Voices.
“—for her recent divorce, shot her three children, aged seven—”
“—a judge praised defendant John Roy, but was dismayed to learn that he’d had sex with the corpse—”
“—state authorities last October released turtles into the Ganges, to try and reduce human pollution, and will now use crocodiles to eat corpses dumped by poor Hindus—”
Lathered in static, these voices, a crazed cross-hatching of FM monologues, one-way-only verbal highways upon which madness cruises unchallenged and unargued, a disconnected chorus battering their listener with a world gone wrong on its way to Hell.
A metal shiver zigzags up-down her spine to match the frequency of mayhem coming out the speakers of her night-black 1965 Ford Thunderbird as she cruises down a godforgotten Texas farm road. The empty Southwestern landscape is all boiling murk—the baked asphalt falling under her tires, the tallgrass prairie stunned dead and yellow by the low-slung sun, the heatshimmer horizon stretching just beyond reach—with only the faded road signs and rust-rotted razorwire fence lines to indicate a civilization once rooted here.
“Holy shit!” she shrieks as she violently twists the radio dial. “It’s Night of the Livin’ fuckin’ Dead!”
Lula Pace Fortune (Laura Dern) whipsaws the convertible onto the shoulder, hurling herself out into the weeds in hysterics, demanding her napping fugitive boyfriend, Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage), snap awake and locate on the dial the music that will soothe her jinglejangled nerves. When he finds a song—the speedpummel frenzy of their favorite band, thrash-metal outfit Powermad—it’s as if the young couple is capital-R Resurrected. Sailor backflips into the field with Lula, the two of them hipgripped by ecstasy and dancing with a screaming, high-kicking abandon. Each is in orbit of the other, the music awakening them from their overheated twilight torpor—but also providing them with a medium for true communication. Intercoursing between their bodies via dance is a wordless and infinite conversation, a kind of limb-flailed physical glossolalia, an extension of the river of easy confab that seems to flow eternally between the two.
And when their bodies finally come together, Powermad fades and the swooning Romanticism of a Richard Strauss composition soars from the soundtrack, washing away any other sound, including their voices. They speak soundlessly, but we don’t need to hear to know what they’re saying, and neither do they: “I love you.” Such is the power of the connection between them, a bond that transforms the world from a dull, marrow-colored sunset haze to a warm magenta so vivid and safe it seems torn directly from a Technicolor rainbow.
This is a crucial sequence—possibly the crucial sequence, a kind of map key to all that has come before and all that is to follow—in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, a candied work of rock ’n’ roll surrealism that warps a lovers-on-the-run travelogue through the American South with the writer-director’s trademark arcane absurdia. It’s crucial not just because the scene highlights Lynch’s vision of the film (“a really modern romance in a violent world—a picture about finding love in Hell”), not just because it reflects Lynch’s perception at the time that reality was transmogrifying into a channel-surfed nightmare of, well, Lynchian proportions (“the world was coming unglued then . . . the world was going insane,” he noted in his memoir, Room to Dream). Rather, it’s crucial because it ably portraits that which is so fundamental to this story: communication and conversation. Not just communication between its characters, but between the film and the perhaps lesser-known novel it is based upon. A visionary conversation—via the shared telling of this story—between David Lynch and one of the most important and underrated literary figures of the last half century: Barry fucking Gifford.
If you’re reading this magazine, then maybe you’ve passed through this particular corridor of American letters before. Still, it’s late and it’s dark, baby, so why not trace a path with your finger on this here map just to follow along so we don’t get lost. And mind that fried-chicken grease so the words don’t get smudged, dig? Okay, crank up that radio and let’s roll:
Barry Gifford was born in a Chicago hotel room in 1946 to a beauty queen mother and mobbed-up and distant father, the kind of entrance into the world that, had it not actually happened, he may well could have invented for one of his wayward characters. It’s a kind of explicitly American big bang, a heady mix of the gritty and the mythic from which Gifford’s early life crisscrossed from Chicago to south of the Mason-Dixon, traversing layers of vernacular and experience, living in hotel rooms with his mom, soaking in roughshod B movies of the 1950s on various antennaed TVs, picking up dialects equal parts seedy and revelatory, the jazz, the blues, the rock, the road. From there: college at the University of Missouri, the Air Force Reserve, an unrealized baseball career, journalism in the early days of Rolling Stone.
