Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!yale!mintaka!mit-eddie!thakur
From: awp92@campus.swarthmore.edu (Andy Perry)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.cinema
Subject: What is Wild at Heart About?
Message-ID: <1990Sep20.160021.25426@eddie.mit.edu>
Date: 20 Sep 90 16:00:21 GMT
Sender: thakur@eddie.mit.edu (Manavendra K. Thakur)
Reply-To: awp92@campus.swarthmore.edu (Andy Perry)
Followup-To: rec.arts.cinema
Organization: Swarthmore College
Lines: 28
Approved: thakur@zerkalo.harvard.edu


Cristophe, you are completely right when you say that much of Wild at Heart is
meaningless.  I think that's the point (if there is one--I give Lynch the
benefit of the doubt because Blue Velvet had a definite point which was
incredibly successfully achieved).  I refer you to page 46 of _Alice_Doesn't_
by Teresa De Lauretis, a truly amazing book.  De Lauretis says that in current
cinema

"Language becomes more and more incidental, as music used to be in silent
cinema, often simply redundant or vaguely evocative, allusive, mythical.  [Many
references nowadays] serve solely to alude, refer to--not engage--a symbolic
order, an abstract code....[For the viewer, such codes are] no longer
intelligible.  But it doesn't matter.  What matters is once again the
spectacle, as in the earliest days of cinema.  Contradiction, paradox,
ambiguity in the image as well as in the textualized overlay of sound,
language, and image no longer produce distancing effects by baring the device
of cinema and thus inducing rationality and consciousness.  THEY ARE THE
SPECTACLE, the no longer simple but excessive, "perverse" pleasure of current
cinema."  (I apologize for editting the passage.  I don't have the book with
me, only some notes I took.)

Anyway, I think this passage can be taken in one of two ways.  Either it is a
scathing diagnosis of Wild at Heart, or (and I want to believe this) it is a
summary of what Lynch is trying to get us to see through his film.  I mean,
Wild at Heart is this trend taken to extremes.  It is as wonderfully exciting
to watch and hear as it is completely without any meaning at all.
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Andy Perry; Swarthmore College  AWP92@campus.swarthmore.edu OR AWP92@swarthmr