Lynch lets his hair down. One of Lynch’s greatest talents is the use of dramatic tension. Constructing a scenario where you expect terrible things to happen, and holding off and holding off until, finally, they do, or they don’t. He is a master of mood, knowing that the audience is trapped in the cinema, they can’t escape, and he can persecute them as much as he wants. There is something sadistic about horror, and Lynch, genial figure though he is, knows how to exploit his dark side. Yet, in Wild at Heart, the director chooses to forego this. From the opening sequence, where Sailor kills his would-be assassin in brutal fashion, it’s all blowsy surface action, dialled up to twelve. The Cape Fear reference, which Scorsese would later echo, tells us we’re headed on a wild ride, which isn’t going to have any great subtlety. Cage and Dern have a ball, overacting to their heart’s content, full on Dennis Hopper mode from the word go. It’s an end-of-the-eighties movie, big shoulder pads, Duran Duran, that kind of aesthetic. Post the politics of the seventies, that brief spell between the Cold War and 911 when mindless violence could still somehow be portrayed as more innocent. Something Lynch revels in here, not least in the decapitation of Bobby Peru, an iconic moment for a director giving himself free ride to go over the top. In some ways it feels like the work of an auteur who has temporarily lost their way, but nonetheless is happy to be lost, to go out on a limb in some faraway Texas holdout. We tend to look back at a director’s career and impose a pattern of conscious and coherent decision-making on it, but the film industry doesn’t work that way, and Wild at Heart feels like an outrider.
No comments:
Post a Comment