Keep that finger moving down the highway, you’re not gonna believe this part, peanut: Crafting over a dozen volumes of poetry of leathered, laconic lyricism. Penning the Beat bible Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. Founding the literary imprint and noir gateway drug Black Lizard in 1984, reprinting/rescuing such then-forgotten crimepulp gods as David Goodis, the Charleses (Willeford and Williams), and Jim Thompson from out-of-print obscurity and placing them in the hands of a new generation of crime fiction fans and authors. Releasing exceptional and foundational writing on film noir. And here we go, right here’s the direction we’re headed: creating one of the most profound bodies of postwar American literature in the form of the Roy stories (a kind of fictionalized funhouse mirror that reaches back to his youth and transmutes it into a hardscrabble coming-of-age tale) and especially the Sailor and Lula novels—works that when combined form a dialogue-jazzed, wolf-whistling tribute to and vivisection of American danger and American cool from the 1950s to right now.
Gifford’s entire career has been one in conversation with and about the American subterranean. Nowhere is that more evident than in the desperado existentialism and deep-fried soul of his Sailor and Lula books, a series of rockabillied Southern Gothic tales centered (mostly) on goodhearted ex-con bad boy Sailor Ripley and the love of his life, the deeper-than-she-seems cheesecake belle Lula Pace Fortune. Compressed within these works of hard-boiled minimalism and crackling bebop rhythms is a series of conversations (again, mostly) between Sail and Lula, conversations that simultaneously drive and detour the plots while also serving as a kind of ongoing Socratic dialogue between the two, all leather jacketed with the calamitous couple’s philosophies, dreams, memories, and obsessions. As a whole, these conversations form—like the scales of the movie-Sailor’s snakeskin jacket webbing together to form the physical embodiment of his “individuality and my belief in personal freedom”—a kind of prismatic weave, a rainbow through which their stories are told.
It’s in this way that Gifford’s works converse with that American subterranean which he is a monumental evangelist for, influence upon, and evolutionary force within, shaping the worlds of noir and crime fiction in ways both sublime and blunt-force that cannot be overstated. Inasmuch as his books chart the chats between his road-worn lovers to form an image of who they are, so does his literature form, in its dialogue with Americana, a unique vision of who we are, and of where we live—in a world that’s wild at heart and weird on top.
Okay, a couple loop-the-loops and roundelays aside, looks like we’re right on top of it now, kinda where we started from but also where we needed to be: a conversation between two masters of the American absurd, David Lynch and Barry Gifford. It’s all right there in that roadside radio scene, one that’s shared by book and movie alike. In the book, Lula simply flicks off the radio and she and Sailor chitchat about the decaying nature of the world as they continue on down the road. The film adapted and directed by Lynch, however, takes the scene and stretches it, heightens it, slurs it with the surreal, doing what all the best conversations do—revealing something new and true and wild.
The plot of Gifford’s novel Wild at Heart is, on its surface, one of relative pulp-fatalist simplicity: Sailor Ripley has done a short stint of jail time for manslaughter and, upon his release, breaks parole with his girlfriend, Lula Pace Fortune, and together they hit the road from Cape Fear, North Carolina, to California. On their tail are Lula’s overprotective mother, Marietta, and her boyfriend, Johnnie Farragut. Along the way, the paradoxically naive-yet-world-weary twentysomethings Sail and Lula encounter all manner of human grotesqueries and curiosities before breaking down in Big Tuna, Texas, and later breaking up.
Then there’s the plot of Lynch’s film adaptation of Wild at Heart, which Gifford described after his first viewing as “not boring.”
A lit match, a flame, an implosion. The opening credits fly.
David Lynch’s Wild at Heart is a film that begins in Hell and fights to claw its way out by the end. Like a kind of call-and-response, the movie is a conversational retort to the novel, which itself conversely begins with joy and descends into entropy and depression by its final page.
To experience both is to watch two great artists discuss love, sex, death, rebirth, rock ’n’ roll, cigarettes, childhood, dancing, road movies, trauma, freedom, violence, grief, noir, and America, all rolled into a series of short verbal vignettes—some created solely by Gifford, some created solely by Lynch, some created by one and then heightened by the other—that form a film marbled with fire and latticed with rainbow light.
