpretation of the popular vein of great American cinema and its histrionic twist. Lynch appropriates an immense repertoire of recognisable signs — roadside motels, Elvis, The Wizard of Oz, bank robberies — and superimposes them on his pantheon of oddities. How can one hear «Love Me Tender» again in the cinema, if not from the mouth of a passionate murderer, wearing a snakeskin coat, hovering over the cars he has just jumped on to find his beloved for the last time?

Every time a new character enters the scene, it is to be expected that some detail in their presence will go beyond their narrative function to set a surprising tone, somewhere between feverishness and derision. Wild at Heart is a film that always moves forward, in the best American tradition, but is constantly haunted by a lateral aspect: there is always an extra shadow in the shot, a glare that catches the eye, a voice that changes to pull the rug out from under our perception. There is always one more accident on the side of the road. And while it is filled with unfathomable enigmas, as always in Lynch, the film does not have the sombre character of Lost Highway (1997) or the introspection of Inland Empire (2006). The mystery of Wild at Heart takes place in the open: sunny, superficial, pyrotechnic, like a lit cigarette in close-up.

Here, people smoke a lot, all the time, Marlboro and Kool, Viceroys and Merits, from the age of four until they die of cancer, perhaps like in no other film in the history of cinema. All the characters are always ready to light a cigarette (or two at the same time, like Sailor). And if the flame of the cigarette's portable fire spreads through the narrative and visual material of the film (the eternal return of the burning of the father's body, the flames that mark the transition between one shot and another), it is because the cigarette is the perfect allegory for this fiery cinema. If early death is the price to pay for so many lit cigarettes, may the flame of each one bring with it the beauty and terror of a conflagration.