Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal
When we lost David Lynch earlier this year, it felt like a flame that would never stop flickering was suddenly snuffed out. Suffering from emphysema, the 78-year-old director’s health reportedly took a turn for the worse when the Sunset Fire’s proximity to his house necessitated that he evacuate. There’s a tragic irony in the fact that some of Lynch’s most evocative images prominently involve immolation, like the shack burning in reverse in Lost Highway and the candle flickering monstrously in Jeffrey’s nightmare in Blue Velvet. There’s that infamous on-set photo of him filming The Straight Story where he’s smoking in front of a house on fire and one of his short films is even titled Fire (Pożar). But of his features, flames can be found most prominently in his twisted romance road movie Wild At Heart, which opens with a title card ablaze and peppers in numerous close-ups of stricken matches and cindering cigarettes.
The film tells the love story of snakeskin jacket-wearing bad boy Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) and his vivacious sweetheart Lula Fortune (Laura Dern) as it finds itself through various stages of tumult. The main source of obstruction for the star-crossed lovers is Marietta (Diane Ladd), Lula’s viciously overbearing mother who has never approved of Sailor and even goes far enough to send men after him. After Sailor spends almost 2 years in prison for killing one of the attackers hired by Marietta, the couple decide to hit the road to be free from her controlling menace. Plotting a spontaneous trip from North Carolina out to California, Sailor and Lula have the future in their eyes but Marietta hires seedy detective Johnnie Farragut (Harry Dean Stanton) to track them down and bring Lula back home safely.
This being a David Lynch movie, there are plenty of strange detours, mercurial pitstops and eerie non-sequiturs in the journey that make this anything but a traditional road trip. Its manic-depressive push-pull tone is perhaps best typified by the range in soundtrack choices from speed metal band Powermad and The King himself, Elvis Presley. In a five minute stretch, Lula pounds her feet on a motel bed as we crossfade to her dancing shoes bouncing to heavy guitar chugs but after a scuff-up with an interloper, Sailor belts out “Love Me” in the mosh pit. Another standout on the soundtrack is Chris Isaak’s moody masterpiece “Wicked Game”, whose initial release didn’t garner much attention but shot up to number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 after its inclusion in Wild At Heart.
Of all the wayward and wild weirdos Sailor and Lula meet along the way, the most chillingly memorable is the criminally creepy Bobby Peru, played indelibly by Willem Dafoe. While at a string light party in Big Tuna, Texas, Sailor and Lula cross paths with Bobby as he slithers across the yard behind three topless women hootin’ and hollerin’. He’s dressed in all black with slicked back hair, his mustache as thin as the strings of his bolo tie. But his most defining characteristic are his undersized teeth, which we first get a glimpse of as he bites on a cigarette while cheekily clarifying to Lula and Sailor that his last name is the same as the country. Lynch wrote in the script that Bobby was to have grubby and stubby chompers but Dafoe didn’t expect to have dentures molded and created for the character. Once he had them in, he later explained that they unlocked something primal and lascivious within him and became “the key to the character”.
Lynch lingers on Bobby’s creepy smile the longest after Lula responds that she’s 20 years old; we can see the hostile lust in his eyes, even if poor Sailor can’t. Scored by a slowed-down version of Chris Isaak’s “In The Heat Of The Jungle”, Bobby bitterly recalls his Marine days before vulgarly excusing himself to go to the restroom. If that wasn’t off-putting enough for Lula, he barges into her motel room the next day to finish the job, loudly urinating with the bathroom door open. Things only get uglier from there, as Bobby takes advantage of Sailor’s absence and violently coerces her into asking him for sex. It’s a repulsive act and even though he involves Sailor in different criminal pursuits, Bobby does get what’s coming to him and then some by the end of Wild At Heart.
Across hundreds of wide-ranging film roles, Willem Dafoe has made a permanent mark on film history with his impressively expressive face and turn-on-a-dime theatrics. Lynch utilizes Dafoe’s talents perfectly in this fever dream of a film that is still one of the master filmmaker’s more straightforward accounts. Bobby Peru has echoes of Dennis Hopper’s horrid villain Frank Booth from Blue Velvet but Dafoe gives Peru a sort of twisted sex appeal that makes it all the more horrifying when sexual assault is introduced into the story. It can be hard to watch someone behave so repugnantly in a movie and yet the fact remains that you can’t take your eyes off them. As such, Bobby Peru remains one of Dafoe’s most magnetic performances.