The Lynch Who Stole Christmas: Wild at Heart (Dir David Lynch, 2h4m, 1990)

"I'm not good with words", David Lynch once admitted in his quasi-self help, quasi-meditation, quasi-artist handbook, Catching the Big Fish before adding "cinema is its own language...you can express a feeling and a thought that can’t be conveyed any other way. Its a magical medium". Lynch loved cinema, and arguably loved no film more than The Wizard of Oz. The parallels are clear; beyond small town America is a big frightening world full of strange, sometimes helpful, often dangerous people and things, forces of great evil - and good, and all of it is steeped in American culture like few other films in the cinematic canon. No film reflects, no film of Lynch's is so obsessed and in love with the very fabric of cinema, like Wild at Heart, Lynch's adaption of the Barry Gifford novel about two outlaws on the run across the southern USA.

At long last, Nicolas Cage appears; this is prime 1990s Nic Cage, straight off Raising Arizona and the enjoyably gonzo Vampire's Kiss, and it redresses the fact that I've not spoken about one of my favourite actors period in over 450 columns ably. It is Cage's Sailor Ripley that dominates this film, an outlawish figure - on two separate occasions, he's jailed for multiple years at a time - driven by his own moral code and individuality, represented by the snakeskin jacket that he daubs "a  symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom." In his past, only slowly revealled towards the middle of the film, but hinted at from the film's fiery opening credits, lies violence, but there is an undeniable magnetism to Sailor, Lynch's cinematic eye following this chaotic freewheeling peformance, complete with wild leaps and kung fu kicks, this "wild at heart" energy extending to media performances, including a bizarre, and riveting appearance against the late Terry Wogan that has to be seen to be believed. 

Against Cage's Sailor is the perfect foil, his love interest and the film's emotional centre, Lula (Laura Dern). Lula is where the film most obviously leans into the imagery and concepts of the Wizard of Oz-Lula's mother,  Marietta Fortune (Diana Ladd, Dern's real-life mother) is pictured several times as the Wicked Witch of the West, riding on her broomstick as the duo travel across the United States, her high cackling laugh haunting the scenes she doesn't appear in.. Her presence in the story is that of overprotective and repressive figure, controlling Lula, as she bids for freedom and the open road with Sailor, and it is Lula's attempts to escape this with her sweetheart, and what they encounter along the journey that forms the backbone of the film. 

The other major strand is a, even for Lynch, bizarre and often violent love triangle between Marietta, rumpled detective Johnnie Farragut (Harry Dean Stanton) and sadistic Marcellus Santos (poet and actor J.E. Freeman), who is eager to kill Johnnie. This leads to some truly outlandish imagery, the most nightmarish of which is a sequence where, haunted by her decision to get Santos involved in finding Lula, and thus doom Johnnie, Mariette daubs her entire face in lipstick, turning to the camera at the end to reveal this disturbing visage, a sense of the demonic, the evil, at the centre of the film. Equally strange is the group of assassins brought into the hunt for Johnnie, a trio of violent and outlandish figures, commanded by the equally unsettling gangster,  Mr. Reindeer (Morgan Shepard), who is almost always surrounded by semi-naked women and introduced drinking a cup of tea on the toilet, together with his Charonic habits of using coins to call on hits. This is to say nothing of Willem Dafoe's 

All of this is a dark reflection to Sailor and Lula's journey, their love story, their following the Yellow Brick Road across the dark and haunted land to the Emerald City of Los Angeles, of Hollywood. This journey across the USA is punctured with Lynchian moments, with the outlandish figures hunting Johnnie outward, the brimming violence of the America they travel through rising to the surface in sequences often at night and invariably on the highways. This unsettling liminality, this Lynchian "third place", would be the focus of Lynch's next film, Lost Highway, but here it, like the blaring riff from thrash metal band Powermad's "Slaughterhouse", and the equally unsettling slowed versions of Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game" is a jarring and disconcerting visitation, a sense of violence to come, the most notable of these bursts of violence that punctuate the film the sudden emergence of a fatal car crash from the darkness, the last survivor dying in front of Sailor and Lula and adding a further level of disquiet to their escape.

Alongside all of this, though, is a sense of artifice, a sense of the cinematic. The explosions and fire that haunt the childhood of Lula, as well as the film's opening credits, are heightened, the firey figure that moves through these shots cinematic, but artificial, a stuntman rather than a character. Much of Wild at Heart is this, a deliberate and knowing reference to cinema, to its beauty and artifice - at one point, the duo, irritated by the non-stop radio broadcasts of violence and deaths, flip the radio to be confronted by "Slaughterhouse" at which point, the duo leap out of the car and throw themselves around, Sailor throwing karate kicks, the camera pulling up to reveal a perfect sunset over cornfields. Elsewhere, the spectre of Elvis Presley lingers in the film, and in Sailor's persona, his music cropping up in the film's soundtrack, whilst Sailor has more than a little of James Dean. 

Americana pervades Wild at Heart but its role is more to heighten an unreality, a reality that pays homage to one of its great cinematic works of American movie-making and one of its greatest stars. David Lynch spoke to us through cinema, through his films, through their visions of America and what lies beneath. Lynch's final on-screen performance, as John Ford in Steven Spielberg's charming if safely autobiographical The Fabelmans, is as fleeting as it is revealling, perhaps the greatest visionary of the last forty years of cinema playing another great American director. And then, with the slam of a door he is gone, and American cinema goes on without him. Lynch may have made more personal, more successful, more unsettling and more thought provoking work than Wild at Heart but it is where Lynch's understanding of his medium, and his life-long adoration of it, is in full effect. 

Rating: Must See

Wild at Heart is available via BluRay from Universal and streaming from AppleTV

Next week, we're on our winter break, but AFootAndAHalfASecond will return in January with a roundup of the best films you may have missed in 2025.