1334 Wild at Heart

[domino harvey]

“This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top.” With this torrid adaptation of the novel by Barry Gifford, David Lynch pushed his vision of nightmarish Americana into new realms of delirious excess and feverish romanticism. Burning with libidinal abandon, Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage are Lula and Sailor, outlaw lovers whose reckless passion sends them on the run through a menacing South, where their dream of freedom collides with a vortex of violence and depravity. Blending all-American iconography ranging from Elvis to The Wizard of Oz into a twisted southern-gothic soap opera, and featuring memorable supporting turns by Willem Dafoe and Diane Ladd, the film conjures a dark dreamscape of danger, desire, and fantasy that stands as perhaps the most transcendently perverse love story of the 1990s.

4K UHD SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
New 4K digital restoration of the unrated international version, supervised by director of photography Frederick Elmes and approved by the David Lynch Estate, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
Alternate 5.1 surround mix newly created from the original 35 mm DME magnetic tracks by rerecording mixer Dean Hurley
One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the special features
New introduction by film programmer and critic Dennis Lim
Archival documentaries featuring interviews with Elmes; director David Lynch; actors Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, Willem Dafoe, Diane Ladd, and Isabella Rossellini; novelist Barry Gifford; editor Duwayne Dunham; filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci; and other members of the cast and crew
Deleted scenes and outtakes, with a new 5.1 surround mix by Hurley
Readings from Room to Dream, a 2018 book coauthored by Lynch and critic Kristine McKenna
Segments from a 1988 episode of Cinéma, de notre temps featuring Lynch
Music video directed by Lynch for Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game”
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
PLUS: An excerpted interview with Lynch from filmmaker and writer Chris Rodley’s book Lynch on Lynch, and a new introduction by Rodley

New cover by Fred Davis, based on the original theatrical poster

[soundchaser]

No Industrial Symphony No. 1 feels like a pretty big missed opportunity.

[denti alligator]

No Industrial Symphony No. 1 feels like a pretty big missed opportunity.

Unless it'll be on the rumored shorts box.

[Drucker]

Wow the "Wicked Game" music video!

[Forrest Taft]

As it’s the video directed by Lynch, it is not the best known video with Helena Christensen, fyi.

[Adam X]

New 4K digital restoration of the unrated international version, supervised by director of photography Frederick Elmes and approved by the David Lynch Estate

… dreams do come true!

[WrathOfAguirre]

New 4K digital restoration of the unrated international version, supervised by director of photography Frederick Elmes and approved by the David Lynch Estate

… dreams do come true!

Are there significant/noticeable differences? As much as I love Lynch, this is one film of his I've only seen a couple of times (and years ago at this point, probably going back to Netflix DVD mail-in days, IIRC).

[Roger Ryan]

New 4K digital restoration of the unrated international version, supervised by director of photography Frederick Elmes and approved by the David Lynch Estate

… dreams do come true!

Are there significant/noticeable differences? As much as I love Lynch, this is one film of his I've only seen a couple of times (and years ago at this point, probably going back to Netflix DVD mail-in days, IIRC).

Lynch was required to blur out one portion of a shot showing graphic violence as well as add colored filters to a couple of shots supposedly to reduce the sexual explicitness. I never minded the color filters which looked like an intentional artistic choice by Lynch (and likely were even if he had not originally intended for them to be there), but the censoring of the violence always looked sloppy and I'll be happy to have it gone. For clarity, no footage was actually cut for the U.S. version; shots were just manipulated.

[WrathOfAguirre]

Interesting! Sounds fairly inconsequential, though. Thanks for the details.

[hearthesilence]

I'll probably skip this as it's one of my least favorite Lynch films, but I thought Dave Kehr gave a commendable argument for it. He wrote about it twice for the Chicago Tribune, though ultimately it didn't make his ten best list for the year. (It had been a very strong year and he had to leave off quite a few worthy films, all of which he gave an honorable mention.)

This was the first write-up he did as part of a report on Cannes:

`This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top," says the Laura Dern character in David Lynch's new film "Wild at Heart," which Monday night won the highest award, the Palme d'Or, of the 43rd Cannes International Film Festival. Violent, passionate and touchingly naive, it stands to "Blue Velvet" as a finished painting does to a preliminary sketch.

Based on a story by Barry Gifford, "Wild at Heart" treats one of the classic subjects of the American cinema: The outlaw couple, as developed from Fritz Lang's "You Only Live Once" through Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde."

Laura Dern, more feline and sensual than she was in "Blue Velvet," is a Southern girl with the Nabokovian name of "Lula"; she is implacably in love with a drifter named Sailor, played by Nicolas Cage with Elvis Presley's voice and Marlon Brando's snakeskin jacket from "The Fugitive Kind." Lula's mother (played by Dern's own mom, Diane Ladd) burns in jealous opposition to their relationship and uses her crime syndicate connections (to the same surrealist mob that supported Dennis Hopper in "Blue Velvet") to send a series of hitmen after the hapless Sailor, including Isabella Rossellini and Willem Dafoe as the most evil couple in Big Tuna, Texas.

Making deliberate use of movie cliches and constantly flirting with a camp sensibility, "Wild at Heart" still manages to look on its characters with affection and concern-producing that odd combination of snarling cruelty and wide-eyed sentimentality that defines the Lynch effect. With the 60-minute trailer provided by "Twin Peaks" every Thursday night (several of the series' stars make guest appearances here), "Wild at Heart" will probably prove to be Lynch's most successful film when it is released later this summer, and deservedly so: It is a stunning piece of work.

