While other Lynch films have been treated to Criterion editions and repertory play, it was hard to find on DVD in the US for years and it’s still not available to stream anywhere. But Wild at Heart opening to polarized reviews and middling box office, and its reputation over the years hasn’t improved as much as Fire Walk with Me or Lost Highway, which both seemed ahead of their audience at the time. Such a reception at Cannes can often be a badge of honor – L’Avventura and Taxi Driver also got an earful – and Lynch would get booed again when he premiered Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me at the festival two years later. Thirty years ago, Wild at Heart arrived in theaters after winning the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was greeted, according to the critic Dave Kehr, with “the most violent chorus of boos and hisses to be heard in a decade”. The forces of good and evil that Lynch had limited to a small town four years earlier with Blue Velvet are blown out into the larger expanse of the American road.
That uneasiness is the lifeblood of Wild at Heart, which sets a love of the purest and most passionate kind against a sun-scorched landscape of ceaseless hostility. The appeal of road movies is that they allow for a certain amount of narrative spontaneity, with every exit teasing the possibility of a new and unexpected subplot. The sequence is Wild at Heart in microcosm, with the AM stations representing treacherous pitstops on the lost highways between a deep south correctional facility and sunny California, where Sailor and Lula hope to carve out some place for themselves. Romance pokes through the violence and discord like a bloom through cracks in the pavement. And then suddenly, the adrenalized thump of Powermad’s Slaughterhouse fades out and the lush strings of Richard Strauss overwhelm the soundtrack. As the two thrash along in the embankment – Sailor, with his karate-kick dancing style, seems like a terror in nightclubs – Lynch’s camera cranes upwards to a magic-hour sunset across the field. “Sailor Ripley, you get me some music on that radio this instant!” she screams, and he obliges, scanning past more talk-radio mayhem before landing, improbably, on a track by the Minneapolis speed metal band Powermad.
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