Dream a little dream of David Lynch
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The first time I watched Wild at Heart, I couldn’t believe it. I was 13 years old, cable television was new to India, and boys my age would routinely scavenge the then-uncensored Star Movies channel for movies that featured nudity.
David Lynch’s 1990 film—a blazing, shrieking road movie that howls at the moon as two lovers passionately fight and dance—had a lot of skin, but, even more strikingly, it had a tremendous, overpowering affection for a film I’d grown up with, The Wizard of Oz. Electrified by Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern’s performances as Sailor and Lula, I gaped at Wild at Heart every chance I could—all the while incredulous that an R-rated film could be so unashamedly smitten by a 1939 children’s film. Cage’s character worships Oz, and Lynch’s film riffs repeatedly on Victor Fleming’s classic: Lula’s mother, Marietta, is an Emerald City-era Wicked Witch, conjuring menace in exaggerated make-up and venomous cackles.
Willem Dafoe’s Bobby Peru is the twisted inverse of a flying monkey, slithering through the film with an evil grin. These, however, are references. Movies pay tributes.
What (still) leaves my jaw on the floor is the way Lynch finishes off Wild at Heart. The film’s climax is interrupted by an actual appearance of the Good Witch from The Wizard of Oz, pointing our quixotic hero toward love. With that, Lynch takes an unhinged road movie and lifts it into something transcendent.
He loves us, tender. He makes a bloodied mess shine like a ruby slipper. The great David Lynch, who left us last week, taught me many things.
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