Wild at Heart 4K 1990

My first thought about the movie *Wild at Heart* is: Laura Dern is so beautiful. My second is: you’ll always be too dumb to write about Lynch. My third is: if *Wild at Heart* hadn’t been directed by Lynch, it would have been *Natural Born Killers*. In both films, young lovers run away from overbearing parents, are separated, and then reunite.

*Wild at Heart* was filmed in 1990 based on the novel by Barry Gifford and tells the story of twenty-year-old Lula (Laura Dern) and her boyfriend Sailor (Nicolas Cage). *Natural Born Killers* was made four years later based on an original screenplay by Oliver Stone. Given this chronology, *Natural Born Killers* appears to be a deliberate nod to *Wild at Heart*. There’s the convertible, Malory Knox’s blonde wig—which heightens her resemblance to Laura Dern’s character—the escape from a kind of bondage only to realize at some point that you can’t run away from yourself, the visions, and the psychedelics.

These two films diverge only when it comes to the question of morality. Where *Natural Born Killers* starts lecturing you on life lessons, *Wild at Heart* simply exists, without really calling for anything in particular.

And yet, if you were to remove Lynch himself from a Lynch film, it would turn out to be as simple as three kopecks. But with Lynch—it’s as if you read a novel, fell asleep, and dreamed up this movie. Absurdity, exaggerations, heightened emotions, blurred faces, strange actions by strange characters. And endless cigarettes, lit in such close-ups that they look like the nozzle of a jet engine.

And you hear music the whole time, and you know it’s not just there to accompany the plot. Whether Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” is playing on the radio, Cage is singing an Elvis Presley song, or a melody composed by Angelo Badalamenti is playing—it’s always either a plea, a confession, or a curse.

It’s something like that. A phantasmagoria—strip that away, and all you’ll find is a detective-romance novel. What’s more, the main character’s mother is, quite literally, a villainous Fate—that’s her name, Marietta Fortune. And the good fairy, if you’ll pardon the reference, is played by Laura Palmer from “Twin Peaks.”