[music, playing, a-chirping sound plays] And welcome. To pick six movies. The podcast for every season. We pick eight themes, then we pick six movies related to that theme, then we pick one of those movies and give you some behind the scenes facts and stories about how and why the movie was made and then a full review to see if the movie has been done. Then we repeat that process five more times every two weeks for a total of six picked movies. Hence the title of this podcast Pick Six Movies.
I'm Chad Cooper, one of your hosts, and I will soon be joined by my lifelong friend and co-host, mr Bo Randolph. This season's theme is Holiday Road, where we're discussing road trip movies, and this is the season finale, where we're going back for a heaping second helping of Nicholas Cage. This time he's in a David Lynch movie, meaning that things are going to be weird on top of crazy inside a hurricane of insanity.
And what movie is capable of delivering such a force of unpredictable bat shittery while none other than Wild at Heart, easily one of the most romantically disturbing movies I've ever seen? If you've never seen Wild at Heart, that's okay. We'll take you by the hand and service your guide through Weirdsville Lynch, sa.
Let's say we get Mr Bo Randolph in here to set up this fever dream of a movie with a pleasant, albeit brief, history of the life of David Lynch and one of his most lynchian pieces of cinema, wild at Heart. Then we'll talk about all of the totally bonkers stuff crammed into this movie and there is a lot of it, bo take it away the End.
Given that we have already broken our tradition of doing only bad movies this season on Pixx Movies, it seems only right we should break another. Rather than wait until the end to hear from resident, deceased film critic, roger Ebert, let's hear from him right off the bat. But first a little backstory. In 1990, the subject of this episode, wild at Heart showed up at the Cannes Film Festival.
It was coming in hot, like we just finished the edit on this thing yesterday hot and yet it would go on to win the Palm D'Or, the grand prize for films it can. When David Lynch climbed the podium to accept the award, there was a standing ovation. There was also a healthy round of booing and jeering. With that in mind, let's get to Ebert. At the end of both Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart I was angry, he said, as if a clever con man had tried to put one over on me. My taste is in the minority.
Blue Velvet was hailed as one of the best films of the decade. Lynch's Twin Peaks is a cult hit on television. Now comes Wild at Heart, which won the Palm D'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival. Two great cheers and many booze. Some of the latter from me. There is something repulsive and manipulative about it and even its best scenes have the flavor of a kid in the schoolyard trying to show you pictures you don't feel like looking at.
It's a road picture with a 1950s T-Bird convertible as the chariot and lots of throwaway gags about Ripley's snake skin jacket his quote personal symbol of individuality. End quote Cage does a conscious imitation of Presley in all of his dialogue and even bursts into song a couple of times. I've seen the movie twice now. I liked it less. The second time you have to hand it to Ebert. He knew what he liked and what he didn't. And Ebert rarely liked Lynch.
He famously hated Blue Velvet and certainly Dune. When reviewing Lost Highway, lynch's bizarre take on the OJ trial, ebert asked the rhetorical question is the joke on us? And that's not the worst question to ask when talking about David Lynch. His films can be challenging to say the least, but he's more curious because of other films in his catalog.
The Elephant man from 1981 was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars and Lynch for Best Director, and it plays straight, not unlike the Straight Story, a film in which elderly lead actor Richard Farnsworth was nominated for an Oscar, and Lynch was nominated for numerous awards for his direction. It's a bit maudlin, but nothing that could be classified as surreal. Of that one, ebert said, quote the first time I saw the Straight Story I focused on the foreground and liked it.
The second time I focused on the background too and loved it. The point is, david Lynch knows how to make a so-called normal movie. He simply chooses not to. In most cases he is, I would argue, an artist and as such his art is not for everyone. In fact, sometimes it seems like he goes out of his way to be off-putting, but that's part of what makes Lynch Lynch. But where did this screwball sensibility come from? Some hippie commune? Is he, gasp? Perhaps European?
Actually, lynch was born in Missoula, montana, his folk, successful but not artistic per se. His father worked as a scientist for the Department of Agriculture and his mother was an English language tutor. He was even Presbyterian. A few years after Lynch was born, he moved to the even less artsy-fartsy land of Idaho With his father's job. The family was on the move a lot Washington State, north Carolina, back to Idaho, then Virginia.
Of this upbringing, lynch said my childhood was elegant homes, tree-lined streets, the milkman building, backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees, middle America as it's supposed to be. But on the cherry tree there's this pitch using out some black, some yellow and millions of red ants crawling all over it. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath.
Because I grew up in a perfect world, other things were a contrast. He was an eagle scout and spent his 15th birthday in a Boy Scout uniform watching the inauguration of John F Kennedy. While he was a bright kid, he had little interest in school. Of that, lynch commented for me back then. School was a crime against young people. It destroyed the seeds of liberty. The teachers didn't encourage knowledge or a positive attitude. Now we get to the artistic bent of David Lynch.
