Hunka Burnin´ Love

By Georgia Brown

Wild at Heart

"Lordy, what was that all about?" This is what normal people walking out of David Lynch movies mutter. It´s also an exclamation drawled by Lula Pace Fortune (Laura Dern) in Lynch´s spellbinding, spectaculary decadent, Southern gothic movie Wild at Heart. Winner of this year´s Palme d`Or at Cannes, Wild at Heart is flamboyantly violent and erotic; it´s also very funny. (And impossible to take notes of because so much is going on.) Still, I can´t guarantee you´ll enjoy yourself: Some Lynch fans hate the movie, and others resist it more genially, feeling it goes too far. As of this writing, I´ve only been granted access to one screening, but I think it´s grand. Sure, he goes too far, and then, a practiced onanist, he pulls it off.

Yesterday, I went to local bookstores looking for Barry Gifford´s recently published novel, Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula, but nobody had heard of it. (No doubt this situation will change in a week.) But I do have in hand Gifford´s offbeat, noir-infatuated collection of film columns for Mystere Scene magazine. It´s called The Devil Thumbs a Ride & Other Unforgettable Films (Grove Press), and here is what the from-the-gut Gifford writes about that "phlegm noir," Blue Velvet: "an ugly, brutal, but naive movie. One cut above a snuff film. A kind of academic porn. It´s interesting to me that I can never imagine things as depraved as those that occur here, and I´ve always thought I could get pretty low in that department... The whole thing is sick in a way that the world could easily do without. Lynch is a pornographic fabulist, but a real, effective one, as opposed to a faker like Brian De Palma."

I´d love to hear what Gifford thinks of what Lynch has gone and done to his novel. Dredging slime from the creek bottom, Wild at Heart-the-movie is everything Gifford says Blue Velvet is and more. For instance: There may be child abuse in the novel - the rape of 13-year-old Lula by Uncle Pooch, her father´s business partner - but Lynch supplies peculiar graphic flashbacks with some very weird details. When Lula bleeds from the mouth and paunchy, creepy Uncle Pooch zips the loudest zipper in creation (the sound in Lynch´s movies is amazing), what exactly the man has done is left up to your perverse imagination. (The director´s line: "That´s for me to know and you to find out.") Then there´s the odd abortion, during which we view Lula with tubes on an operating table, through a round glass "eye." On the one hand Lynch seems daring us to exercise our perverse imaginations. On the other, he jolts us back to the origins of perversity: the child´s fevered distortions of painful reality.

Plot never was Lynch´s strong suit. A painter, he builds on the images that float up to him on sugar and caffeine highs at Bob´s Big Boy in L.A. Here the story is flimsier even than Blue Velvet´s. So, in lieu of a synopsis, I´ll begin with the journalistic basics:

WHO? Say that Wild at Heart is about people on fire. The rhapsodically clinical opening credits (with Angelo Badalamenti´s lush score) show a raging yellow inferno as if from the inside. Lula and her boyfriend, Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage), burn with lust and love while Lula´s bleached blond mama, Marietta (played by Dern´s real mother, Diane Ladd), smolders with hate and jealousy. To keep the lovers apart, Mama contacts a series of detectives and hit men, including Harry Dean Stanton, here the victim of a tender streak. Lula´s daddy died, according to his daughter, when he "poured kerosene over himself and lit a match."

(Maybe he did it himself, maybe he didn´t.) Matches are often struck (close-up and with exaggerated sound) because everybody smokes. You can take that as a pun. What brand they smoke is a subjet of one of those trademark Lynchian conversations - like the ones about beer in Blue Velvet. When Lula tells Sailor she´s pregnant, he sticks two Marlboros in his mouth and lights them. Sailor sings and has rings under his eyes like Elvis.

When? In the film´s first scene, Lula and Sailor step into a baroque dance hall to the strains of Glenn Miller´s "In the Mood." (Mood is right.) Judging by decor, clothes, cars, etc., you might assume to be back in the ´50s, but a few scenes later you´re jolted by the sound of heavy metal. Lynch´s surrealist sensibility subliminally collapses the second half of the 20th century, eliding the ´50s with the ´80s - the same trick managed by illusionist Ronald Reagan to sinister effect. Ike´s bald baby-cranium on an enlarged silver dollar floats around like a little white cloud. (The dollars, by the way, are death seals.) Which, you might ask, is the anachronism - Lula´s Betty Grable halter top or a reference to triple bypasses? Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks had the same nebulous, mutually refracting time frames, while Eraserhead was both ´50s and sci-fi future. (A similiar regressive, taboo-testing impulse drove the original Back to the Future and Peggy Sue Got Married.) The ´50s are where we Americans come from, and in Lynchburg we never really leave home.

Where? Lula, Sailor, and Mama reside in "Cape Fear: Somewhere on the border between North and South Carolina." Jesse Helms territory? Cape Fear is the 1962 noir directed by J. Lee Thompson from the John D. MacDonald novel, The Executioners, that Gifford situates on his short list of creepy, unforgettable films: "You won´t forget this movie, especially if you´re a Yankee Jew." Gregory Peck plays the decent man and Robert Mitchum a psychopath - the sadistic type dear to Lynch´s heart. Wild at Heart´s collection of psychos starts with Mama - incarnated as the wicked witch of the East - and ends with Willem Dafoe´s pug-ugly Bobby Peru, a deadly pervert on the order of Mitchum or Dennis Hopper´s Frank in Blue Velvet. (Dafoe is fitted with a dental prosthesis giving him exposed gums sprouting tiny rotten teeth.) In between Mama and Bobby are the cold-blooded executioner, Santos (J.E. Freeman), and the effete pervert, Mr Reindeer (W. Morgan Sheppard), who sits on the toilet while a lady in leather trappings does who knows what.

