Weird America - film director David Lynch - Cover Story

National Review, Oct 1, 1990 by Joseph Sobran

WILD AT HEART, David Lynch recently conceded, is not a film for eve ne." Maybe he's right. It begins with the hero bashing open the skull of a black who pulls a knife on him. After a brief prison term, he elopes cross-country with the girl he was fighting over; they have frequent and fairly explicit sex along the way. Her mother, who it transpires has tried to seduce him in a public toilet, sends several men to murder him. On the road, the lovers come across a bloody traffic accident. Meanwhile, a rich mobster sits on a toilet talking into his telephone as naked women attend him. During an armed robbery, one man is vividly decapitated; another has a hand shot off, and as he crawls around in his own blood trying to find it a dog trots out the back door holding it in his teeth. At different points in the film, both mother and daughter vomit, and a man is murdered

o rite. Oh, and the hero gets his nose swollen in a fistfight.

I hope I haven't given the wrong impression: Wild at Heart is a comedy.

And believe it or not, it is pretty funny. The two lovers, Sailor (Nicholas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern), are a pair of losers who are in over their heads. They stick together in dopey devotion as gory misadventures befall them. "This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top," Lula wails. Sailor faces everything with the polite, stoical stupidity of an Elvis Presley, whom he explicitly resembles; in one wonderfully sweet and funny scene, a hard-rock band turns into a backup group for Cage's dead-on Elvis imitation as girls scream and swoon. He proudly wears an outlandish snakeskin jacket, which he says "represents my individuality and my belief in personal freedom," a slightly cracked credo that gets more endearing every time he repeats it. Other eccentric characters keep roaming in and out, most of whom have nothing to do with the plot. Then again Sailor and Lula don't have much to do with the plot either. They more or less outrun it.

But even the jokes have an eerie edge. Wild at Heart has Lynch's trademark themes: death, violence, mutilation, deformity, sex, kinkiness, secret traumas-but at the heart of it all, an innocence that escapes being overwhelmed by the monstrosities around it. The innocence is what makes the rest so scary. You never know what will happen next in a Lynch film; you feel trapped and fascinated, as in a dream. "Dreamlike" is the word most often used to describe his films. Dreams, disturbing flashbacks, and strange images are his stock in trade.

Lynch is all the rage right now, thanks to his explosive hit Blue Velvet (1986) and his TV series Twin Peaks. Both are formulaically said to reveal "the dark underside of Middle America," which makes them sound like exposes, as if Lynch were your basic left-wing avant-garde muckraker of the national soul. Perish the thought. He's a 44-year-old former Eagle Scout who is said to adore Ronald Reagan (probably an unrequited passion) and whose only known addiction, now conquered, is milkshakes. Interviews show him to be something of an eccentric himself, given to ancient boyish locutions like "golly" and "neat." He talks more like a worried schoolboy-a hick Holden Caulfield-than a theorist of the cinema, let alone an avatar of Freedom of Expression.

If there's any sort of philosophy behind his work, it's probably something like what he recently told Rolling Stone: "There are too many possibilities for something to go wrong-so you could always worry about that. And there's many things that are hidden and seeming like many, many secrets; and you don't know for sure whether you are being just paranoid or if there really are some secrets. You know little by little, just by studying science, that certain things are hidden there are things you can't see. And your mind can begin to create many things to worry about. And then once you're exposed to fearful things, and you see that really and truly many, many, many things are wrong-and so many people are participating in strange and horrible things-you begin to worry that the peaceful, happy life could vanish or be threatened." He's said to have scolded a woman on the set for swearing too much.

A Strange World

IT'S a strange world, isn't it?" says the heroine of Blue Velvet. On Lynch's showing, it certainly is. His first movie, Eraserhead, is about a young couple with a horribly malformed child. It's sometimes billed as a horror film, though again, the label doesn't quite fit. Lynch made it when he was depressed about his first marriage, which produced a daughter born with clubfeet. His first real success came in 1980: The Elephant Man, a film of dark tenderness, with a moving performance by John Hurt under a ton of hideous latex. Lynch showed that he could play on heartstrings as well as nerves.

He bombed his next time out, in 1984, with Dune, a clumsy version of Frank Herbert's science-fiction classic. Lynch blames the studio for hacking his work down to two hours, but it's hard to see how longer could have been better: the story is tediously futuristic," full of big battle scenes where confused hordes zap each other with ray guns and things. That sort of "future"-10,000 A.D. or so-is too abstract to have the quirky emotional resonance Lynch excels in.