MOVIE REVIEW : Another Walk on the Wild Side : David Lynch’s ‘Wild at Heart’ is a startling conglomeration of road movie, musical, Southern Gothic, sitcom and sci-fi

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. Or imagine “The Night of the Living Dead” as a road movie, with a parolee who sounds like Elvis behind the wheel.

Lynch has never made anything remotely ordinary. “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. 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.

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. Horror films aren’t supposed to be goofy; musicals shouldn’t be blood baths; sitcoms aren’t lyrical. And yet the most explosively exciting American films have often been those that violated the rules of the game. What’s disturbing about Lynch’s work is that he unbinds the safety net.

In “Blue Velvet,” the Hardy Boys-style scenario mutates into a fever dream. In “Twin Peaks,” Lynch toys with our assumptions about the blandness of most TV shows, and of most small towns, for that matter. Between commercial breaks, he uncorks the shocks in banality. The hallucinatory jumble of tones that might, in the work of a conventional filmmaker, signal desperation is instead lifeblood for Lynch.

The tone of “Wild at Heart,” to the extent it can be characterized, is when-you-wish-upon-a-star kitsch crossed with abject horror. We’re witnessing a commingling of extremes: a twinkling world of perfect love and the wickedness that would deny us that world.

If neither seems fully real, the combination still strikes a resounding chord. Lynch may be operating out of his own wild, compass-less dreamland but his anxieties connect with audiences on very deep levels. What’s particularly unsettling about “Wild at Heart” is that usually you can’t see the connections being made. Lynch works on a more subliminal level than any other American film artist making feature films. He’s a master of the ways in which film logic and dream logic interweave.

“Wild at Heart,” which opens Friday, is a comedy of a very special sort. The violence in it, like the sentimentality, is so over-the-top that sometimes the only sane response is a cackle--it’s the only way to defuse the horror. With Lynch, nothing is so awful that it can’t be made more awful, and there’s a graveyard humor in that.

He doesn’t waste any time making nice with us in “Wild at Heart.” In the very first scene, at a fancy-dress party in Cape Fear, near the border between North Carolina and South Carolina, Sailor beats in the head of a man who picks a fight with him.

It’s not that Lynch is malevolent, exactly; he’s not like the Brian De Palma of “Carrie” or “Dressed to Kill” laying out his little ghoulish trip ropes for us. Lynch is simply too obsessively caught up in the malignancy of the world to loiter for very long on its goodness. “Wild at Heart” is the work of an affronted traditionalist; Lynch wants everything to be as goody-goody as in a fairy tale but the world keeps betraying him. The gingerbread house keeps mutating into “The House That Dripped Blood.”

The film hits the road when Sailor, paroled from the penitentiary nearly two years after the fatal head-bashing, heads south in a beat-up convertible with his darling Lula. (He calls her “Peanut”; she calls him “Sail.”) They don’t have a fixed destination, although they want to pass through New Orleans. Mainly they just want to scram, even if, for Sailor, that means leaving the state and breaking parole. For Lula, whose boozy, widowed mother (Diane Ladd) has a lusty, pathological yen to see Sailor dead, her joy ride is a chance to break free and be with the man she adores. These two are running away from everything except love.

You can tell they’re in love because, speeding down the road, they move contrapuntally to the hillbilly music pouring out of the radio. They have the body-language jingle-jangle of true soulmates. But this is true love, David Lynch-style. In bed, or in the bars, in between sex tussles, Sailor and Lula turn each other on with morbid, dirty banter. Between drags on their cigarettes, they innocently compare notes on how their parents smoked themselves cancerous; Sailor describes a torrid, long-ago session with a brunette and, then, eyeing Lula’s golden mane, adds with skuzzball courtliness, “But gentleman prefer blondes.” On the dance floor, in his snakeskin jacket, Sailor has a python-like sinuosity. Writhing with Lula, he might be molting. His love aria comes when he grabs the mike and, in a sonorous Elvis croon, sings “Treat Me Like a Fool.”

