Wild at Heart occupies the same space of morbid humour and existential curiosity. Its opening features a man getting his head bashed against a wooden bannister and then the marble floor, until the brain starts leaking from the back of his head. Later in the film, a car accident victim is seen with a gashing wound where her hair parts, and a man self-decapitates with a shotgun while another one looks for his arm which has been shot off his body. These characters are no different from the market mackerel; the individuated horror of their death has been replaced by mechanical elasticity. Like the blood-blots on the kitchen table of the Fish Kit photograph, there is something cluttered about these deaths. The process of the human body’s emptying is presented as an uncontainable flow. Perhaps appalling and partially comical, but ultimately plastic. This purgatorium where the body is neither alive, nor acknowledged as dead is the unnerving ‘middle’ of Wild at Heart. The same could be said of the story’s fairytale influence, The Wizard of Oz, where a cyclone uproots the heroine’s house taking her away from, and yet towards, home. This informs Lynch’s pre-dystopian world which seems to be on the brink of spinning out of control; ‘wild at heart and weird on top.’
‘Did I ever tell you that this here jacket represents a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom?’ It is not misguided confidence that sets Sailor and Lula free, but the unyielding honesty they always recover for one another. They talk through anything and everything with the sheer delight one saviours for the person they love talking to the most. Revelling in the pleasure of one another, all crumbled noise melts into whatever is most delightful in the moment. A modern fairytale ignited by the very substances that threaten to pollute it. This is Wild at Heart’s happy ending. The severed fish has been arranged and is indeed swimming. Don’t forget to feed it.