While no one was likely aware this almost forgotten, near-masterwork would serve to revitalize the neo-noir genre, the story of a young couple on the run from mysterious forces helped define 90’s movies from True Romance to Pulp Fiction.
Two young lovers, one of them with a dubious past, are on the run, traveling across the country with barely a penny in their pockets, avoiding both the law and those who would kill them. Desperate for cash, they concoct a robbery scheme with an unsavory individual, a robbery that goes horribly wrong and results in blood, guts, and death. What 90’s movie am I describing? Is it the Quentin Tarantino written True Romance or some other neo-noir, where everyone’s morals are suspect and the audience is well aware the heist or other crime at the end will not turn out as planned? No, far from it. This is Wild at Heart, a largely forgotten David Lynch film – so forgotten, it wasn’t even available on streaming until very recently – that predated the decade’s explosion in gritty, stylized blood-drenched crime stories by at least a few years. Though Mr. Lynch is reasonably well known for revolutionizing television with his ground-breaking Twin Peaks, he is far less widely credited with popularizing and modernizing the film noir genre, but that is precisely what he does in his 1990 road movie about a runway couple, Lula Fortune and Sailor Ripley, who are desperate to escape assassins sent by her obsessive out of control mother, Marietta, and who end up deeper in the criminal underworld than they can handle. In retrospect, the pieces for the noir revival were in place before anyone really knew it. Sailor has a history with the family, a rich clan from Cape Fear, North Carolina. As the film unfolds, we learn that he was a witness to the murder of Lula’s father and that her mother had tried to seduce him. This drives Marietta to attempt to pay someone to kill him in the dramatic opening scene, but Sailor, despite his ambiguous morality and other faults, is a total bad ass. In a brutal, unflinching scene, backed by pounding heavy metal music that will become a motif throughout the film, he beats his would-be assassin to death, which lands him in jail. Lula might be young, but her devotion to Sailor is real. She waits for him to be released, literally outside the doors of the prison, and the two set off together, knowing her mother will be sending people after them and setting off the first two thirds of the narrative.
Separated for an extended period, the couple begin their odyssey– how else? – with a night of wild sex and head banging music, which serves three purposes. First, there is obvious affection between the pair, two people madly in love with one another despite their different backgrounds and the impediments to their relationship, a sort of Shakespearean star crossed lovers seen through the looking glass of the criminal underworld. Second, Sailor isn’t your average run of the mill thug. He differentiates himself both with his love for Lula and a symbolic snake skin jacket, which he insists it’s a “symbol of my individuality, and my belief in personal freedom.” Third, he’s not unnecessarily cruel or aggressive. When Lula is accosted at the club and someone insults his jacket, it’s clear that he could’ve easily savaged the creep as he did the assassin in the opening scene, but instead he holds back and merely puts him in his place rather than actually hurting him. Sailor is undoubtedly a tough guy, capable of extreme violence, but it’s not his preference and he’s equally capable of restraint. By establishing both in the first few minutes of the film as well as his love for Lula, Mr. Lynch renders the character more endearing than he would be otherwise, and sets the stage for their extended road trip. To a large extent, the rest of the film will be seen from their perspective, as the audience journeys with them into the unknown, making them serve as both a foundational element and a point of view. Though neither are the sort of people the average person regularly associates with, the bond between them and the sense that external forces are trying to pull them apart, adds a necessary amount of relatability to the pair. We might not want to be them, but we want to see them together. To a large extent, this element is unique among 90’s neo noir, perhaps used only in 1993’s True Romance mentioned earlier. Generally speaking, relationships in both the original film noir craze of the 1940s, the second wave in 70’s, and the third wave fifty years later, are used for transactional purposes only. Either the femme fatale manipulates men in her orbit without truly caring for them, using them for evil schemes, or there are no real relationships at all beyond the ever-shifting power dynamics of a criminal gang (think Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction) or ordinary citizens tempted by crime (think A Simple Plan), rendering the genre notoriously bleak.