We first meet Lynch’s Sailor and Lula in medias res—tornado-dropped right in the middle of their story in Cape Fear. No meet-cute, no dizzy arc of two hothouse motormouths falling in love. Instead, with one vertiginous swoop of the camera, we are thrown out of the fiery credits and hurly-burly into the snake pit of depravity that these lovers must witness, endure, participate in, and ultimately escape from by film’s end. And it all begins with an assassination attempt on Sailor, organized by an obsessed Marietta (Dern’s real-life mother, Diane Ladd)—with the emphasis on attempt. Whirlwinded by the physical and mental ferocity of Nic Cage, Sailor handily splits the assassin’s skull wide open in self-defense, while Lula screams in dismay and disgust. As a result, Sailor is jailed for nearly two years.
Thus we meet Sailor and Lula not as they fall in love, but as their love falls into endangerment—the moment when the whole world seems a threat to that which is most precious to them.
“Well, we’re really out in the middle of it now, ain’t we?”
It’s a question Lula asks as Sail pilots her Thunderbird into the desert dark. Behind them, the past burns in a bloodied red swirl of taillights swallowed by an ink-black night; before them, the road yawns onward into that same dust-deviled dark. As the sinuously serpentine Stratocaster slink of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” weaves around their words, Sailor makes a confession to Lula: before he knew her, he used to be a driver for local mobster Marcello Santos (J. E. Freeman). Further, on the night Lula’s father Clyde died in a mysterious house fire, Sailor painfully admits he drove Marcello to a home that, minutes later, burned down. Through a typically complicated—typically Lynchian—series of noir-adjacent convolutions, Sailor realizes and admits that he unknowingly chauffeured the executioner of Lula’s father. With the same big-hearted openness with which she and Sailor share every part of their lives with one another, Lula accepts his confession with love, but also a newfound adult sorrow that hadn’t etched itself upon her beautiful face before.
“It’s just shocking sometimes when things aren’t what you thought they were,” she sighs.
Throughout Sailor’s midnight confession, Lynch cuts back and forth between it and its antithesis, a scene in which Marietta and her long-suffering boyfriend, Johnnie Farragut (Harry Dean Stanton), discuss their plans to reclaim Lula from Sailor. Farragut grudgingly agrees to help, but insists Marietta be honest with him—is her occasional paramour Marcello Santos involved in the chase? Marietta stiffens, her eyes stormy, dark orbs, and she lies, denying that she asked Marcello for help as well. Lies, and denies that Marcello is out there, organizing hits on both Sailor and Farragut (whom Marcello suspects of knowing too much about Clyde’s death). Though passionate, theirs is a relationship based on a foundation of dishonesty and selfishness, unlike the selfless honesty that flows between Lula and Sailor. A typical but ingenious bit of Lynchian doubling: two couples, two brunet men and two blonde women, but only one pair forged in honesty and understanding.
Both Sailor’s confession and Marietta’s anti-confession are wholly invented by the director for the film, but are spoken in Gifford’s storytelling accent, a kind of conversation between scenes and artists simultaneously. Lynch moves Gifford’s subtextual undercurrents to the amphetamined sway of his film’s surface, while also stressing what is so precious, and different, about Sailor and Lula from everyone else, and why their precious love must be protected, and what it must be protected from.
As Sail and Lula continue on into the night, they find the road dotted with the ellipses of disaster—clothes, metal wreckage, glass, all increasingly strewn about the highway. Soon, an overturned car falls in the path of their high beams. The pair—already shaken by Sailor’s admission—watches helplessly as a single survivor emerges from the accordioned metal carnage. The Girl (Sherilyn Fenn) wanders dazed in the desert night, her porcelain face cracked and painted red with gore-chunked blood, forebodingly muttering that “my mother’s gonna kill me.” She then collapses in the sand as Sailor and Lula watch, and dies right there.
Despite the charmed nature of their post-jail reunion—a staccato series of short stories in which Sail and Lula party at bars and clubs, or hold delightfully meandering late-night chats about love and smokes and family and life, or share so much in their easy way (at one point a comfortable and secure Lula admits to being raped as a child to a compassionate, attentive Sailor; elsewhere, Sail regales Lula with tales of his sexual conquests, which engenders not her jealousy but instead her extraordinary arousal), or dance against the twilight, or fuck unquenchably—this beautiful broken doll lies in the sand before them like a reminder of the head-cracked assassin who was the world’s first threat to their love, like a horrid memory surfacing in a fantasy, reminding them that all dreams must come to an end.
