We chose this movie for Ron, who was visiting at the time, and nursing a healthy Nicholas Cage fetish.
This movie has an aesthetic mix of conceptual coolness and an unpredictably-tempered wildness that allows powerful images to gaze into the mirror of the other. What does this mean? The audience experiences the two sides of proximity and distance, the sense of security and exposure, the physical and the psychic, that Sailor and Lula presumably experience. The characters develop out of a highly personal and subjective exploration of a room or space in which they have sex, which forms the emotional framework for ideologically-spawned vestiges in sculptural, architectural, psychic, and narrative fragments of life.
It’s difficult to choose this movie between good and evil, adolescence and maturity, accountability and negligence. There are so many symbols in this movie that indicate a limbo, and the entirety of the story is looking for a home. Especially the violent rest in Big Tuna calls to mind the mythological “fish” static state between bliss and banishment. I particularly love cousin Dell’s “disappearance”--the ultimate escape, and Lula’s hope for ascension.
But part of me just wants to call “Wild At Heart” maniacal pop. It’s full of quotable lines. (I think that has come to mean to me, after knowing Erik for about a year, that the lines quoted out of context provide a considerable amount of amusement and pop-culture value. Would you agree, E?) My friend Donald came to movie night this week for the first time and created a kind of division between the regulars. Was it a failed attempt by Lynch to make a deeper, more resonant film, or is it supposed to be a simple love story, as Karen believes? The discussion was diffused by Ron laughing in the corner and then privately acquiescing to Donald’s theory. (Ron will get me back for saying that.)
