In, say, Blue Velvet, the titular material signified a diseased and unhinged patriarchy eaten up with nostalgic oedipal issues, while the fire in Wild at Heart symbolizes unruly passion. Fire will prove to be the film’s motif, from a burning man to a burning house to the ongoing closeups of matches exploding in fire as smokers strike them to light their cigarettes.
The insinuations of Lynch’s greatest work, about the repressions of society, are rarely present in Wild at Heart, which literally pushes everything to the foreground, starting with a sequence that opens on a torrent of flames with the title rushing toward us like the credits of a 3D horror movie. Released in 1990, the year the first season of Twin Peaks premiered on ABC, the film feels like Lynch’s attempt to top the unruly kink of Blue Velvet and perhaps his brilliant two-hour Twin Peaks pilot, and this aspiration triggers a self-consciousness that’s unusual in his work. Without this backbone, Lynch’s techniques can feel desperate and scattershot, as in his polarizing Wild at Heart. This irony gives his art its emotional backbone, uniting its formal and narrative dissonances. Lynch is a dramatist of erotic violence, utilizing symbols and riffs to elucidate the potentially actualizing pull of sexual suppression.
At his best, as in Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive, and Twin Peaks: The Return, Lynch’s intuitive recalibration of American iconography and genre tropes is profound, locating the nexus of our culture’s perversion. Lynch is a surrealist who appears to possess unusual access to his subconscious, allowing his taboo urges and anxieties to seemingly drift across the canvas or screen with little intermediary. A large part of the exhilaration of David Lynch’s art resides in its fearlessness.