“Well, I know it ain’t exactly the Emerald City,” Sailor mutters in a hound-dog drawl patterned after his beloved Elvis Presley. The morning after the wreck and his confession, he and Lula find themselves in a sun-cooked and sky-hammered shitkicker Hell—the Podunk and tumbleweeded inferno of Big Tuna, Texas. A place about as far from their dreams of life in La-La Land as is spiritually, if not physically, possible. They are out of money, out of gas, and, though they don’t know it yet, almost out of time.
David Lynch had a problem.
While he fell intensely in love with Barry Gifford’s then-unpublished Wild at Heart manuscript in early 1990—so much so that he abandoned plans for a vacation and added the film’s production schedule atop that of his television megahit Twin Peaks—he found Gifford’s ending to be dispiriting and depressing. In it, Lula and Sailor are holed up in the big nowhere of a dead-end Texas town, where she reveals that she’s pregnant and increasingly despondent about the encroaching realities of their situation. Sailor, desperate to provide for his woman and unborn child, falls in with a dead-eyed killer named Bobby Peru (“like the country”) and together they rob a local feed store. In the process Peru is killed by local law and Sailor arrested and given a decade of jail time. Upon his release and reunion with Lula, and introduction to their son, Pace, Sailor feels he doesn’t belong in this family unit and leaves them both in a gut-punch bit of classic noir fatalism.
Not knowing that Gifford was already hard at work writing Sailor and Lula’s reunion in additional installments of their saga, Lynch set himself to giving these bar-crossed lovers the happy ending he felt their dreams deserved. To do so would require changing the conversation that is Wild at Heart, redirecting it from the fusion of Giffordesque artpulp and Lynchian surrealism it had begun as and instead driving it down a different—and very yellow—road entirely, to a place where evil is defeated, where hope is rewarded, and where the wild at heart fight for their dreams and win.
David Lynch was off to meet the Wizard.
A remarkable thing about Wild at Heart: Lynch’s decision to merge the fuck-noir surrealistic psychodrama of his vision of Gifford’s novel with the musical-fantasy magic of Victor Fleming’s 1939 The Wizard of Oz is, on paper, such an atomically incongruent unification of aesthetics that the resultant film should have been an incomprehensible mush of babbled pop culture references. Instead, Lynch’s Wild at Heart becomes a frenzied and freewheeling conversation not just between his work and Gifford’s, but between two opposing pillars of uniquely American mythology (noir and Oz), finding a strange common language—both stories are road thrillers of a sort, both about heroes wishing to escape an evil witch and find happiness over the rainbow.
By allowing the two works to speak with one another, each highlights aspects of the other, with Heart bringing out the darkness in Oz, and Oz underlining so many of Heart’s deeper meanings that might otherwise have been lost beneath its ever-shifting road-movie surface. It’s a union most evident in the film’s repeatedly prolonged and graphic sex scenes. Throughout the film’s first hour, as Sail and Lula burn a path across the American South, they stop nightly at hotels to wantonly fuck with bed-cratering abandon. Each additional sex scene is longer than the one before, and on first viewing they could be read—and were, by many critics at the time—as nothing but superficial surface, requisite sex commiserate with the film’s equally over-the-top violence.
But closer viewings reveal something deeper, more meaningful. Each sex scene between Sailor and Lula, their bodies incurving and twisting and wrapping around one another in a wordless and moaning myriad of combinations, is hazed in a different color. Their first sex scene is steeped in a bloodied and visceral red. Their second night is caressed in a warm and gentle yellow gel. Their third is bathed in an almost otherworldly pink. Their final sex scene, occurring just before their roadside declarations of love in the face of radio-stationed Hell, runs through a whole spectrum of color—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple-pink. Using the visual cinegrammar of his beloved Wizard of Oz, Lynch shows Sailor and Lula’s sex as a kind of precious intimacy, a physical conversation to mirror their verbal union. Each scene adds a different color of the rainbow into their world, as if to suggest that the “somewhere over the rainbow” they seek is not in California, not in Cape Fear, not on the road . . . it’s not anywhere, really. It’s wherever they find themselves together.