From early goings he showed an interest in painting and wanted to pursue it as a career. Encouraged by a Virginia friend of his father's who was a professional artist, he tried a couple of art schools but found no home there. He wasn't challenged or inspired, and so Lynch took off with a friend to travel around Europe. They had plans to train with an artist in Salzburg but found out he wasn't available when they arrived.
Disillusioned by this Wally, world-like rebuff, lynch and his pal returned to America. After only two weeks he landed in Philadelphia where he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. There he found a community and inspiration and a girlfriend, peggy Reavy, with whom he got up to the devil's business and so was sired Jennifer Lynch. David did the proper thing and married Peggy.
They bought a 12 room house for $3,500 in Philly, which sounds crazy until you hear that it was in a very bad neighborhood, like people getting shot and the house being broken into repeatedly bad. But if you want to trace the origins of Lynch's aesthetic, this is a pretty good place to start that journey. Married, a baby, on the way, pursuing an art life and surrounded by the threat of violence and death, he made ends meet by printing engravings, but the artistic itch was always there.
He started putting out feelers for an animator. Having been seized with the idea of seeing his paintings come to life and move, he finally bought his own cheap 16 millimeter camera and produced a short film called Six Men Getting Sick. It tied for first prize in the school he was attending and he was commissioned to do an art installation for $1,000. He bought a camera of his own, did some shooting, but when it came time to deliver, he realized the animation he created was garbage.
Thanks to a bum lens on this new camera, the guy who hired him, in a fit of 60s era good vibes, told him hey, take the leftover money, man, and just make something interesting. And so he did. The alphabet was made in 1968. It was a blend of animation and live action in which a girl, played by Lynch's wife, peggy, scenes the alphabet to a series of pictures of horses and then dies by bleeding to death suddenly in bed.
Also, his daughter's crying was recorded and distorted for even more of an unsettling effect and played behind the film. When asked about his inspiration for this nightmare, lynch said Peggy's niece was having a bad dream one night and was saying the alphabet in her sleep in a tormented way. So that's sort of what started the alphabet going. The rest of it was just subconscious. Ah, there you have it, the subconscious, truly the key to Lynch's career as an artist.
Let that it go, baby, and see what comes out the other side. He tried his hand at some other shorts experimental, to be sure, but good. And in 1971, he packed up the family and moved to Hollywood where he studied at the AFI Conservatory. There he started work on a short called Garden Back but got pissed off about all the instructors telling him to lengthen it and change dialogue.
He was actually about to quit the school when one instructor intervened and said Lynch was one of their best students and too good to just up and quit. Lynch said he would stay if all the instructors at the conservatory could keep their filthy mitts off. Whatever it was he was gonna make, and so a racer head was born. It took years for this movie to be made. Lynch lived off grants for the film, loans from friends and a paper route he ran.
At the same time he and Peggy split up, but it seemed like it was a pleasant enough divorce, as those things go. He remarried not long after, taking up with the sister of the guy he went to Europe with and kept after a racer head. It was finally completed in 1976. The film is the story of a guy named Henry, played by Lynch mainstay Jack Nance, who is tormented when his wife has a deformed baby and leaves it in his care.
Lynch called it my Philadelphia story, referencing his life there, with Peggy and Jennifer and the people being shot down the road. It's bizarre, surreal, filled with imagery that's inexplicable and yet haunting. There is something engaging about a racer head, even as it defies true understanding. Stanley Kubrick, director of 2001 and the Shining maybe you've heard of him called it one of his favorite movies and is widely considered a landmark in cult cinema.
The film got Lynch some notoriety, not the least from a guy named Stuart Cornfield, an executive producer from Mel Brooks, director of Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles Maybe you've heard of him too. Lynch wanted to make a movie about a three-foot guy with red hair and something to do with electricity called Ronnie Rocket, but Cornfield pointed out that Ronnie Rocket sounded like another cult movie and maybe Lynch would like to move up to the big league.
Cornfield said the words the elephant man and Lynch said I'm in. Before he was hired, though, mel Brooks had to watch a racer head. Here's the thing people who make movies love David Lynch. He's like a comics comic or a musicians musician. Even Steven Spielberg cast David Lynch in his recent movie, the Fablemen's, so when Brooks saw the movie, he came out of the screening, embraced Lynch and said you're a bad man, I love you, you're in. As mentioned before, the elephant man is very mainstream.
It's also very good. It was nominated for eight Oscars and it put Lynch on the map as a big time director. You may have heard the story about David Lynch being offered return of the Jedi, and the elephant man is why it might make sense for him to get such an offer. But Lynch thought return of the Jedi was a mess of a script and he isn't totally wrong about that and so he decided instead to do his own space opera, an adaptation of Frank Herbert's sci-fi political epic Dune.
It's like he looked at Return of the Jedi and said I can make a bigger mess than that. Dune had eluded adaptation for almost 20 years. The guy who did another cult movie, el Topo, alejandro Yodorovsky, was famously going to do an adaptation before that fell apart and you should absolutely watch the documentary Yodorovsky's Dune if you've never seen it for more on that. But Lynch had a hot hand, but his version and that of the studio were very different.
