Episode 185: David Lynch Watch Series #6 (WILD AT HEART, 1990)

the kind of like true crime like coming off that stark weather interest in the 90s with like um Yeah, the other ones that came out, Badlands and

other things.

Certainly, certainly.

So this movie, of course, produced and shot in between David Lynch's involvement with Twin Peaks, which comes up a lot if you read about Twin Peaks.

I mean, people say about one of the issues that happened with the second season was that David Lynch was very much involved in this movie.

And then people have cited that as perhaps a reason why a bit of a quality dip in the second season.

Some of that... from what I could tell is a bit apocryphal, but some of it probably I'd imagine is certainly true.

No denying that he was quite involved with this.

And of course, this project really began following the De Laurentiis Company's bankruptcy.

There was a new parent company which had commissioned Lynch to direct another one of his kind of neo-noirs like Blue Velvet.

So Lynch was connected to Barry Gifford's work.

through a man named Monty Montgomery, who was Lynch's friend, producer on Twin Peaks.

Lynch loved the book, and he described it as sort of like a modern romance in a violent world about finding love in hell.

And he decided to make a film out of it.

And so Lynch's screenplay, of course, adds more elements, more surreal sequences, as you can probably tell when you watch the movie, borrows a lot of references, again, from Wizard of Oz, probably the most heavy-handed Wizard of Oz-themed movie To the extent that years later, in recent years, there has been a documentary called Lynch slash Oz, which talks all about Lynch's inspiration of Wizard of Oz and how that's kind of imbued in his films.

But this is really the central one where that's not even subtext.

This is text.

I mean, sailors saved by the good witch at the end of the movie.

Like, it's pretty much part of the actual text of the film.

Yeah.

But Wild at Heart, of course, when it came out, was not a box office hit.

It was a very polarizing film.

But kind of surprisingly, the film famously played at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival and David Lynch won the Palme d'Or.

So this was a huge critical hit at that festival.

But it was to a relatively hostile audience.