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that revitalizing it for a new era required a powerful love underlying events, for fear of alienating the audience otherwise, though the film doesn’t lack a femme fatale in Lula’s mother, more on that in a moment. In the meantime, the couple discusses their future and the reality that Marietta will undoubtedly be after them the next day, when they officially hit the road in a classic convertible. Though Sailor is not allowed to leave the state while on parole, they have no future in North Carolina, where Lula’s mother is a powerful, shadowy figure, and decide to risk it all to travel to California. As they do so, we learn that the mother has sent not one, but two men after them. The first is a detective obviously in love with her, one so good he was said to be able to find an honest man in Washington, DC, who reluctantly agrees to follow them. The second is a more shadowy figure, Santos, who agrees to kill Sailor if he can also kill the detective. Though Lula’s mother is somewhat reluctant to make this deal, her hatred of Sailor – driven at least partially by his rejecting her advances and her fear that he knows too much about the death of her father – overwhelm any affection for the detective, and she proceeds. Thematically, the decision positions her as the film’s femme fatale. In the classic incarnations of the genre, the role is normally taken up by one of the main characters, but Lula is too in love with Sailor and innocent in her own way to fulfill the need. Her mother, in contrast, sits at the center of a web of intrigue from her husband’s murder to her flirtations with Sailor, to her subsequent relationship with the detective and connection to Santos, and is willing to make use of these strands to advance her nefarious, morally suspect ends. In addition to freeing Lula to be madly in love with Sailor, it sets up a certain duality that Mr. Lynch has frequently been fascinated by. Children can be seen as mirrors of their parents, carrying some part of them forward in a new form. Lula is at least partially her mother’s daughter, as intrigued by the underworld as she is, in a sense. She is also different, defined by a love that her mother was never capable of. By having her mother attempt to seduce Sailor, there’s a subtle love triangle in addition to the normal relationship, making the femme fatale a reflection of the main character even as she is not the main character. In yet another reflection, Lula’s mother is played by Dianne Ladd, who is the real life mother of Laura Dern, the actor portraying Lula, making the connection unmistakable, real in the world outside the cinema.
Before the film moves into the final act, which to some extent exists separately from everything else and is in many ways, where we see the birth of 90’s neo noir most plainly, there are two events that serve to almost completely sever the narrative, as though the ending exists unmoored from anything that came before. First, Sailor and Lula encounter a terrible wreck on the highway. A car is turned over in the middle of the road, smashed and smoking, and a man is obviously dead, but they find a young woman who is still alive, babbling uncontrollably behind a tree. It is dark, lit only by the lights of the cars and at first, we see her only from the front. She is striking, pretty, like a dark haired version of Lula herself, obviously traumatized, worried about what her mother might think, making the connection to Lula even more obvious. “I can’t find it. My mother’s gonna kill me. It’s got all my cards in it, and it was in my pocket, and now my pocket’s gone. Gotta help me find it, my mother’s gonna kill me. It’s got all my cards in it, and it was in my pocket. It was in my pocket,” she carries on, in apparent shock at the horror of the accident and her injuries, but it seems as if she might survive – until she turns around and it becomes obvious her head has been split open and her hair is completely matted with blood. She falls onto the ground form there, expiring quickly, the life draining right out of her. Lula believes it’s a bad omen, but they have no choice except to continue their journey wherever it may lead. The detective’s journey must end, however, when Santos’ hitmen track him down in New Orleans, where Lula and Sailor have recently passed through. Though Lula’s mother previously agreed to have the detective killed, she becomes consumed by guilt and appears to suffer some kind of mental break after the fact. This is caused at least partially by her bizarre choice to come to New Orleans personally and have dinner with the detective immediately before the evil deed is done and while she doesn’t witness the murder directly, is present when he is taken despite knowing there is nothing she can do to stop it. As Santos puts it, “Guess what? There’s no turnin’ back, remember? I am in a killin’ mood.” After, she begins wailing uncontrollably, covering her entire face with red lipstick, and figuratively and thematically ending this portion of the narrative.
