Watched: Wild At Heart (1990).
Agh. I couldn’t quite get behind this. There are times when David Lynch almost seems like he’s parodying himself, and it’s often fun when he plays with that, but in this film he does it during a scene of sexual assault and it immediately threw me out of the film. The best work by Lynch preserves enough of the characters that you get sucked in, but Laura Dern’s character in particular seemed more like a sounding board (or sex doll) for Nicolas Cage’s (admittedly fascinating, magnetic, unhinged) character.
There are some clear through lines, thematically speaking, with Twin Peaks, and it isn’t a terrible film, but it’s not Lynch’s finest work by any stretch of the imagination. The sense you get is that there are echoes of brilliance throughout the whole thing, but occasionally the directorial touch pulls back a little too much and the writing doesn’t carry it. It’s surprising that his TV show was more consistent in committing to surrealism than this motion picture.