The Travolta/Cage Project #25: Wild at Heart (1990)

It’s hard to overstate just how hot David Lynch was when Wild at Heart was made. The preeminent oddball cinematic auteur had, through some strange twist of fate, become the co-creator of the most talked about show on television, a trippy, sexed-up nighttime soap opera about the denizens of a strange town called Twin Peaks. 

Twin Peaks wasn’t just a hit; it was a goddamn sensation, a pop culture phenomenon that made its legendarily eccentric creator an unlikely household name and a Time cover boy. Twin Peaks was such a left-field triumph that it gave Lynch the leverage to do whatever he wanted to do for a follow-up. 

Being a giant weirdo, what Lynch wanted to do was write and direct a surreal, southern-fried Neo-Noir about scaldingly hot young lovers in trouble based on Barry Gifford’s hard-boiled novel Wild at Heart that doubled as a redneck comic book riff on The Wizard of Oz, with Lynch’s muse Laura Dern burning up the screen as sexpot Lula Pace Fortune and Nicolas Cage channeling Elvis Presley as her violence-prone boyfriend Sailor Ripley, who due to an egregious lack of parental guidance, drifts into a life of low-level criminality. 

Cage doesn’t just give Sailor’s honey-dripping Southern drawl an Elvis inflection or vibe: he flat-out spends Wild at Heart talking and acting exactly like The King. Acting is largely about choices. Cage famously makes extraordinarily big and bold choices, whether that involves eating a cockroach onscreen to get into the mood for Vampire’s Kiss or having two teeth pulled so he could really feel his character’s pain in Birdy. 

Somewhere very early on Cage, along with Lynch, made the bold acting choice that despite the different names and stations in life, Sailor Ripley WAS Elvis Presley. When Cage’s Sailor tells a forgettable metal band, “you fellas have a lot of the same power that E had” we can infer from context clues that he is not referring to seminal rap duo EPMD or electronic pranksters EMF. Just in case the voice, and the manners, and the charm, and the personality aren’t enough of a giveaway, when Sailor enters a heavy metal club he begins dancing in a style that favors high kicks and various other basic martial arts moves in a manner exclusive to Elvis Presley and of course his famous acolyte, super-fan and one-time son-in-law (that’s right: our Sailor boy legit married the King's daughter before she married the King of Pop) Nicolas Cage. 

As the poet and troubadour Mojo Nixon established in song, Elvis is everywhere. He’s not just a man: he’s a feeling, a way of life, a state of mind. There’s a little Elvis inside each of us and a WHOLE LOT of Elvis inside Nicolas Cage.

It’s not polite, but it is cool to point like this.

There’s so much Elvis in Nicolas Cage that it’s downright pathological: the Elvis part of Cage’s cerebellum is so freakishly large that it told him he had to BE the king in Wild at Heart, not just a fan. 

In Lynch and Cage’s hands, the decision to make Sailor Elvis Presley turns out to be a choice as inspired as it is bold, as was the decision to let Cage wear his own snakeskin jacket onscreen as “a symbol of my individuality, and my belief in personal freedom”, as Ripley states more than once in the film’s most quoted and iconic dialogue. 

Elvis famously had a complicated relationship with black music and black culture; Sailor begins his journey to and through hell by killing a black man who makes the mistake of announcing to Sailor that Marietta Fortune (Dern’s real-life mother Diane Ladd, in a deeply committed, Oscar-nominated performance), Lulu’s mother, has paid him to kill her daughter’s boyfriend. 

Sailor REALLY does not want to be killed. So he beats the man to death in a psychotic fury. What begins as self-defense and survival descends inevitably into something closer to murder or homicide in its utterly gratuitous viciousness. 

The killing that opens Wild at Heart is fucking brutal. As a transgressive artist and provocateur, Lynch makes a point of going too far whenever he can, of crossing lines of taste and propriety and cultural sensitivity. From the vantage point of 2020, Wild at Heart is deeply problematic. 

It’s the kind of cinematic Molotov cocktail that climaxes with its murderous, violent anti-hero (that would be Sailor) calling a gang of cartoonish punks the F word, then, just in case there’s any doubt that he meant it as a homophobic slur, later apologizing for accusing them of being gay. 

But if Lynch is a provocateur it does not seem intentional. He’s simply following a muse that leads him into some pretty dark, strange, complicated places. 

