Lynch is the opposite of the Hollywood hack. The last thing he would dream of doing is sending anyone out of the theater comforted and reassured. He uses sound and image rather than narrative, and replaces a belief in moral order with a vision of the crazed and random blows of malevolent fate.
In Wild at Heart - as entertaining, bizarre, mesmerizing and occasionally stomach-churning a two hours at the movies as you are likely to encounter this year - Lynch turns thrice-familiar conventions and genres into something strange indeed. The jolts in this film come not from a superficial intent to shock - although that is an element - but from the sabotage and arch subversion of our assumptions about genre movies and the world outside.
Reality and fantasy are always dangerously close in Wild at Heart, and at times inseparable. When its characters recall some excruciating experience or nightmare in their past, Lynch does not give us memory in mere soliloquy. Pain and perversion are fleshed out in flashback glimpses that are brief and spellbinding.
In the real world, beauty may be in the eye of the beholder. In Lynch's tormented universe, someone is likely to be holding the eye of the beauty. The wild, galvanic opening of Wild at Heart finds Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) fending off a knife-wielding assailant. With sickening, graphically depicted savagery, he beats the man's head into a pulp.
