David Lynch was riding high in 1990. Blue Velvet had been hauled up out of obscurity by sage champion Pauline Kael and his collaboration with Mark Frost on the initial hit series Twin Peaks had made him such a household name that the term Lynchian became part of what you said. Something, anything, odd or just not immediately comprehensible, Lynchian. Then he did something ... Lynchian. Instead of producing something along the lines that had given him his celebrity, he made a conventional movie.
It's my contention that Blue Velvet is a conventional thriller. It's frequently extreme in its violence and challenging with its sex but it makes narrative sense from beginning to end. The early episodes of the TV show have more outright weirdness to them. But Wild at Heart plays like a lot of movies from the decade just ended; young adult, neo noir flavoured and wall to wall needledrop music. The '90s would continue this. If you baulk at the witches of Oz in Wild at Heart, God knows what you'd make of the ghost of Elvis in the slightly later True Romance. Moreover, if you have ever seen the deleted scenes from the movie, you will know by their conventional tone, how mainstream Lynch was thinking for this one.
There is, all said, plenty of Lynchian stuff on screen, though. Freddie Jones's walk-on at a bar with his voice all heliumed, going on about pigeons and Willem Dafoe's art directed teeth serve that end. Sherilyn Fenn's accident victim and her heartrending monologue and Harry Dean Stanton's exit, also. You could probably find at least one Lynchian touch per scene but they stick out in Wild at Heart where they seem at home in Blue Velvet. Eraserhead is constructed wholly from them and there are many in Dune. Even The Elephant Man has them (albeit woven more seamlessly in). Because the narrative is kept close to Barry Gifford's source novel (he co wrote the screenplay with Lynch), the timeline is central and the Lynchian bits more like seasoning.
What is Lynchian is the overall insistence on the central romance. For all his trips beyond the Scorpio nebula in visual style and performance direction, Lynch is as sentimental as a Christmas tree when it comes to things like love or hope. This is why the Wizard of Oz references don't feel out of place, however superficially fantastic. Laura Dern's Lula shares a moment of damaged hope with her character in Blue Velvet when she pleads for order in her universe which has been battered by shock. Sailor's serenade to her at the gig with a big goofy Elvis number as the girls around them scream as though everything suddenly transported back to the '50s and he really was Elvis is played for laughs but incompletely, the gesture of it is dressed to impress. See also, though more soberly, the performance at the end. These moments weave into the picture without notice as, whether we want to own it or not, they are part of every Lynch film.
Sailor and Lula are depicted as rock 'n' rollers, bad kids with pure hearts but they only barely keep from pushing through to being garish trash. Lula is less like a riot grrl than Sandy at the end of Grease. Nicholas Cage trips over himself channelling Elvis but only really gets as far as a Vegas tribute. They are campy rather than dangerous. To be fair, this has more to do with the characters own ideas of their image and we aren't meant to swallow it whole, even if David Lynch seems to. If you want rock 'n' roll bad you need to turn to Willem Dafoe's Bobby Peru with his pencil thin physique, stumpy metal teeth, sleaze moustache, and slinky, evil sliding gait. A kind of distillation of Blue Velvet's Frank that could take the mic at a gig and flatten a whole audience.
Wild at Heart is a road movie where the fugitives are fleeing from the previous generation which is gathering strength every time you see them. The extremity of the effort is explained as the plot develops and it has to do with the sins of the father, and uncle, and rival of father, and almost anyone on the ancestral tier of Lula's crazy mother (played by Dern's real mother). The sins of the past are invested on the future generation. A few mentions of the depleting ozone layer are enough to give this credence. Sailor and Lula want to get to California with the intention of severing all ties and as the vistas west open up to the extent that we see a lens distorted horizon to suggest the world's curve is welcoming them from its edge. For all their naivete and puerility, they do have a point and whether it's the magic of New Orleans to the open road, they are living what they set out to live. And then, when the world catches up and tears them from each other and they approach the grown up task of repair, the depiction of difficulty of the job is refreshing as it feels earned.
The film had quite an advance campaign. I recall reading frustratingly small tidbits about its content and eagerly pored over the few production stills seeded to the media. If the public was temporarily infatuated with David Lynch, my own fandom was reaching fever pitch. I imagined barely discernible darkness within shadows, black smoke and old black grease on machinery, biological anomalies and shocking violence. I imagined watching something I dreaded seeing.
This is from the experience of seeing Eraserhead repeatedly at the local Valhalla from the midpoint of the '80s. Every time, whether I could rope someone else in or had to go on my own, I would sit there, watching the credits fade in and panic. The Baron Harkonnen's rape of the servant boy in Dune left a scar and all of Frank's antic's are with me still from Blue Velvet. There was a lot of rich cinema around then, aimed squarely at my demographic but Lynch was in the lead as he wasn't like any of the others and could build worlds from whims that stayed with his audiences. That year, while the USA and UK got to see the first season of Twin Peaks, the extended pilot was released to Australian home video. I watched it many times, fearing and being wowed by the end scene in the red room, knowing only that it was twenty-five years later, not a dream sequence but a sequel scene. It freaked me out and I had to keep watching it. To know that a whole new movie was coming at the end of the year felt like a gift.
I saw it three times in one week, roping any number of people in to join me. We'd quote it at gatherings, parties, the pub, anywhere. That flowed through to the second season of Twin Peaks the following year when so much of it started fading and looking tacky. After that point, anyone who'd jumped on to the wagon reacted as though they'd been cheated and the response was predictably childish. When a friend approaches you to inform you that they made a positive decision not to try one of your favourite things, you start learning a little more about them.
What can I say, the film flows like a well told story of the highway. It burst with colour and magic, even if some of that was just veneer. It made a sleeper hit of Chris Isaak's Wicked Game and was one of the first mainstream movies to feature a significant remix of an established song. It consolidated the career of Nicholas Cage, allowing him a leap into quirky action roles for the coming decade. Dern fared less well but has had more than a few decent highlights and to this day walks with the respect of her peers and public. I would dress in the mornings before work listening to the soundtrack CD and mentally move around in the space it suggested. For all its reputation as the choc top Lynch movie, it still has its own power. Never again was he so fun but never again so light (if you are thinking of The Straight Story, you need a rewatch). For me it's of its time, it's time in my life.
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