Lynch recognizes the way pop culture has Mix Mastered the lives of these people. Sailor’s Elvis fixation is more than impersonation; it’s as if the King’s cadences had taken over the man. It’s like a Halloween variant on the pop fixations of some other fabled outlaw lovers in the movies, like Jean Paul Belmondo’s Michel in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” who idolized Bogie, or Martin Sheen in Terrence Malick’s “Badlands,” who prided himself on his resemblance to James Dean.

But for Lynch, pop culture is a far more complicated proposition than it was for those directors. Lynch doesn’t work in old-movie references and golden oldies in order to impress us with arcana, or even to promote a nostalgic, tragic vision of life. (That would be too conventional). He’s interested in the yawning distance between the bright doggerel of pop and the sordid reality of where we really are at in our lives.

The Elvis paraphernalia in “Wild at Heart,” just like the many explicit references to “The Wizard of Oz,” is all-of-a-piece with the use of Roy Orbison songs and the title track in “Blue Velvet.” Lynch employs these pop artifacts for their power to release a longing in his characters so ferocious it becomes hysteria. It’s the longing for a world made right--made magical. Pulling into a squalid Texas town after leaving New Orleans, Sailor surveys the purgatory and mutters to Lula, “It’s not exactly the Emerald City.”

Like Lynch’s other feature films (except for “The Elephant Man”) and, like his dreamily jokey TV series “Twin Peaks,” “Wild at Heart” seems to take place in an unplaceable, then-and-now continuum. Even though it’s ostensibly contemporary, a vaguely ‘50s flavor is in the air--Sailor and Lula are like hot-rodder delinquents from the Eisenhower era, Lula’s mother has the primped, Peggy Lee-ish look of an aged beauty queen contestant. The men she sends out to bring her daughter back, Harry Dean Stanton’s Johnnie Farragut and J. E. Freeman’s Marcello Santos, are lean, wolfish Westerners; they look antiqued.

In “Wild at Heart,” Sailor and Lula joy ride into a wasteland that is only superficially barren. They encounter a relentless parade of crazies, and the confrontations have a ritualistic violence, as if their love was being tested. One of the peculiarities of “Wild at Heart” is that Sailor and Lula become more human in our eyes as they become more and more surrounded by demons. They seem to devolve into hurt, tender orphans--babes in the woods. At one point, at sunset, Lula can’t find anything to listen to on the car radio except bulletins of death and dismemberment. Wailing, she stops the car and runs into the molten fields.

If “Wild at Heart” doesn’t seem like any other movie, it may have something to do with Lynch’s almost tribal feeling for the primacy of imagery, and of sounds, too. He started out as an artist and his sequences are often built on visual and aural motifs. In “Wild at Heart,” the first shot is an immense, blooming close-up of a match being struck. (The vibrant cinematography is by Frederick Elmes, who has worked on most of Lynch’s movies; the sound designer was Randy Thom.) Throughout the film, the sights and sounds of conflagration vibrate the torrid atmosphere. These punctuations aren’t mere diddling; Lula’s father was burned to death several years back in a fire, and the recurring images provide a horrific linkage.

The flashbacks to the fire key into other recurring painful memories, like Lula’s rape when she was a teen-ager. (She’s 20 when the film begins). Lynch is an enthusiast of the subconscious power of fear-linked imagery, and he keeps imprinting these images again and again, as if to demonstrate that they don’t lose their violence over time. He wants us to know that their power is not reductive.

Lynch tends to see his actors in strongly visuals terms, too. This works mostly to his advantage in “Wild at Heart” because he’s chosen actors who have an almost emblematic force--while still being frightfully full of life. For a new-style film you need new-style actors.

