Wild At Heart (1990)
Because TIFF is hosting an ongoing late night series dedicated to him this season, and because we believe (actually) that he might be the essential American actor of the last 30 years, we present Caged Wisdom, a series of essays about the films of Nicolas Cage.
“Did I ever tell you this here jacket represents a symbol of my individuality, and my belief in personal freedom? “—Nicolas Cage, as Sailor Ripley, in Wild At Heart
More than any of David Lynch’s films, 1990’s Wild At Heart is an exercise in tropes. It’s a brightly woven tapestry of signs and symbols, irony and metaphor. Its synthetic-noir Wizard Of Oz riffing is defined by its very trope-iness. In Wild At Heart, a character won’t just wear an ostentatious snakeskin jacket as an obvious symbol of individuality and belief in personal freedom. No. Rather, that same character will outright tell you that that’s what it is. It’s disarmingly obvious.
The film opens in the liminal, in-between space “somewhere near the border between North and South Carolina.” There—at some upper-crust to-do in a cavernous ballroom where his Brylcreemed hairdo and boots with the matching polish mark him as immediately out of place—we meet Nicolas Cage’s Sailor Ripley. In his introduction, Cage quickly dispatches a hitman, hired to kill him by the hateful mother of his beloved, Laura Dern’s Lulu Fortune. Like Valley Girl, this is a star-crossed lovers story. And it is perhaps the sweetest of the '90s-revival of “love on the run” gangster films. More than the characters in Tony Scott’s True Romance (or, lord knows, those in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers), Lynch’s hopeless paramours are true innocents, even if it is in a topsy-turvy Lynchian moral universe.
Wild At Heart is not top-shelf Lynch, by any but the most forgiving yardstick. (It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1990, but not without controversy.) It’s neither as allegorically perfect as Blue Velvet, nor as invitingly elusive as Mulholland Drive, nor as vividly nightmarish as Lost Highway or Inland Empire. It plays, in places, like it was made by someone who had seen half of Blue Velvet and the dream sequence episode from Twin Peaks, and then set about copping the tone and style as an exercise. It is thoroughly ersatz. Wild At Heart persists in calling attention to its phoniness, just as Cage points at his jacket and says, basically, “This is a symbol for something else!” The film is at once incredibly rich (at least in the academic sense, where all its cinematic self-references can be endlessly parsed in the search for its meaning) and deeply, deeply shallow (because that meaning isn’t there). The film nods to The Wizard Of Oz so much that it’s not so much referencing the film as writing over it.
Lynch whorls together existing iconography from cinema, rock ’n’ roll, and that fizzing subconscious dreamscape that he’s always seemed to be able to access. Before Tarantino coined the phrase with his own poppish mish-mashing in Pulp Fiction, Wild At Heart felt very much like “a wax museum with a pulse.” And Cage’s Ripley is the superlative trope. He’s the Janus-face to Kyle MacLachlan’s aww-shucks oddballs in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. He’s every one of David Lynch’s nervier preoccupations—violence, eeriness, rock ’n’ roll, cigarettes smoking—wrapped up in a snakeskin jacket. “Wild at heart and weird on top.”
Despite opening on Cage savagely caving in a man’s head, Wild At Heart offers one of the actor’s more self-possessed performances. Cage plays it like his character in Valley Girl, tinged just slightly sociopathic. (Everything in Wild At Heart is tinged at least slightly sociopathic.) Like Martin Sheen did for his full-on psycho greaser in Badlands, Cage channels a nostalgic idea of 1950’s cool. He’s a cowboy-badass who high-kicks to thrash metal and worships Elvis. He started smoking when he was 4. And, like all of the best Cage characters, he’s unbridled—so overflowing with energy that he’ll punch at the air or howl at nothing or brutalize a man’s face beyond the requirements of “self-defense” just to vent it.
