Classic Movie Review: 'Wild at Heart' David Lynch the Romantic

Wild at Heart

Directed by David Lynch

Written by David Lynch

Starring Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, Diane Ladd

Release Date August 17th, 1990

Published March, 24th, 2025

What is Wild at Heart? What is it supposed to be? Few films defy explanation quite the way Wild at Heart does. The myriad references to The Wizard of Oz, Nicolas Cage’s Elvis voice juxtaposed against a repeated heavy metal motif, and the sex and violence to an extreme, all feel like disparate elements from different movies. How they have been combined in Wild at Heart feels a bit like someone cutting puzzle pieces to make them fit into a completely incorrect puzzle. And yet, it does feel strangely cohesive, married via David Lynch’s singular aesthetic that presses against the bounds of reality.

Wild at Heart stars Nicolas Cage as Sailor, a criminal trying to go straight after falling for Lula (Laura Dern). Sailor’s attempt to straighten up and fly right is undermined by Lula’s scheming witch of a mother, Marietta (Diane Ladd), who tries to have Sailor killed only for Sailor to murder his assailant. Because he was defending himself and Lula, Sailor is only charged with manslaughter and, less than two years later, Sailor is leaving prison and he and Lula are picking up right where they left off. The two are running away together, breaking Sailor's parole and dreaming of life on the West Coast.

Naturally, Marietta is not having this and she hires her boyfriend, Johnny Farragut (Harry Dean Stanton) to track them down as they go on the run from North Carolina on the way to California. Not believing Johnny can carry out her exact wishes, which is to see Sailor killed, Marietta contacts a mobster named Santos (J.E Freeman), who promises to kill Sailor but he also wants to kill Johnny as well, something Marietta isn’t entirely in favor of. Eventually, Sailor and Lula end up in a dead end Texas town where a man named Johnny Peru (Willem Dafoe) awaits them.

Johnny Peru is a poisonous snake turned human, a figure of pure malevolence played by Willem Dafoe with a set of fake rotted teeth as jarringly horrific as any of the violence in Wild at Heart. Dafoe’s tick of licking his disgusting teeth is somehow more menacing than any of the things Johnny Peru actually does in the movie, and that says something considering his actions late in the movie and his disturbing end. David Lynch appears to revel in watching Dafoe be the absolutely creepiest of creeps, especially as he lingers on a scene of Johnny menacing poor Lula, left alone in her hotel room while Sailor fixes their car. If your skin doesn’t crawl during this scene, I don’t trust you.

Nicolas Cage has charisma to spare in Wild at Heart. I have no idea who Sailor is supposed to be or how he will exist in a world after this movie as a father and husband, but while we watch him in Wild at Heart, he’s a lightning bolt. He’s electrically charged and we can’t help but be struck by his electricity. The chemistry between Sailor and Lula, Cage and Laura Dern, is enough to make you sweat just thinking about it. Lynch underlines the sweaty, heated sexuality of Sailor and Luna with images of fire, a roiling flame underscores the opening credits, while matches, cigarettes, candles, and the lingering nightmare of the fire that killed Lula’s daddy, appear throughout the film reminding you of the all consuming passion at the heart of Wild at Heart.

That said, I still don’t quite know what Wild at Heart is supposed to be? Is it just an exercise in style? Is there a deeper point that I am missing? Is it just a movie that intends to provoke the audience into finding a meaning of their own? That last thought seems to be the prevailing one among those who’ve spent time thinking about Wild at Heart and while that can seem like a cop out for a director who can’t come up with a point to their super-cool images, I can’t help but feel that Lynch is more sincere than other filmmakers who I would consider cowardly in how they leave it up to the audience to determine what the point of it all is.

Lynch films Wild at Heart in a fashion that is surreal, as is his reputation, but there is something in how he presents Sailor and Lula that feels authentic, as if Lynch were showing us the kind of fatalistic approach to true love that exists in his soul. The movie is about love and sex and passion but it is left up to you how you feel about Lynch’s style of love story. My interpretation is that Lynch throws in thriller genre elements as a way to frame his kind of love story within a familiar convention. The nods to The Wizard of Oz and the surreal performance of Diane Ladd are nods to old Hollywood and an antagonist who creates the plot in which this love story can exist.

Wild at Heart is David Lynch the romantic, letting us see a softer side that was rarely on display amid the surreal aesthetic and mixed up storytelling. Wild at Heart is as disorienting and odd as any of Lynch’s other movies but it contains a key to his heart, a glimpse into the kind of passion that Lynch feels. I wonder if perhaps he’s a man who would not settle for a love story any less all encompassing than that of Sailor and Lula and Wild at Heart was a way to express himself as a longing, hopeless romantic who must disguise his heart inside a conventional, melodramatic Hollywood frame, amid a thriller plot with broad violence and obvious villains.

I love the idea that Lynch wasn’t making a thriller in Wild at Heart but an old school, 50’s style romance that keeps getting interrupted by a modern crime movie, busting through the pristine love affair of Sailor and Lula with the crunch of a heavy metal guitar, the explosion of modern action movie gunfire, and a villain in Diane Ladd that is straight out of a modern soap opera through the cracked lens of David Lynch. The sex in the movie is the kind one might expect James Dean and Natalie Wood characters are having when the camera is forced to turn away by the censors of the day.

David Lynch as secret romantic. That’s my Wild at Heart. Perhaps you have a different Wild at Heart. Let me know in the comments how you see Wild at Heart? It’s a film that could be open to a number of interpretations, each of them with their own bits of truth, all of them inspired by David Lynch and his big, beautiful imagination that never seemed to slow down for a moment from when he burst onto the scene with Eraserhead to his recent passing. Lynch’s mind appeared from afar to be a constantly roiling cauldron of images and ideas all grounded in a love for classic cinema.

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