wild at heart david lynch los angeles locations

The hallucinatory jumble of tones that might, in the work of a conventional filmmaker, signal desperation is instead lifeblood for Lynch. Between commercial breaks, he uncorks the shocks in banality. In “Twin Peaks,” Lynch toys with our assumptions about the blandness of most TV shows, and of most small towns, for that matter. In “Blue Velvet,” the Hardy Boys-style scenario mutates into a fever dream. What’s disturbing about Lynch’s work is that he unbinds the safety net. And yet the most explosively exciting American films have often been those that violated the rules of the game. Horror films aren’t supposed to be goofy musicals shouldn’t be blood baths sitcoms aren’t lyrical.

Genre films are generally tightly bound to the rules of the form, and, for audiences, there’s a large measure of security in the binding. It’s a conglomeration of genres-not just the road movie and musicals and ghoul pictures, but juvenile delinquent films, Southern Gothic, sitcom, sci-fi. “Wild at Heart,” starring Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern as Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune, two white-trash lovebirds on the lam from a host of hellions, is startling even for him.

Lynch has never made anything remotely ordinary. Or imagine “The Night of the Living Dead” as a road movie, with a parolee who sounds like Elvis behind the wheel. Imagine “The Wizard of Oz” remade by David Lynch and you may catch a whiff of what his new film “Wild at Heart” is like.

Wild at heart david lynch los angeles locations