Wild at Heart

 Saw Wild at Heart, an early Lynch film before Lynch fully embraced his twisty dream-logic method of story-telling.  This film follows two young lovers on the run from the law.  It stars Nicholas Cage and contains a strange mix of Lynch-ian strangeness and Cage-ian grotesques.  There's an early scene where Cage is jumped by a guy with a knife.  He fights off the assailant, pounding his head against the marble floor until his skull is crushed, and then glowering and flaring his nostrils, he points at the woman who was behind the attack.  It's unclear if this is intentionally off-putting and film-y or if this is just how Nick cage is and Lynch is trying to work with him.

The film goes on like that.  It has a lot of Lynch-y strangeness, with voodoo assassins and old men who inexplicably talk like ducks, but through it all is Nick Cage doing an Elvis impression and saying strange mouthfuls like "this here jacket represents a symbol of my individuality, and my belief in personal freedom."  Totally strange.

So, this is an interesting film for sure, but it's not quite as good as Lynch's later work.  This contains a lot of strange experiments that don't make a ton of sense and seem more hap-hazard than deliberate.  There's some nice suburban insanity in the form of the woman who ordered this hit - at one point she paints her entire face in lipstick and vomits in a pink toilet - and some nice on-the-nose symbolism about the protagonists' love being like fire, consuming and destroying them.

I like Lynch's films because of their non-sense.  The mental landscapes of real people are too complex to fit neatly into established Hollywood tropes and so, when we see them in Lynch's films, presented as unique manifestations of his characters' mind's they are jarring, confusing, off-putting, and intense.  Here however, these same fall a bit flat and seem just kind of lurid and goofy and although people's thoughts are those too, it's indistinguishable from just bad film-making.  A minor Lynch film.