Almost three months later, he wrote this for the general release:

When you've made a movie that has had the cult impact of "Blue Velvet"-a film that many fans have adopted as if it were a religious text-you have one of two choices for your next project: You can make it again, or you can try to destroy it, to search for something new by contradicting what you did before.

With "Wild at Heart," the story of a young outlaw couple (Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage) on the run from a murderously jealous mother (Diane Ladd, Dern's real-life mom), David Lynch has made the latter choice - which is, of course, the only choice open to the serious artist. Yet it's a decision that's bound to disconcert many of Lynch's followers, because "Wild at Heart" does not aim for "Blue Velvet's" hypnotic intensity nor for its sense of threatening, ferociously repressed sexual energy.

Instead, the energy of "Wild at Heart" is open and unchecked: Its dominant image is that of a match bursting into flame. The new film is agitated, linear, diffuse and episodic, where "Blue Velvet" was static, claustrophobic and driven by a closed, symmetrical plot.

Lynch seems to have gone down the list of stylistic choices he made for "Blue Velvet" and reversed almost every one of them, substituting yellows and oranges for the earlier film's dominant blues and greens, using a quick, analytic editing style (including sudden, disruptive cuts to gigantic closeups of objects) in place of long takes, and creating a horizontal sense of space (low-lying buildings, ribbons of highway as the couple drives from North Carolina to Texas) instead of "Blue Velvet's" vertical imagery (church steeples, fire escapes, microphone stands).

Similarly, "Blue Velvet's" near unity of time and place gives way to a vague and discontinuous sense of chronology in which the present-tense narrative is continually interrupted by flashbacks and cutaways to parallel actions. By spacing out the editing, Lynch takes actions that should occupy only a few minutes (such as Lula's witchlike mother painting her face with lipstick) and stretches them over a period of hours.

Most important, where "Blue Velvet" was fundamentally a thriller with elements of black comedy, "Wild at Heart" is a comedy with the trappings of a thriller. At its center, in place of Kyle MacLachlan's ultimate straight man, there is Nicolas Cage's Sailor Ripley-a broadly comic, even cartoonish figure who speaks in the baritone growl of his hero, Elvis Presley, and wears an outrageous snakeskin jacket-the symbol, he says, of his personal freedom and individuality.

As the girl, there is the same actress as in "Blue Velvet," Laura Dern, but a very different character-her Lula Fortune is a steamy 20-year-old who likes leather halters rather than print dresses and enjoys nothing more than making love to her man. This isn't the blocked, kinky, guilt-ridden sexuality of "Blue Velvet," but sex perceived as an irresistible force of nature.

Although the professionally puritanical Lynch still seems disturbed by sex (like Peter Greenaway, he can't seem to contemplate the topic without free-associating images of bathrooms), it is for once a liberating, sanctifying force, the means by which the characters will discover a genuine love and create a family.

For just as "Blue Velvet" was a voyage inward-to a discovery of loneliness and corruption-so "Wild at Heart" is a journey outward, from the isolated self to the united couple. It takes the narrative form of the classic Hollywood romance (behind which stands an infinitely older form of Christian allegory) in which the couple's love must be repeatedly tested and proved before they are allowed to ascend to a true unity, a true happiness. (Taking the place of Christian faith in "Wild at Heart" is, in one of Lynch's most elaborate gags, an entire cosmology based on "The Wizard of Oz.")

The agent of that testing is the malicious spirit embodied by Lula's devouring mother (who stands at the head of a whole Lynchian syndicate of crime bosses and hit men, including Willem Dafoe, Isabella Rossellini and Harry Dean Stanton).

Lynch thus finds a place in the world-and it is a touchingly traditional one-for the evil that was so unaccountable and devastating in "Blue Velvet." It is through evil that good comes to exist.

Of course, this moral drama, abstract and naive as it often is, is played out in "Wild at Heart" behind dense layers of irony and sarcasm. Lynch often seems to be making fun of his characters, mocking their aspirations to middle-class respectability or turning their most difficult moral choices into jokes.

And yet there is enough of a core of sincerity to turn even the most preposterous moments-such as the film's dream-sequence finale-into something moving and true: You buy the feelings, even as the situations degenerate into the ludicrous and absurd.

That may be the secret of Lynch's style - his ability to rhapsodize and sneer at the same time, to balance a campy contempt for his material and an absolute belief in it. He is the perfect moralist for the end of a century too cynical to buy the moral precepts he lays down with such showy firmness, yet too dissatisfied with his cynicism - too nostalgic, perhaps? - to abandon them completely.

(STAR)(STAR)(STAR) 1/2

[Adam X]

Interesting! Sounds fairly inconsequential, though. Thanks for the details.

I don’t think it feels inconsequential when you’re used to the international version. The fact the obvious optical censorship occurs as part of the film’s climax, and over the last scene of the main antagonist, really puts a dampener on the finale.
Very happy this is getting restored, though I’m fairly certain any other changes were made after Cannes & early test screenings rather than just for the US release.

[beamish14]

Interesting! Sounds fairly inconsequential, though. Thanks for the details.

I don’t think it feels inconsequential when you’re used to the international version. The fact the obvious optical censorship occurs as part of the film’s climax, and over the last scene of the main antagonist, really puts a dampener on the finale.
Very happy this is getting restored, though I’m fairly certain any other changes were made after Cannes & early test screenings rather than just for the US release.

I’ve seen the very print that played at Cannes. There were no other alterations beyond the VFX in that one scene

[flyonthewall2983]

As it’s the video directed by Lynch, it is not the best known video with Helena Christensen, fyi.

Herb Ritts directed that.