Or, as Lula puts it to Sailor in her own very unique way, that special Lynchian Giffordese: “You just take me right over the rainbow. It’s like your cock is talkin’ to me with a voice all its own.”
While in Gifford’s novel Marietta Fortune is a somewhat sympathetic figure, Lynch’s film transforms her into an outright villain, using the iconography of The Wizard of Oz to cast her as Wild at Heart’s Wicked Witch of the West. Like the film’s outrageous sex scenes, it’s a decision that initially seems a superficial one, reducing Marietta from a flesh-and-blood character into a simple archetype, but it allows Lynch to heighten and emphasize his vision of the movie as “a picture about finding love in Hell.” In the novel, our duo encounters an escalating series of obstacles and eventually disintegrates as a couple, and while that serves Gifford’s excellent noir-tinged tale rather well, the nature of Lynch’s frenetic film is such that it requires a representative face for all the challenges to Sailor and Lula’s love.
That face is not the sickly green visage of Oz’s Wicked Witch, but rather the red lipstick–slathered appearance of Marietta. Her every decision as the film’s villain sets forces in opposition to the young lovers—from her affair with Marcello Santos leading to Clyde Fortune’s death, to her multiple hits on Sailor, driving the young man to murder and to break parole on the run with Lula, leaving the two finally broken-down and without hope in the Hell of Big Tuna and prey to monsters like the stump-toothed Bobby Peru (a gleefully perverse Willem Dafoe). By centralizing her as the film’s source of wickedness (at one point Lula even imagines Marietta chasing her Thunderbird on a broomstick), Lynch gives Sailor and Lula’s love a malevolence to overcome.
Using Oz’s schismatic conversation between Good and Evil, the existence of a Wicked Witch in Wild at Heart dictates that there must be a counterforce, a Good Witch, one who represents what is magic and good and wild at heart in the world. All the layering of Oz’s aesthetics and tropes into Lynch’s film—the rainbows, the musical numbers (Sail gets off two great Elvis songs), the malformed, fantasial monstrosity of the villains, the infinite yellow-lined road—leads to Lynch being able to insert a magical entity, a deus ex Lychina, to upend the story and give it the ending he wanted, and one that the characters needed.
It’s a moment of pure cinemagic—Sailor has left Lula and Pace (Glenn Walker Harris Jr.) and he drifts into an industrial wasteland, where he’s beaten by nomadic bikers. As he lies dead center in an unending road in a state of dubious consciousness, he’s bathed in rich magenta light, not dissimilar to that which shined upon him and Lula on that roadside so many years before. Within that light floats the Good Witch (Sheryl Lee), straight out of Oz and into Lynch’s film, where she (and Oz) act as a kind of medium, a final means of communication between Barry Gifford and David Lynch, with Sailor speaking for Gifford’s noirish story, and the Good Witch for Lynch’s surrealistically hopeful film.
Sailor lists all the character defects that compose his noir archetype—“I’m a robber and a manslaughterer. And I haven’t had any parental guidance”—as reasons why he’s no good for Lula and Pace. When he finally mutters that he’s too wild at heart for his family, the Good Witch speaks in words Lynch has expressed in infinite combinations throughout his interviews, films, and song lyrics: “If you are truly wild at heart, you’ll fight for your dreams. Don’t turn away from love, Sailor.”
Moments later, the Good Witch is gone, as is Marietta, who disappears from her distant home in a screaming plume of smoke. But what remains—a reunited Sailor, Lula, and Pace, all bound together by Sailor’s impromptu rendition of “Love Me Tender” as the sun sets, as if they’ve finally found their own personal radio station to listen to as the world burns, one that finally plays what they want to hear—is a film, is a novel, is a story, is a conversation, that lingers on. 
Travis Woods lives and writes in Los Angeles. As a teen, he stole the Corvette of a WBO world heavyweight boxing champion. He has a dog and a tattoo of Elliott Gould smoking. Bob Dylan once clapped him on the back and whispered something incomprehensible. He always keeps a Jim Thompson paperback in his back pocket and a karambit knife in his boot. These are the only interesting things about him.
Illustration: Olivier Courbet.