When it was released, this movie felt for many like it was too closely related to Twin Peaks and perhaps Blue Velvet. Now, after many other Lynch movies (Inland Empire being the latest when I am writing this), it just feel like one great highly imaginative movie among others by Lynch. Almost all his favorite cultural fixations are in Wild at Heart, but are used just enough a different way to make the movie a unique experience.
Nobody will say a bad thing about Ingmar Bergman for recycling the same ideas in most of his movies, but that’s what he did. It doesn’t matter because his movies are almost all perfect in what they tried to achieve.
The same thing can be said of Lynch movies, but cinephiles keep trying to identify a few movies instead of celebrating them all. the controversial side is due to the fact that Lynch includes ultra-violence (before the gore mania), extra-kitsch (his imitators underrate the importance of contrast in his personal expression, darkness alone is not that interesting) and extra-characters (with little explanation why they are there) in a far more complex affair that is still dominated by a light pop culture. It’s easy to dismiss such vision, because it doesn’t apply as much to European culture, that will find a better home in Bergman movies.
At the same time, does that make Lynch a more superficial director ? Hell No ! His cinema feels much closer to today’s reality (European people are more stressed than ever before). It doesn’t find the basics in now old-fashion, comfortable new wave cinema school or in religion problems that most people don’t care for anymore in America, in Europe and in the orient of Japan and China. The fast paste of his movies take full advantages of new technologies, often much more than the newer directors dare to do and feel like zapping through different worlds, just like on television or in the Internet. Who do you follow ?
Does that really matter if all the characters are important and justified in the movie ? No. Life is closer to a Lynch movie than most recent slow-paced and down-to-earth movies that are trying to hard to be realist and believable, to the point of being both boring and away from any kind of life.