After killing the man sent to kill him, Sailor ends up spending some time in prison for manslaughter. Lulu spends that time working herself into a delirious sexual frenzy waiting for him to be released so that he can satisfy her insatiable carnal needs.

In a volcanic performance, Dern plays Lulu as both a hurt, damaged child of trauma and betrayal and a raging cyclone of sexual energy; she seems to live her life perpetually at the very knife’s edge of an overpowering orgasm; all it seemingly takes is a salacious look from Sailor to send her over the edge. 

Sailor and Lulu spend pretty much the entirety of Wild at Heart’s first half fucking, smoking cigarettes in a post-coital haze, dancing and then fucking some more. Lynch is an unapologetic sensualist and Wild at Heart is his most brazenly, brilliantly sensual film, a genuinely erotic exploration of young lust. 

After he leaves prison, Sailor immediately violates his parole by driving to California with Lulu in tow. Lulu’s wicked witch of a mother dispatches her sometimes boyfriend Johnnie Faragut (Harry Dean Stanton) to find Lulu and Sailor. In the fetid moral sewer world of Wild at Heart, Faragut is a true oddity: a seemingly decent human being whose motives are neither sinister nor mysterious. 

Wild at Heart is so fucking wild at heart and weird on top that Stanton’s normalcy becomes both achingly poignant and weirdly unforgettable. In Lynch and Gifford’s wickedly Darwinian world he’s a guppie destined to be devoured by bigger, hungrier, crazier fish. 

Sure enough, Faragut is brutally murdered by the minions of Marcellus Santos (J.E Freeman), one of the film’s many sociopathic monsters. Others include Mr. Reindeer (W. Morgan Sheppard), an ominous English gentleman perpetually surrounded by naked women, Perdita Durango (Isabella Rossellini), murderers Reggie (Calvin Lockhart) and Juana Durango (Lynch staple Grace Zabriksie) and finally Bobby Peru, an unhinged career criminal with a John Waters pubic hair mustache. 

For all of its outrageousness, sex, violence and free-floating insanity, Wild at Heart is relatively straightforward on a narrative level. In the third act Lulu finds out that she’s pregnant and Sailor, who is not a smart man, has the phenomenally bad judgment to agree to a heist with Bobby Peru, who is clearly the least dependable soul in the history of the universe. 

There’s never any chance the robbery will be anything other than a complete disaster; men like Sailor are inherently doomed, by fate as well as their own actions.

Sailor and Lulu use sex for good; as an expression of their love and lust for each other, then to make a baby that will grow up to have a singularly unattractive little boy mullet. With the notable exception of Stanton’s oasis of dignity and decency in a strange land, everyone else uses sex for evil.

The gorgeous, incongruously innocent straight white couple at Wild at Heart’s white-hot core are surrounded by over-sexed, over-stimulated, sensation-crazed grotesques, human gargoyles whose willfully excessive, transgressive sexuality is explicitly and implicitly connected to their evil and insanity. 

When I saw Wild at Heart during its theatrical run as a fourteen year budding cinephile and aggressive, prolific onanist, I approached it as an incendiary, Palme D’Or-winning statement from one of our greatest and most important Artists at the height of his creative powers. And also as a movie with a lot of hot fucking and nudity.

I’m not sure it even registered just how fucking ridiculous the film was the first time around, even after Twin Peaks’ Sheryl Lee shows up as Glinda the Good Witch to tell Sailor that, in order to be a good person, he should abandon his plans to ditch his soulmate and their tragically mulleted child on the dubious logic that he’s not good enough for them, and they’d be better off without him. 

Wild at Heart is only slightly less of a bonkers, gleefully silly live-action Warner Brothers cartoon than Raising Arizona. It’s such a profane, violent and sexual comic book of a movie that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to take it seriously. 

Wild at Heart is pure Lynch but it also feels informed by a half decade of pop culture trash and treasure. It’s pretty much Elvis and Marilyn Monroe in John Waters’ redneck Wizard of Oz, with all of of the gloriously terrible taste that entails. 

Is Wild at Heart a great film? I don’t know, but it is a great goof, a magnificent lark from an artist as brilliant at fucking around as he is telling stories and crafting unforgettable imagery with the disconcerting power of dreams or nightmares. 

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