With Wild At Heart, 1990 was a big year for David Lynch

Wild At Heart (1990)

Call it a victory for the TV-is-the-new-cinema crowd or just proof that the small screen’s talent pool keeps expanding, but for the first time ever, television has earned an invitation to the Cannes Film Festival. Cannes, which began yesterday (and which yours truly is covering from the ground; read the kickoff dispatch here), will this year screen, however begrudgingly, the first couple episodes of two new TV shows, both by past Palme D’Or winners. I’ll probably skip Jane Campion’s Top Of The Lake sequel, China Girl—I admire Campion and quite liked the first season of her show, but I didn’t fly halfway around the world to get an early start on the fall TV season. What’s going to prove much harder to resist, however, is a first look at what could be the TV event of the year: the return of David Lynch’s groundbreaking whodunit whatsit soap opera Twin Peaks. New anything by Lynch is very rare these days. Also, it’s Twin friggin’ Peaks.

Exhibiting the revival of his prestige-TV milestone at the world’s most prestigious film festival must hold some special significance for Lynch. After all, the two things dovetail on his résumé, don’t they? Lynch first came to Cannes in May of 1990, flying with a print of his new movie, which he had completed mere hours earlier, pushed underneath the seat in front of him. This was a big year—nay, a big couple months—for America’s nightmare laureate. Just a few weeks earlier, his pilot for Twin Peaks had aired to much awe, befuddlement, and rapturous acclaim—no one had ever seen anything like it on TV, and the show was a bona fide sensation by the time Lynch made his inaugural appearance in competition at Cannes, with the batshit movie he basically shot concurrently with his batshit show, even borrowing cast members from the latter to appear in the former.

To this day, Twin Peaks remains one of the weirdest, most stylish, most idiosyncratic visions ever allowed on network television, maybe on TV in general. It exploded the possibilities of what the medium could be. All the same, it was still a TV show, beholden not just to the demands of episodic storytelling, but also to standards and practices. Wild At Heart, the film Lynch brought to Cannes in the wake of Twin Peaks’ auspicious debut, feels beholden to little. It shows no great interest in its own story, which is really just a hook on which Lynch can hang his obsessions, his hang-ups, his acid-retro attitude. And, certainly, there’s nothing safe-for-ABC about the film’s splashes of sex and violence: bodies writhing in bare ecstasy, heads bashed in and blown off. People walked out in droves at early screenings. The MPAA threatened an X. (Lynch, bending to the outrage of both a little, trimmed some carnage, but the difference between the version that played on the Croisette and the one that opened in American theaters three months later is marginal.)

At Cannes, the reaction was mixed, to put it mildly. For each person thrilled by the movie’s black-comic transgressions, there was someone else disgusted or irritated by its open-road freak show, its never-ending parade of degenerate oddballs and sardonic debauchery. When Bernardo Bertolucci, head of the competition jury, announced that he and his cohorts (Aleksei German, Mira Nair, Anjelica Huston, and Christopher Hampton among them) were handing the Palme D’Or to this mad movie, the boos drowned out the applause. Lynch, polite and brief at the podium, looked unfazed by the jeers. “I can’t believe what’s happening,” he said. “It’s a true dream come true.”

In its near-constant, laughing-gas lunacy, Wild At Heart is the closest Lynch has ever come to making a bona fide comedy. And in a filmography highlighted by eerie musical performances (the lip-sync showpiece of Blue Velvet, the mesmerizing Club Silencio scene in Mulholland Drive), it comes the closest to a hypothetical “David Lynch musical,” high on heavy metal and Chris Isaak, straight through to a breaking-into-song ending that puts that genre influence front and center. But Wild At Heart is also Lynch’s shrillest movie, his most garishly over-the-top, the one that threatens to twist his regular preoccupations—lost highways, the submerged horror of Americana, Elvis Presley—into a swaggering shtick. If a Lynch movie could ever be accused of self-parody, this would be the one.

The source material is a book, then unpublished, by Barry Gifford—the first in a series of road-noir novels he wrote about two horny star-crossed lovers, crisscrossing the American Southwest. Sailor, brought screaming (and boogieing and crooning) to life by Nicolas Cage at his most unrestrained, is the insane-asylum version of a ’50s greaser outlaw. Laura Dern, in what then counted as a deviation from a more squeaky-clean career path, plays Lula, his sex- and excitement-starved sweetheart. After a stint in prison for killing a man in something resembling self-defense, Sailor picks Lula up in his ostentatious ’50s convertible, and they head for California, breaking his parole in search of a more sensational life. But Lula’s mother, Marietta (Laura Dern’s actual mother, Diane Ladd), despises Sailor, in no small part because he rejected her advances. And so she sends a few unsavory customers (a private eye, a couple of assassins) to hunt the young lovers down.

To say that Lynch is more interested in the journey than the destination would be an understatement. With Wild At Heart, he takes every narrative off-ramp he spots, lets loose ends dangle, and perversely subverts even the promise of chase-movie danger. (That the bad guys never really catch up to the good guys could be a joke or just a shrug.) Sailor and Lula themselves disappear often into detours and memories, Lynch cutting over and over again to the image of a fiery trauma from Lula’s past (fire is a motif, sparked repeatedly by a lit match) or turning anecdotes into vignettes, like the one starring Crispin Glover as a mentally ill shut-in with a habit of stuffing cockroaches up his anus. It’s no great shock that more than an hour of deleted scenes exist for Wild At Heart. One could probably add or subtract digressions without much change to the cumulative effect.

Is there a life-sized performance in the movie? Just about everyone is a camp cartoon, beginning with Lynch’s wild-man star. Rocking a snakeskin jacket from his own wardrobe, Cage punches and kicks the air, thrusting his hips around like someone impersonating an Elvis impersonator, complete with sketch-comedy drawl. He’s cranked to 11 in that familiar way, but Wild At Heart is so overpopulated with weirdos that the actor has no foil to play his theatrics against; it’s the rare instance when Cage actually seems to be struggling to keep up with the craziness happening around him. Certainly, there are plenty who give him a run for his scenery-chewing money. Ladd, for example, plays all of her scenes at a fever pitch of boozy hysteria—howling with indignation, smearing her whole face in blood-red lipstick, summoning the vamping ghost of Hollywood divas past. That she earned an Oscar nomination for the performance is either an unholy miracle or proof that industry clout can buy anything.