Don’t Love Me Tender: Music in David Lynch’s Wild At Heart

Perhaps the most common attribute of anything described as “Lynchian” is a contrast between diametrically opposed things: reality and fantasy, light and darkness, good and evil etc.. What Lynch’s work does differentlly than anything else described as “Lynchian,” other than being the real thing, is his belief that these things are not antithetical but instead synergistically connected. This idea is made clear in Lynch’s use of music throughout Wild at Heart as it simultaneously conveys a nostalgic yearning for the conservative romantic values of the fifties while also acknowledging its compatibility with a modern free and wild life, thus, asserting that love is at its truest when it is at its most impure.

Wild At Heart features a romance that on the surface is incredibly unconventional and that could be colloquially described as “freaky.” However, Lynch paints the wild couple of Lula and Sailor with strokes of conventional romance, most notably with the choice of music in the film. In one of the most memorable sequences of the film Sailor interrupts dancing at a hard rock club to perform Elvis Presley’s  Love Me to Lula. This sweet display of affection is subsequent to an act of violence committed by Sailor and the speed metal song Slaughterhouse by Powermad. During the sequence, leather dressed metal heads fawn over Sailor and scream like teenage girls in the audience at the Ed Sullivan show. In this scene Lynch melds two cultures from two different times, forcing the audience to see the ways that these can coexist and passing no moral judgement to either. In a featurette for the film Lynch states “In life you never what’s going to come along next…there are very tender moments and then there’s very violent moments… confusion and despair, and then suddenly you’re in love… there’s gotta be room for all of these things in a film” (Lynch). Lynch taps into this “confusion and despair” with Sailor’s “tender moment” and its juxtaposition of the lovey-dovey-rockabilly music of Elvis against the violence and darkness of a hard metal club. In the same featurette Lynch describes Wild At Heart as “a love story that barrels along a strange highway through the twisted modern world.” Despite their own twistedness, Lynch ascribes that word to the modern world and not the characters. Perhaps explaining the nostalgic attributes of Sailor and Lula’s innocent expressions of love that play against the otherwise “twisted” parts of their characters. Sailor and Lula’s love is true because it is not innocent.

The next time a musical sequence like the one previously mentioned occurs is at the end of the film, when in a explosion of romance Sailor runs to Lula after abandoning her and their son, and finally sings Love Me Tender, by Elvis to her— a song he makes a vow earlier in the film to only sing to the woman he marries. By the time this sequence wraps up the film, Lula and Sailor have achieved a conventional life despite their unconventional circumstances. They are back together, Lula domesticated by the birth of their child, Sailor reformed by his time spent in prison. According to both the purity of the fifties and the hedonism of modern times there is something wrong about their lives. When Sailor momentarily abandons Lula and his son he acknowledges how unorthodox their life has become compared to their character by saying “It's what makes sense is all,” However, when Sailor runs back to lula and sings a song from the fifties to her , he accepts that there is no barrier between these things.  In her article “Do The Wrong Thing: David Lynch’s Perverse Style”  Sharon Willis critiques the film by saying “A familiar nostalgia for the fifties and the sixties is almost ambient, and serves to overdetermined both images and narrative” (Willis 156). Willis is right to acknowledge the pervasiveness of the aesthetics of nostalgia in the film but ignores that this “ambient” “nostalgia” is what communicates the arc of conflicting values that exist in Sailor and Lula’s romance. The use of fifties pop music while sometimes seemingly comedic or surreal is sincere to the story of the characters.

Deep within the music of the Wild at Heart is a story of how values change over time. We often see these values as conflicting and acceptance of either or as indicative of some type of moral adjudication. David Lynch, however, does not. Instead through his use of music he makes the case that love, like anything else in life, is complicated by the times we live in but ultimately made stronger by the fact that it exists no matter what. When Sailor is knocked out by a group of street kids and hallucinates seeing the good witch of the north, he tells her “But I'm wild at heart.” She responds “If you truly are wild at heart, you'll fight for your dreams. Don't turn away from love, Sailor.” It is the thesis of the film that to love in this day in age is to be wild at heart.