1990 was a wild year for David Lynch. That’s when he and
Mark Frost revolutionized TV with “Twin Peaks”, shocking a passive viewing
public with more bizarre humor, cinematic atmosphere, graphic violence, and
red-hot sexiness than it had ever seen on the little screen. The vibrations
“Twin Peaks” sent out into world—making possible such future series as “The
X-Files”, “The Sopranos”, and “Mad Men”—were so intense that we sometimes
forget that ’90 was also the year Lynch had a breakthrough on the big screen when
he won his first Palme d’Or with his adaptation of Barry Gifford’s novel Wild at Heart. It is significant that
both pieces came out in the same year, because both Wild at Heart and “Twin Peaks” share steamy pulp-romance
sensibilities, post-modern humor, pure surrealism, and lots of cast members. Both
were also rejected by a fickle public as quickly as they were embraced, TV
viewers losing interest in the second season of “Twin Peaks” and critics
increasingly deciding that Wild at Heart
was too self-referential and self-conscious. That’s always a misinformed way to
approach a David Lynch film as he may actually be our least self-conscious,
most purely intuitive filmmaker. Despite its nods to such pop-culture
touchstones as The Wizard of Oz and
Elvis Presley, Wild at Heart really
follows a Rock & Roll rhythm all its own, and though it shares similarities
with “Twin Peaks”, it diverges from that show and Gifford’s novel in its
refreshing hopefulness. It is a film that completely believes that love can survive
in a world that’s “wild at heart and weird on top.” While words like “weird”
and “ironic” are overused in describing David Lynch’s movies, one word that
isn’t is “sweet,” and Wild at Heart
is ultimately a really sweet movie—even with its head-smashing murder, toilet
seduction, severed-hand snatching dog, gross self-decapitation by shotgun, and
close up of puke on a motel room carpet. Hey, it’s sweet, but it’s still a
David Lynch movie.
Wild at Heart
first came out in a pretty spiffy DVD edition by MGM in 2004, with a nice
selection of extra features and refurbished sound and vision personally
overseen by Mr. Lynch. The disc’s vibrant clarity was a revelation after so
many years spent watching the film’s absolutely wretched incarnation on VHS. Ten
years later, MGM has apparently decided that a breakthrough movie by perhaps
the greatest living director is not worth putting out on blu-ray, so it passed Wild at Heart off to Twilight Time. It
also passed along all of the extra features from its old DVD, which appear on
the new blu-ray in standard definition. These are all worth a rewatch,
especially for Diane Ladd’s interview. Her explanation for Marietta Fortune
painting her face with lipstick is impassioned and it makes perfect sense of
one of the film’s craziest scenes. The only new extras are a booklet essay (the
cover of which is one of the sexiest movie stills I’ve ever seen) and Twilight
Time’s standard isolated music and effects track. It would have been really nice
to get those 75 minutes of deleted scenes that Lynch released on his Lime Green set in 2008, but I’m assuming
Lynch personally owns that footage since his company Absurda released that DVD
box and it wasn’t MGM’s to hand out. Oh, well.
The main draw of this new disc is obviously the blu-ray
upgrade. No new tinkering has been performed, but the remastering of the old
DVD was sharp enough that it has made the transition to high-def very well.
There are some white specks here and there, but if this is the best we’re ever
going to get Wild at Heart on home
video, I have no complaints.