Nicolas Cage may be the most high-flying actor in the movies right now. He’s the perfect performer for Lynch because, like the director, he doesn’t censor his wildest intuitions, and so his performance has the expressionist unpredictability of a dream. Cage, as he also demonstrated last year in “Vampire’s Kiss,” works much closer to the way silent actors, particularly the silent horror-film actors, used to work. He has the same kind of rapt, stylized intensity, the kind that can make muteness more chilling than a shriek.

Laura Dern isn’t as radically original as Cage, but she’s able to make Lula both minxy and maidenly--a white-trash Dorothy in an Oz gone riotously bad. And her match-up with Diane Ladd, Dern’s real-life mother, provides an added, Cocteau-like spookiness to the casting. Ladd herself is amazingly over-the-top, perhaps too much so. She’s the Wicked Witch of the piece, but she’s also supposed to have a crazed concern for her daughter’s welfare. The concern often gets obliterated in the free-style shenanigans. Ladd’s Marietta becomes progressively more shrill until, near the end, with her tinselly hair hanging wild and her face smeared red with lipstick, she’s like some punk melding of Barnum and Kabuki.

There are more crazies per acre in “Wild at Heart” than in any other Lynch movie. That’s saying something. Harry Dean Stanton’s Johnie Farragut is actually the sanest character in the film, which should give you an idea how far gone the human landscape is. At times, it seems as if Lynch has convened every way-out actor in the business. David Patrick Kelly, with his pointed Lucifer’s chin, turns up briefly, and so does Crispin Glover, as Lula’s madman cousin with a Father Christmas obsession. With voodoo dominatrixes and crone madams and psycho pashas putting in appearances, “Wild at Heart” is like a floating freak show. And Lynch saves the best for last--Willem Dafoe’s Bobby Peru, a scurvy maniac with a John Waters pencil-thin mustache and tiny, rotted teeth. Bobby has the slick, icky contours of an imp who has popped straight out of the dungeons of Lynch’s fervid fantasy life.

The drawback to Lynch’s pile-it-on method is that it is reductive. One reason “Wild at Heart,” for all its amazements, isn’t quite as stunning as “Blue Velvet” is because it seems less the working out of a single fixed obsession than an entire smear of obsessions. Whereas in “Blue Velvet” Lynch often seemed to be experimenting with just how close you can bring a film to a rest and still have it resonate, in “Wild at Heart” he’s taken to the open road, and the picaresque form allows for too many distractions. It’s a chase film without much impetus to the chase; at times, particularly in its last half hour, “Wild at Heart” seems like one long digression from Sailor and Lula’s flight. The Barry Gifford novel upon which the film is based is vastly less interesting than the movie, but it does have one clear advantage: constant forward momentum.

The overdose of crazies also points up another weakness. Lynch is probably better at portraying rock-bottom, gut-level depravity than any other filmmaker. He works so close to the edge of the unconscious that his horrors far outlast the usual pulp frights of most scare pictures. But Lynch’s vision doesn’t encompass the ways in which horror can be banal and bland-faced (which are sometimes more terrifying). For Lynch, wickedness is, in visual terms, all goblins and demons, and there’s something peculiarly child-like and limiting about that vision. We in the audience know (or should know) that horror often shows up wearing a suit and a smile. Despite Lynch’s almost entomological fascination with depravity, he doesn’t give it its full measure.

But what he does with it is harrowing enough. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film with this much movement that nevertheless seemed so trance-like. Lynch’s delirium binds the film together even when it’s a sequence of glittering shards, even when it veers dangerously close to David Lynch Shtick. And if Lynch’s vision of goodness is equally child-like, he at least gives that vision a rhapsodic lift. He never loses sight of Sailor and Lula’s love for each other. Their final redemption has its goofy side but the passion behind it is ardent, operatic. It’s as if, for Lynch, the safety of these two tormented innocents was crucial to the sanctity of love, of goodness itself. What does it matter that the Yellow Brick Road is blood-spattered as long as you can feel it beneath your feet?