Wild at Heart. - movie reviews

National Review, Oct 1, 1990 by John Simon

LOVE, the saying goes, conquers all. But not, I must insist, stupidity, as David Lynch's new film, Wild at Heart, amply demonstrates. And I don't mean just the stupidity of its main characters, Lula and Sailor, two near-imbecile juveniles who want nothing from life but continuous sprees and incontinent sex. I mean especially the stupidity of their creator, David Lynch [see Weird America," p. 381. For that is the overarching characteristic of his oeuvre, from Eraserhead through The Elephant Man, Dune, and Blue Velvet, to the current Wild at Heart. I can't speak about Twin Peaks, because the one thing I will not stoop to is TV soaps, regardless of how titillatingly unwashed. But I assume that television's self-censorship is powerfully craven enough to sanitize even the most unleashed minds.

Wild at Heart is a cul-de-sac of a road movie in which nothing leads anywhere or makes the barest minimum of sense. Sailor, a shiftless youth with an Elvis complex and prison record, and Lula, a benighted girl with a Marilyn fixation and a demented mother, set out on a wild drive from the Carolinas to California, pursued by the crazily jealous and vengeful mother's bravos (killers, not kudos) and beset by assorted mauvaises rencontres. They hit New Orleans, and get as far as Big Tuna, Texas, singing, dancing, fornicating, and exchanging loopy banalities all the way. (Sample: "I'm sorry, Sailor, but the ozone layer is disappearing.") In Tuna, Sailor gets involved in a robbery, is jailed again, but, after serving five years, ten months, and 21 days (the script is maniacally specific about prison terms), rejoins his woman and hitherto unseen son, and, after a brief contretemps, the three of them are off and running again.

This may sound harmless enough, but Lynch throws in every kind of imbecility, perversity, and disgustingness (most of them gratuitous) he can think of, with only the X rating the limit. If he were a less successful filmmaker-this garbage walked, or drove, off with the Golden Palm at Cannes-the movie might indeed have earned an X; as it is, something had to be snipped after Cannes. Why does Lynch win over juries and critics (audiences, alas, are beyond explication and help)? There is a clue in Lula's exclamation in a moment of postcoital pensiveness, "This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top." The typical movie reviewer is weaned on top but child (or infant) at heart.

Characteristic of the film is an incident at the Texas motel. Sailor is away on some fishy Tuna business while Lula, as is her wont, lolls around in bed awaiting their next sexual bout. Only lately she's been feeling queasy (it turns out she's pregnant) and when Sailor, returning, asks why it 'smells so terrible," she calmly informs him she's thrown up on the rug. Neither of them makes the slightest move to clean up the mess, not even when, for some time to come, every visitor comments on the stench.

To dot the i and turn the stomach, we are accorded a closeup of the vomit on the carpet, with cockroaches lushly swarming over it. What makes this extreme closeup especially memorable is that Frederick Elmes, Lynch's favorite cinematographer, has a low-angle shot that actually manages to shoot up at the cockroaches; it is not every cameraman and director that can stoop lower than a cockroach. As David Edelstein remarked in the New York Post, "That shot-and the fact that no one cleans [the puke] up, and that people remark for the next half-hour on how the room reeks-captures something of the Wild at Heart aroma. The images are so overripe, so lushly fetid, that you can almost smell the barf in every shot."

There is no need to review in detail this film that proffers a busted skull with the brain oozing out; a head (another one) blown off with part of it landing near the camera; a set of wired, brown, apocopated teeth on a smiling villain; a car-wreck victim spouting blood in a tight shot; a fellow getting his kicks out of cramming cockroaches into his underwear; Marietta, Lula's mother, smearing her entire face with lipstick till her head becomes a Halloween pumpkin-or, rather, tomato; as well as the odd form of sexual deviation, but kept carefully soft-core. If this stuff were integrated into some sort of schema; if it shed any sort of light, however lurid; if it created at least some plausible atmosphere, very well; but no, Lynch will have no truck with credibility, and uses Barry Gifford's trashy underlying novel only as an excuse for his own aberrations. - Though it may also be sick, Lynch's oeuvre is, above all, stupid. Thus in The Elephant Man, Lynch showed us -the horribly misshapen hero's face, which the play (on which the film claimed not to be based) had the sense to spare us; a disfigurement, by the way, he quite unscientifically turned into a Dumbo head out of some demented version of Disney. Thus Dune was a film that could not be followed from one moment to the next. Thus Blue Velvet, though likewise utter nonsense, managed, because of its seeming novelty and a semblance of control, to garner almost unanimous raves.