It was this film, along with a few others from the early 90s, that I came to realize that to find more of what I liked about these films was to seek out more by the same directors. But at the ripe age of 18 or so, entering my first year of university, it was so clear that there was something else going on in this film, so different from any I had seen before, so passionate. I was drawn to Wild at Heart initially because I was a Nicholas Cage fan, and on that front it didn’t disappoint still one of my favourite of his performances after all these years. I enjoyed its grim absurdity and wanted more, but at that time the answer to where I could find more was to seek out other science fiction films.

As a science fiction fan I had seen Dune many times, but did not think of it as an auteur film – or even know what that was. Throughout my teenage years I had made movie choices based on things like genre, celebrity, or franchise. Instead, she shows how he subverts traditional Hollywood gender roles to offer an optimistic view that love and human connection are really possible.Wild at Heart was the film with which I became conscious of David Lynch as a director, and which had a major role in awakening me to the very idea of the director itself. Nochimson’s interpretations explode previous misconceptions of Lynch as a deviant filmmaker and misogynist. These include Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Dune, The Elephant Man, Eraserhead, The Grandmother, The Alphabet, and Lynch’s most recent, Lost Highway. Nochimson begins with a look at Lynch’s visual influences-Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon, and Edward Hopper-and his links to Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, then moves into the heart of her study, in-depth analyses of Lynch’s films and television productions.

In this innovative book, she draws on these strategies to offer close readings of Lynch’s films, informed by unprecedented, in-depth interviews with Lynch himself. To understand Lynch’s films, Martha Nochimson believes, requires a similar method of being open to the subconscious, of resisting the logical reductiveness of language. The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood Martha P Nochimsonįilmmaker David Lynch asserts that when he is directing, ninety percent of the time he doesn’t know what he is doing.

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