Review of Wild at Heart, Directed by David Lynch

In the broadest sense, postmodernism is a focus on the effects of art as opposed to its meaning or message. After his triumph of Blue Velvet (1986), director David Lynch turned his focus from the ugly underbelly of the classic American small town to the, you guessed it, ugly underbelly of the American road. Wild at Heart is a postmodern road film, Lynch's vision of youthful love in conflict with depraved, corrupt morality. Highly sexual and violent even from the first scene, this is a film, like Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, not for the faint of heart.

Lula (Laura Dern) and Sailor (Nicolas Cage) love each other wildly, but Lula's mother Marietta (Diane Ladd) worries that Sailor knows too much about how Lula's father died-he was betrayed by his wife and burned to death, like the passions that fuel Lula and Sail's love. The conflict puts Lula and Sailor in a classic Romeo and Juliet scenario, but in the context of the American road movie-but of course with the peculiar Lynchian weirdness.

If anything, the film is too full of disparate ideas and references, such as The Wizard of Oz, thrash-metal music, Elvis Presley, among others. Lynch throws the elements up against a wall and hopes that they stick, but Wild at Heart does not cohere together in the same way that most of his other films do. Especially regarding dialogue, I felt like I was witnessing the inner workings of David Lynch's mind instead of the traits of Dern's and Cage's characters. And although the on-location shooting in New Orleans and El Paso interests the eye, the settings do not build our identification with the characters.

The ensemble cast does have its highlights, though, especially in a depraved, hell-bent Willem Defoe. And Isabella Rossellini is back, this time as an assassin. Others present a twisted world where the morality of good and evil no longer applies; instead, Wild at Heart portrays a macabre, bizarre America where the powerful evil revel in their depraved world of sex and violence, while the powerless good climb the heights of innocent sex and are forced to use violence in self-defense. It's a world of obsessed mothers, contract killers, crime bosses, psychologically damaged relatives, but also of beautifully schlocky love songs and heartfelt caresses.

Wild at Heart is most important as a document of a Lynchian chapter in a classic American genre: the road story. Also in this lineage are The Grapes of Wrath, Easy Rider, Badlands, Natural Born Killers, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and literary notables like Jack Kerouac's On the Road. While the elements do not cohere together fully, nor does the suspense enrapture us, nor do the depraved characters shock us as much as they might, Wild at Heart reminds us that there is a world to be seen in a filthy Texas motel room, crazy local yokels, and even in the provenance of an ugly lamp. If we don't believe that love really conquers all in this world, I guess it doesn't really matter-Wild at Heart is a collection of effects, not a structured whole.