Wild at Heart

WILD AT HEART (1990). Barry Gifford's neopulp novel inspired this controversial cult film from director David Lynch. A star-crossed couple on the lam (Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern) is in for the most gruesome ride of their lives when they encounter a handful of bizarre -- and perhaps murderous -- strangers (played by the likes of Sheryl Lee and Willem Dafoe). (124 mins)

Some of the themes:

Elvis as:

Rebellious prototype
Camp humor
Nostalgia for the 50’s

Baudrillard says of the 50’s “ the real high spot for the US (‘when things were going on’) and you can still feel the nostalgia for those years, for the ecstasy of power, when power still held power.”

“To ridicule and to celebrate are reversible and interchangeable”

Flame as symbol of rebellion (like Badlands)

Again there is the impetus to start a family (like True Romance), but on the road, they are actually sexy and sensual

Like other post-modern road films the journey gets diluted, restricted, circumscribed, and minimized.

Dream-like ending- surrealist strategy of not distinguishing between the dream world and the real world (making freams real)

In the end, the car is actually stuck in traffic- not moving.

Traditional family represents stasis and being on the run turns them into a dangerous, mobile pair.

True Romance

TRUE ROMANCE (1993). In this darkly comic web of crime, murder and mayhem from writer Quentin Tarantino and director Tony Scott, novice prostitute Alabama Whitman (Patricia Arquette) and her lover, comic book store clerk Clarence Worley (Christian Slater), become a Bonnie and Clyde for the 1990s. When Clarence kills Alabama's pimp, the newlyweds ride off into the sunset -- with $5 million worth of cocaine in a suitcase and the police and the mob on their trail. (123 mins)

Here are a couple of things that came up during the discussion:

*One of the most interesting things about True Romance is that despite it being a film about two supposed rebels, what we see in the end is a picture-perfect family -- mom, dad, and baby living happily ever after on a beach somewhere. But then again, the narration (the voice of Alabama) tells the viewer that if Clarence had died in the shoot out, "things would have pretty much turned out the same." This echoes her blasé introductory voice over in the opening scene.

* Despite being a road film, the two protagonists (and thus we) aren't seen a lot on the open road. But it still feels like a "road movie" through and through, especially if you consider some of the symbolism of the road: it's a place on which this good-natured couple is forced to traverse after leaving their cozy, safe (if not somewhat stagnant) lives in Detroit; it's where they arguably mature and come of age as they travel through LA, a city of endless intertwined freeways; and it represents the means to their paradise -- they get off the road and settle into their lives on the beach, a kind of paradise, as we see in the final scene.

*The issue of Clarence's moral character came up too: Was he an innocent comic book-loving nice guy who found himself needing to defend his wife's honor and was in fact forced into a life of violence? Or was he always a bit of a rebel who just hadn't found his cause? One could argue that Alabama became his cause, and he did, after all.