Saturated with high camp tropes and delightfully overwrought visual iconography, Wild at Heart is a cinematic caravanserai, playing host to highway-bound star-crossed lovers, deliciously sinister criminal syndicates, and duplicitous frenemies. The film raises the stakes with Wizard of Oz lore, gaudy glamour, and an enchanting crime syndicate. Wild at Heart is motel room erotica through and through.    

Lynchian to its core, the film brims with the holy trinity that is his cinematic signature: an idiosyncratic world where more is hidden than revealed, a labyrinthine and richly visually coded ambiance, and a whimsical nod to capital A Americana. Angelo Badalementi’s sultry score throbs, suspending the film in a half life stupor between sorrow and excess. 

This is performative cinema, an earnestly tongue in cheek affair. Dialogue is outrageous, perhaps improbable. The sincerity is laced with saccharine, and the moments of sorrow are pure hysteria, and unflinchingly indulgent. The storyline, acting, and script is delightfully overwrought and endearingly incomprehensible.

The film makes ostentatious, unapologetic claims to the time worn formula of the road movie and reimagines it. Desert vistas become a spatial medium to convey the tropes of recklessness and rough livin. The characters are surface level, even in their complexities. Our jailbird and jailbait are tangled up in a fragmented world of self involved intrigue, pain, and wonder. Marietta is a caricature: all sociopathic conceit with claw nails and a hurricane proof perm.

Ultimately, Wild at Heart is the kitschy love child of a heady neo-noir and a rockabilly roadshow. Follow the yellow brick road into a kitschy neverland, saturated with visual references to the pulp genre and the medium of the fleabag motel. Here are 17 whimsical reasons that this is the visual and aesthetic experience you need.

1. Crimsons

2. The dream auto

3. Desert crash

4. the wicked witch

5. This jacket is a symbol of my individuality, and my belief in personal freedom

6. motel room sorrow

7. we fight and make up

8. bleached

9. landline living

10. desert shack silhouette

11. a rebel’s cause

12. strangers in town

13. motel love affair

14. vistas of americana

15. neon magenta breakdown

16. antagonist a la mode

17. jailbird and jailbait on the run