Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Wild at Heart
1990 · David Lynch · Wild at Heart on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch a match fill the entire frame. (camera)
Frederick Elmes shoots flame so close it stops doing a job. A cigarette catches, a match strikes, a house burns, and the image abstracts into orange motion with no room left around it.
Payoff: The fire is not an event in a scene. It is the film's temperature, surfacing wherever the feeling gets too big. In the reading: affective color. The reading calls this affective color: a color that stops describing objects and takes the whole scene as a single charge.
Listen for Sailor explaining his snakeskin jacket. (setting)
He calls it a symbol of his individuality and his belief in personal freedom, and he says it more than once. The jacket was Cage's own, brought to set as a nod to Brando in The Fugitive Kind.
Payoff: He is assembling himself out of movie parts and announcing the assembly. The film lets the invention stand. In the reading: story-telling / legending. The reading calls this fabulation: characters caught legending themselves, telling a story about who they are until the telling holds.
Notice the cuts to fire that belong to no scene. (cutting)
Duwayne Dunham keeps breaking the forward motion of the road with sudden associative inserts. Flame, a fragment of the past, an image out of The Wizard of Oz. None of them are literal events.
Payoff: Emotional states are delivered by juxtaposition instead of continuity, which is why the film feels hallucinated rather than plotted.
Watch Cage do Elvis in the drawl and the stance. (performance)
Sailor is an open homage rather than a character who happens to like Elvis, and it pays off when Cage actually sings. Around him the cast plays grotesques, with Diane Ladd's Marietta pitched highest of all.
Payoff: Everyone here is performing a type at full volume, which is what lets the film be sincere and knowing at the same time.
Listen for the soundtrack swinging from thrash metal to a ballad. (sound)
Powermad opens it at full assault, then Chris Isaak's Wicked Game arrives, then Angelo Badalamenti's orchestral writing. Under all of it Lynch layers room tone, breath and the amplified sound of small things.
Payoff: The jump between brutal noise and tender melody is the film's argument about violence and love, made in the mix.
Once you have seen it
Watch Bobby Peru in the motel room with Lula. (performance)
Dafoe gives him rotted teeth and a voice like a slow leak, and the scene has no plot business at all. It is pressure applied for its own sake, and it goes on longer than it needs to.
Payoff: The diners and blacktop are the surface. This is what keeps leaking up through it, and the film never explains him. In the reading: originary-world. The reading calls what he represents an originary world: raw appetite showing through the polite American surface as pure drive.
Look for Oz turning up in the decor and staging. (setting)
A good witch arriving in a bubble, a wicked cackle, ruby-slipper red in the design. Lynch imported the whole framework himself. It is not in Barry Gifford's novel.
Payoff: The fairy tale is not decoration. It is the myth these two are using to navigate, and the film agrees to be told that way.
Track the same red across lipstick, flame and slippers. (light)
Elmes runs the palette hot. Marietta smearing her whole face crimson in a mirror, the orange of a match, the highway whites and blacks between. The reds are not separate reds.
Payoff: One intensity keeps surfacing in different objects, which is how the film keeps a single feeling running across scenes that have nothing else in common.
Watch what Sailor does in the last scene. (structure)
Beaten and released, he goes back and sings. The film has spent two hours making that gesture look ridiculous and has also spent two hours earning it.
Payoff: Choosing sincerity after all that is a decision, not an accident. The booing and the Palme d'Or were both correct.
Carry this in: Watch the fire. Every time a match fills the frame, the film is telling you the temperature of a feeling.