While we cannot say precisely why Santos stops pursuing Lula and Sailor, the final sequence proceeds without him as the couple find themselves in the town of Big Tuna, Texas. They are out of money, stuck in a dingy motel populated with a host of bizarre Lynchian characters, at least some of which are filming a Texas style pornographic film. Against the backdrop of scantily clad, grossly overweight women dancing, we meet who will become the chief antagonist for the finale, Bobby Peru, a man with slick hair, a pencil moustache, and rotted teeth, marking him immediately as someone to avoid. After menacing Lula, forcing her to whisper fuck me as he physically accosts her in the motel room, “Ya know, I sure do like a girl with nice tits like yours who talks tough and looks like she can fuck like a bunny. Do you fuck like that? Cause if ya do, I’ll fuck ya good. Like a big ol’ jackrabbit bunny, jump all around that hole. Bobby Peru don’t come up for air,” he ensnares Sailor, desperate for money to escape Big Tuna, in a robbery scheme, where not surprisingly, he plans to double cross him, having learned there’s a bounty on his head. Though Sailor is reluctant, he just learned that Lula is pregnant and feels he has no choice except to get back on the road as quickly as they can. He is also mislead into believing there is no longer a price on his head, meaning he thinks there is the potential for a clean break with the past, another common film noir trope, but perhaps equally needless to say, things go wrong almost immediately when Bobby starts maniacally shooting up the feed store even though he said no one would get hurt. When he turns the gun on Sailor, Sailor learns that his own weapon doesn’t have real bullets and would’ve been killed except that Bobby apparently isn’t a good shot and one of the clerks survived. Sailor flees, only to find the police waiting outside. Bobby bursts from he store after him, attempts to go down in a blaze of glory, but he trips, falls to his knees, and ends up blowing his own head off with a shotgun in the sort of shoot out gone bad that would become familiar across the genre in a few years. A dog walks off with a severed hand in the aftermath, adding the sort of black comedy of errors that helped make the 90’s incarnation unique.
Though Sailor finds himself back in jail, all is not lost. Mr. Lynch has a penchant for the dark side of human nature, but in many ways he’s a romantic a heart and the ending serves as both a break from the previous narrative and the neo-noir genre. Lula waits for him again, this time with a son, but Sailor has concluded that the two are better apart despite his love for her – until the most bizarre aspect of the film comes to fruition. Periodically, Mr. Lynch has inserted images that suggest a connection with the classic, The Wizard of Oz. We see shots of what appears to be a crystal ball and a witch riding a broom stick in a few places, but at the time, they are non-sequiturs, mere insertions without any meaning. At the climax, however, the Good Witch speaks directly to Sailor, telling him “Don’t turn away from love, Sailor. Don’t turn away from love. Don’t turn away from love” and “If you are truly wild at heart, you’ll fight for your dreams.” Sailor, who had just been beaten by a gang, wakes up, apologizes to the gang, “I’d like to apologize to you gentlemen for referring to you all as homosexuals. You taught me a valuable lesson in life,” and chases after Lula. The mother disappears, either literally or figuratively, we aren’t sure, and the couple share a passionate kiss as the credits begin to roll leaving the audience to make sense of it all, as Mr. Lynch is prone to do. A few things come to mind. First, neither Mr. Lynch nor the audience at the time was likely aware Wild at Heart would serve to revitalize the neo-noir genre which had been dormant since the 1970’s. Mr. Lynch, as ever, was following where is own artistic spirit led and while that spirit obviously has some cross over appeal with the other artists and the public, he can’t help but have a unique streak either. As such, it’s not surprising that the film wasn’t particularly well-reviewed at the time. Though it won the prestigious Palme D’or at the Cannes Film Festival, many critics weren’t sold. Steve Murray summarized it for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as “Wild, yes. But not much heart.” Terry Francis of Southern Voice claimed “Wild at Heart’s materials are so thin that the Lynchisms appear to be the film’s principle reason for being.” Jonathan Rosebaum, writing for Sight & Sound insisted, “Perhaps the major problem is that despite Cage and Dern’s best efforts, Lynch ultimately interested only in iconography, not characters at all.”
There might be some truth to this. Film noir in general is primarily an iconoclastic genre. The femme fatale. The hard-nosed detective. The mark caught up in the middle of it all. The complex schemes. The double crosses. To some extent, the characters are interchangeable and some of the early ones such as Philip Marlowe appeared in multiple books, a sort of precursor to James Bond and modern franchises. The thrill comes instead of from watching the story unfold unpredictably. The characters aren’t likely to change, but the story itself will not end where it began. To me at least, Wild at Heart internalizes that aspect and flips it upside down. We have a narrative divided into four almost severed parts – Sailor’s release from prison, their decision to break parole to escape the mother, their arrival in Big Tuna and Sailor’s arrest, and the second release from prison – each of which represents a turning point, where the story cannot go back to where it came. This, however, is pretty standard noir. Whether by characters dying or some other devices, the plot advances in spurts that are not easily unwound. Mr. Lynch knew all that, but refused to be so confined. Instead, he centered it on two characters who have some elements of the standard issue noir – especially if you consider Lula a femme fatale through her mother – but are defined mainly by their unbreakable bond. Through this bond, they achieve what noir characters almost never do: A happy ending. Thus, Mr. Lynch defied the genre and as history would prove with the explosion that followed, revitalized it at the same time. “Wild at heart and weird on top,” indeed.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 