Wild At Heart (1990)

I haven’t seen Dune in a while, but that’s Wild at Heart’s only competition for David Lynch’s worst film. The only logical explanation for this mystifying movie I can cobble together is that Lynch’s end game involves appropriating ‘50s cultural icons, depositing them in a ‘90s landscape filled with violence and fornication, and enjoying the car crash that ensues. Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) and Lulu Fortune (Laura Dern) star as respective stand-ins for Elvis Presley and The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy (the film features so many Oz references that one might think Lynch is doing a full retelling, but the similarities are only surface-level deep), a doomed couple plagued by Lulu’s evil mother and the outlandishly bizarre group of assassins she’s contracted to kill Sailor.

Sailor and Lulu are the film’s biggest problem – perhaps with more grounded main characters, this sadistic, unstable film, filled to the brim with lunatics, violence, and perversity, could’ve actually succeeded. But Sailor and Lulu aren’t just strange, they’re grating and off-putting, flat and unconvincing inversions of famed personas. Cage and Dern act so manically, spout such awful dialogue, and are wedded to characters that undergo such degradation, that you begin to actually feel embarrassed for the performers. They are no different from the rest of the film’s screaming idiots, except that we rarely get a break from them.

Wild at Heart does have some effective scenes, most of which involve Willem Dafoe as Bobby Peru, a hideous two-bit crook who torments the couple. Like some kind of demented cross between Robert DeNiro in Cape Fear and a grown-up version of Butt-Head from Beavis and Butt-Head, Peru is one of Lynch’s all-time most twisted and unique creations. But, despite some memorable bits, Wild at Heart is a nasty mess. Lynch goes out of his way to have his female characters demeaned and abused, and the choice serves little narrative or critical purpose. Rather, Wild at Heart’s misogny seems intended as another ironic absurdity, like the inclusion of heavy metal on the soundtrack or a Crispin Glover vignette in which he sticks roaches in his underwear.