Wild At Heart
At a glance...
- Directed by David Lynch
- Released in 1990
- Runtime 124 minutes
- Watched at home
- Final feelings: I loved it, a great intro to the director's work
Rest in peace, David Lynch. I'm embarrassed to say this is his first movie I've ever seen, but I'll make up for that in time, I'm sure.
I really enjoyed this. The whole runtime felt like this was a sort of vernacular surrealism. So many elements of American culture are present here, but we don't see them like artifacts inside a glass case. Surrounding all of these things is the howling, moaning, gasping, panicked vitality of youth. A lot of times the writing feels over the top but what I was delighted by were the ways that important moments felt so grounded in life. I have been Nicholas Cage standing around regretting everything and saying "what am I doing here" more times than I can count.
I'm going off of this movie plus a couple hours of Twin Peaks I watched two years ago for this next part, but my intuition says I'm probably right. David Lynch's combination of writing and directing feels completely one-of-a-kind. His character placement and dialogue feel like pure impulse in a way that you couldn't imitate if you tried. People talk and then suddenly scream with emotion. Characters who would be silently parroting speech in any other film get speaking roles and movement that elevate them to the center of our attention, sometimes for mere seconds. Lula asks sailor if they can be in love forever, a common idea in all romance stories, and sailor responds with something to the effect of, "wow peanut, your mind is really something else." It all just feels painfully genuine. Maybe it's just because of this day, but it felt like I was plainly seeing how David Lynch saw the world around him. Every person contains the possibility of becoming known to us, even if it's just so they can ask a clarifying question and then be on their way. Nothing here is manufactured.
I listened to this talk he gave on YouTube today because i wanted to participate in mourning someone important to so many people I love and one of the things he stresses here and in other places is the value of intuition. Intuition, for David Lynch, drove every single part of the filmmaking process, from casting to rehearsal to editing. The reason he doesn't explain away his own films is because he doesn't want to deprive the audience of their intuition about the film. Maybe it's confirmation bias but I deeply feel his intuition in this, in the ways people talk, in the kinds of people we see, in how the pieces are all put together. He's not following formal rules, forms, or patterns. He's taking the road trip, The Wizard of Oz, and young love, and merging them all together like the riffle shuffle of a deck of cards. What comes out has both the feeling of alien mimicry and the sense that all these pieces are undeniably human. If the movie lives forever, then David Lynch seemingly has good reason to be immortalized in American cinema. It felt really good to watch this today.