No matter whether you’re revisiting the film or seeing it for the first time tonight, I’d encourage you to read these motifs not as drawbacks but rather the film’s key components.

Despite his assertion, Wild at Heart is the Lynch film that scholars and fans alike most often cite as a “a litter of quotation marks,” “a parade of surfaces behind which is no significant depth,” “a kind of cinematic vogue-ing that passes for the play of human emotions,” “a violent collection of images and clichés in search of stability and meaning.” While critics unleash most of their ire on the film’s absolutely bonkers ending (which I won’t spoil here), detractors save some venom for the film’s two major motifs, Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) and 1950s rock ‘n’ roll iconography.

Despite being surrounded by loss and destruction, no one can keep them apart, not even themselves.ĭavid Lynch has called his 1990 Palme d’Or-winning film Wild at Heart “a picture about finding love in hell,” which may be the closest Lynch has ever come to saying what any of his films are actually about. Their adventure climaxes in a lonely, remote place, where they meet a man in black whose presence will threaten their love for each other. In a supreme act of defiance, they grab their cigarettes, snakeskin jackets, and bubblegum hop in a classic convertible and barrel down a road littered with fatal car crashes, violence, and a doomed sense of romance. Synopsis: A sincere-but-damned rebel misfit and a sexually willing, independent woman fight her deranged, uptight Mama for the right to preserve their forbidden love.

Wild at heart (film)