The methods are the same, but the stakes are different. Javy Gwaltney wrote about this in terms of a game embracing its legacy as a goofy, Nazi-killing game for him, it’s a meta-move that has to be tackled head-on lest the whole enterprise fall in on our heads. Wild at Heart’s use of comedy and ridiculous situations to tell a serious story is uncannily similar to the way that The New Colossus uses unbelievably violent gameplay and silly poop jokes to tell a serious story about racism, fascism, and American history. I don’t think this was a case of the audience not getting it, because I think it’s nearly impossible not to “get” the serious, monstrous things that Wild at Heart is putting in front of us. But, and this is critical, I don’t think it is the people’s fault.
It has clear and obvious contempt for the structures of American life in the post-Reagan years.
Everything that Sailor did evoked a room-shaking guffaw Lula couldn’t read a line without a woman in the first row audibly, and with great gusto, screaming “haw haw haw.” This is all just to give you some context for how puzzled I was when the audience around me started laughing and cackling like we were at a midnight showing of The Room. There are moments that are ridiculous, and they’re funny, and it’s impossible not to laugh at the absurdity of it. The film cuts to a dog running away with it, as if it’s a Laurel and Hardy routine. A man whose hand has been shot off with a shotgun crawls around on the ground while his friend tells him that the doctors reattach it. Lula’s mother laughs, screams, and cries without any pause between them, working as a kind of melodrama machine that only produces ridiculous scenarios. Sailor repeatedly says that he wears a snakeskin jacket as a sign of his individuality. And, like The New Colossus, it flips wildly in tone.
It follows young adults Sailor and Lula as they flee Lula’s possessive mother, hired assassins, and a cavalcade of other nefarious forces. To summarize it briefly, it is a film about gender and culture in America in the 1980s.
Released in 1990, Wild at Heart was Lynch’s first feature film after 1986’s violent noir Blue Velvet. I had that feeling until earlier this week when I went to watch a screening of the David Lynch classic Wild at Heart.
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