If Lynch were an instinctive artist of this era (rather than a solipsistic expressionist), he would make movies about people trying to put the lid on their libidos instead of seeking to relieve themselves of inhibitions. (Soon after Blue Velvet, a neophyte director such as Bob Balaban was able to copy this approach in Parents, his own fifties paranoia film about red meat.) The presumed timeliness of this view is disingenuous. Lynch’s white working-class identification masquerades as chic nostalgia for the conservative fifties-era inhibitions and repression. Not only is it simplistic to depict the most virulent aspects of contemporary society at loose in the lower classes (that’s ready-made condescension), but the approach ignores the recent political reality ( Where the Heart Is, Metropolitan) that recognizes even antisocial impulses in middle- and upper-class behavior. This can only be praised as insightful or inspired if one shares Lynch’s blinkered, regressive unconscious. In Wild at Heart, America’s white trash culture sets the terms through which Lynch sees the world. (Lynch returns too often to a conflagration visual motif - matches, arson, car crashes, heat -that reduces sensation to meaningless mannerism.) Without the surprise of insistent banality where the mundane takes on such a distinctive bathos that the commonplace (and the laws of the universe) seem to be redefined. But instead of these traits signaling an all-too-human compulsion or neurosis, they lapse into cliche: Lynch can’t redeem them. Lynch adds contemporary quotients of violence and sex, making Lula a childlike nympho and Sailor an insular Elvis imitator. The situation isn’t real - it’s taken from one of the more recurrent themes of movies for the past thirty years: dark-haired man and blonde speed toward their destiny. Wild at Heart is a road movie about Lula and Sailor (Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage she of the gaping mouth, he of the annoying voice) on the run from Lula’s hysterical, controlling mother (Diane Ladd). Some people want to call this art in the postmodern age, but no matter how inflated with esteem Lynch becomes, his art isn’t so great that it transcends political reading or vicious, regressive, conservative meaning. The Black victim has no personality, little identity (besides wielding a knife and uttering the film’s first few cuss words), and his death is never mourned. Not only does the white man win in Lynch’s view, he should win. This knock-down-and-drag-out is an epic battle of the races. Their physical aspects are drastically symbolic, highly connotative, and their actions carry definitive meanings.
Taken on Lynch’s neosurreal level, these aren’t anonymous men fighting. A white man beats a Black man to a literal pulp -blood oozes, bones crack, body crumples. From the opening scene of Wild at Heart, David Lynch crosses the line between art and obscenity.
0 kommentar(er)