The can of unwarranted whoop-ass Cage opens early in the film is key. Unlike Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr., or Twin Peaks—which are all patterned as stories of wide-eyed innocents tainted by evil forces bubbling just beneath the surface of daily life—Wild At Heart proceeds from inequity and charts a course back into redemption. In Blue Velvet, we wait to see what MacLachlan’s pervert/detective is capable of. In Wild At Heart, Cage’s unchecked savagery is laid bare in the opening scene. Then we watch as he works to effectively contain it—with the occasional purifying outburst, of course.
The film works rather neatly as an analogy for directing Cage. Lynch is a deft wrangler of the sorts of energies that seep through the seams of Cage’s star persona. Cage and Lynch met at Musso & Frank, a restaurant steeped in the history of Old Hollywood. They’d cross paths there, and it’s fun to think of them running in the same circles, keeping the same schedules, as if cut from the same quirky, snakeskin cloth.
In 1989, Lynch cast Cage (opposite Dern) in his avant-musical theatre piece Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream Of The Brokenhearted commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy Of Music for the New Musical America Festival. Industrial Symphony opens on Cage (as “Heartbreaker”) dumping Dern (as “Heartbroken Woman”) over the phone. It then pirouettes out of the orbits of reality, spinning into a long-form melancholic hallucination on the part of the Heartbroken Woman. Like Wild At Heart, it’s ludicrously Lynchian. (Lights flicker and blink, a dwarf saws a log, actresses are flailed around on ropes like a nightmarish twist on the Streetcar Named Desire production on The Simpsons, etc.) Industrial Symphony plays like a prelude to Wild At Heart. By exploring the depths of heartbreak through experimental theatre, Industrial Symphony begins threading the emotional ties between Cage and Dern, which would reach their cartoonish crescendo in Wild At Heart.
Cage’s CV is pretty much defined by its eclecticism, by the yo-yoing between scenery chewing in barely B-movies, a more refined kind of acting, and every sequel and remake and face-swap movie in between. But his role as Heartbreaker in Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream Of The Brokenhearted may be the most standout credit in his sprawling filmography.
Coming off successes in Moonstruck, Raising Arizona, and the under-appreciated mini-masterpiece Vampire’s Kiss, a wacky musical-theatre piece seems like an odd choice. But these are the kinds of choices that make Cage’s career interesting. Like Lynch, Cage seems to operate on a weird pre-instinctual level, driven by his half-mad muse. Over the past 10 years, this has become conflated with a tendency to chase paycheques indiscriminately. But there seems to be a sense of exploration here. Again, like that classical Lynchian protagonist, Blue Velvet’s Jeffrey, Cage seems guided as much by his curiosity as his individuality belief in personal freedom.
Wild At Heart seems like the payoff on the gambit of Industrial Symphony. It was a chance for Cage to collaborate with perhaps America’s only legit art house filmmaker (at the time, anyway). Cage is often at his best working with filmmakers whose tastes position them just on the edges of the mainstream (Spike Jonze, Werner Herzog, the Coens), where the cultivated fringe sensibilities of actor and director can fruitfully commingle. Given this, it’s interesting that Cage rarely works with these filmmakers agin. Directors like David Lynch or the Coen Brothers are known for curating their stables of actors-at-hand. But Cage has never joined their ranks. It’s as if he exhausts himself in these collaborations. Unlike Lynchian roles played by Harry Dean Stanton or Grace Zabriskie, Cage’s Ripley seems singular. As flat and overly ironic the film is, Cage stands out in his own super flat and overly ironic way. And when, after two hours of teasing, Cage finally sings “Love Me Tender” to Dern, it’s legitimately sweet and affecting in the movie’s own wax-museum way.
And that jacket.
If Cage ever has to refinance his pyramidal mausoleum, and so abandon any hopes of actual mummification, let us hope he’s with that snakeskin jacket. Or in it. Or under it, like a shroud. Or cremated and then woven into a fine thread used to stich a line of licensed, Cage-issued Symbol Of Individuality And Belief In Personal Freedom celebrity snakeskin jackets.
Wild At Heart screens Saturday, Feb. 11 at TIFF Bell Lightbox.