Besides Cape Fear, Wild at Heart locations include New Orleans ("The big N.O.," says Stanton´s Johnnie Farragut), a little hellhole in Texas known as Big Tuna where the bad and the ugly congregate, and the road - hot asphalt and yellow brick.

Why? In that first dance hall scene, Sailor is menaced by a black man wielding a knife who accuses him of wanting to "fuck Mama." (Lynch shows he´s stuck back in the ´50s by making all his minorities into terrorizers.) It takes a psychoanalytic virgin like Lynch to place Oedipal desire and castration anxiety right up front. Blue Velvet opened onto Daddy suffering a nasty accident while using his hose and, as a result, son Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) finds a severed ear and ends up naked, with Mommy holding a butcher knife to his genitals - just as the nasty Daddy/Baby bursts in. Simplified, Blue Velvet was a coming-of-age film that followed the adolescent boy through the dangerous night into the light of day. (In the purely regressive Eraserhead, there was no daylight.) Wild at Heart joins the boy´s anxiety to a girl´s by tapping into both the Gifford novel and that classic American on-the-road text, The Wizard of Oz.

Parenthetically: Back in ´86 whe Blue Velvet opened and a candid Lynch was interviewed for the Voice, he said, "Dennis was the perfect Frank because he´s from Kansas. It´s perfect that Frank would be from Kansas - because Kansas has something to do with The Wizard of Oz and Dorothy [the name of the Isabella Rossellini character.] It just all seemed so perfect." Shades of Andy Warhol.

Related to the Oedipal drama is an obsession with voyeurism (what the child has seen) that Lynch shares with directors like Hitchcock and de Palma. What did Sailor see between Lula´s parents when he worked for Santos? "I don´t know what it was they think I saw that night," Sailor says, referring to the night Lula´s daddy went up in flames. The Uncle Pooch flashbacks represent the female effort to piece together and overcome trauma past. Lynch exaggerates an audience´s ordinary voyeuristic role by supplying cryptic images that require us to stare harder. (A New York Times Magazine profile described a torture scene "featuring a ritual resembling a carnival game, except that it involves masturbation, a gun, and a pair of soda bottles - that Lynch was afraid to show anyone." It´s no longer in the movie. Nor, apparently, was it in the Cannes version.)

In his compulsion to open closets, Lynch provides Wild at Heart with four big toilet scenes, three of which relate directly to seduction or sex. (What´s the old joke about putting sex back in toilet where it belongs?) Both toilet and sex connect with vomiting - a major activity in Lynch films. Vomit isn´t just about disgust, though it´s that too. Lynch is a connoisseur of what comes up, an aesthetician of retch. (What´s that milky stuff in the first toilet bowl anyway? Lula "barfs" when she finds out she´s pregnant; this may be morning sickness but it´s also a visceral rejection of reproduction.

Never forget Henry and Mary´s baby in Eraserhead.

Wild at Heart´s point of view is more Sailor´s than Lula´s. Sporting his protective snakeskin jacket, his mission is to survive a series of temptations, beginning with Mama´s threatening come-on in the dance hall bathroom. Then he bashes in the head of her emissary and goes to jail. Sailor is more acted upon than acting. He´s a man fleeing not only what he saw but what he feels, the fire inside. When slimeball Bobby Peru appears, it´s as if Sailor loses his will. (Lula does too.) The Wizard of Oz´s message may be that "the power of good is stronger than the power of evil," but in the world according to Lynch evil´s potency governs character.

When all the freaks and creeps gather in Big Tuna, the spectacle resembles an overloaded, Felliniesque nightmare. It includes three topless, dancing fat ladies and a woman with an orthopedic shoe. The scene will probably strike a lot of people as excessive. (John Lurie and Eraserhead star John Nance turn up in cameos.) Naturally, these winged monkeys are agents of the wicked witch - of all the untrustworthy adults breathing down the kids´ necks.

How? Wild at Heart may be wispy and amorphous (making it hard to hold in mind afterward), but it´s also formally beguiling and, in places, brilliant. I have in mind how the spastic plot jerks and scrambles along by means of flashbacks, tangents, non sequiturs, stories the characters tell, and scenes they come across. While they´re on the road, Sailor and Lula share memories, and Lynch illustrates these strange little interior dramas as if furnishing rooms in a capacious dollhouse.

Lula tells about how her cousin Dell (Crispin Glover), the boy who put cockroaches down his underpants, stayed up all night making sandwiches, and threw tantrums when he found out Christmas wasn´t coming soon. Sailor recalls a hooker he once went with - a story that serves as foreplay: "You got me hotter ´n Georgia asphalt," says Lul. Then there´s the car radio that only gets atrocity reports and an eerie accident scene along the highway - a gory car wreck serving up a Freudian nightmare. Wandering dazed among dead bodies, a young woman (Sherilyn Fenn from Twin Peaks) hallucinates that her mama´s going to kill her for losing her pocketbook; she begins scratching her head as if she´s about to lift her scalp: "There´s this sticky stuff in my hair," she moans. From scene to scene, in that candid, childlike way of his, Lynch amazes with how far he´s willing to go.

But he just seems like a kid. Actually, he´s 44, just five years younger than old man De Palma. After his 1977 Eraserhead debut, Lynch got sidetracked directing other people´s projects - first The Elephant Man and then Dino De Laurentiis´s Dune. Amazingly, he came back with Blue Velvet and showed he is a major director. Twin Peaks made him a household name. What will the "weird on top" Wild at Heart do? For one thing, it could drive parents and legislators crazy.