Because of notes, he said he began to make a series of compromises along the way that left him feeling a little uneasy about the quality of the film. That uneasiness turned to outright frustration when he was told to cut the movie down to two hours from three and a half, which meant lopping off an hour in change and he was eventually shut out of the editing room completely. The movie is a fascinating fiasco, but it was both commercially and critically unsuccessful.
Not surprising then that a guy like Lynch decided he was done with big studio movies for a while. Side note there is an extended cut of Dune that was released for TV, adding back an hour of runtime and some new narration. But Lynch hated that cut so much he did the old Alan Smithy nameswap as director thing and also changed the writing credit to Judas Booth, tipping his hat to two famous betrayers. When he signed the deal for Dune, lynch also contracted to do two other movies for the producer.
One would be a never-developed sequel to Dune, assuming that that was going to be a big hit, and the other was a personal film, a movie called Blue Velvet. Blue Velvet is maybe the purest example on film of Lynch's theme of the darkness lurking behind small town sweetness. The main character, jeffrey, played by Kyle McLaughlin, finds a severed ear and becomes embroiled in a mystery with his would-be girlfriend, portrayed by a very young Laura Dern.
He discovers Dorothy, a lounge singer played by Isabella Rossellini, and the man who has kidnapped her husband and child, frank Booth, played with wild energy by Dennis Hopper. It's dark and twisted and horrifying and was of course hated by Roger Ebert and loved by almost everyone else. In fact, blue Velvet became Lynch's second best director nomination at that year's Oscars.
This run carried Lynch into the 90s, when he would meet TV producer Mark Frost, who was probably best known for Hill Street Blues. The two of them conspired on a couple of failed projects before hitting on the idea of a girl washing up on a rocky shore wrapped in plastic found in the Pacific Northwest. Abc picked the show up and Lynch and Frost created a landmark of television part satire, part thriller, part Lynchian weirdness. It was, of course Twin Peaks.
The question who killed Laura Palmer became something of a cultural touchstone. Whether you had seen the show or not, you knew about the log lady and Agent Dale Cooper and his love of coffee and pie. The tale of Twin Peaks is its own twisted tale, but suffice to say that ABC was putting a lot of pressure on Lynch and Mark Frost to reveal the killer of Laura Palmer, which was decidedly not the point of the show.
But Lynch gave in all the while removing himself further from the program due to his disillusionment with working with the ABC executives. It was during this time he was given a book by a friend of his who wanted Lynch's take on the material that he was thinking of producing or maybe even directing. Lynch asked what if I read it and wanna do it myself? His pal told him to go ahead and make it. Then the book was, of course, wild at Heart, the story of Sailor and Lula.
The author was a man named Barry Gifford who had grown up with a father and organized crime, and, if you're curious about that, he has a whole series of autobiographical works called the Roy Stories. Wild at Heart is only the first of a series of novels about Sailor and Lula, though the first novel ends with the break-up scene at the end of the film, without any of the Wizard of Oz stuff to go along with it.
Lynch loved the book, though, and the violence and road trip elements really spoke to him. Lynch called it just exactly the right thing at the right time. He fell in love with the book after finishing the pilot for Twin Peaks. At the same time, two other projects got caught up in a mess when his usual studio, the DeLorentis Entertainment Group, got gobbled up by Carol Coe. The downside was this picture about finding love in hell was slated to start shooting in two weeks.
From the time all this production mess was resolved, which meant Lynch had to write the script in a week and get the party started. To get the movie made, the first draft was deemed too dark and Lynch added a happy ending and some nods to the Wizard of Oz. By his own admission, a rebel with a dream of the Wizard of Oz is kinda like a beautiful thing, and for the rebel Sailor, he had only one choice Nicolas Cage.
We've talked at length about Cage before, but the character of Sailor may be the closest to Cage's daring sense of cinematic adventure of any of his roles. He is of course channeling Elvis Presley and even sings the Elvis songs himself or the soundtrack. Cage also brought to the set the Snake Skin jacket, something he pitched to Lynch, who naturally ran with it.
In adapting the book, lynch invented some new characters, including the murderous middleman, mr Reindeer, and the scene in which Twin Peaks alum Sherilyn Finn is seen as a car crash victim. But the movie lives and dies by the relationship between Cage's Sailor and Lula, as played by Laura Dern. She'd worked with Lynch before, on Blue Velvet, you may recall, and this time around she'd also be working with her mother, diane Ladd, who plays Marietta Fortune in the film, her mother in the movie.
To create a bond, though, between Sailor and Lula, cage and Dern went on a road trip of their own, driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas for a weekend trip, a way for the pair to explore their characters. What emerged from the trip was a sense that Sailor and Lula were essentially one person compliments to each other. Where Sailor was raw and overly masculine, lula is the sexual feminine side.
And then the movie is filled out by Lynch regulars Harry Dean Stanton as the hapless detective, johnny Farragut, grace Zabrisky as Juana, one of a trio of Hitman that includes David Patrick Kelly as Drop Shadow, isabella Rossellini as Perdita, the daughter of Juana, crispin Glover, in an amazing cameo, as Cousin Dell, and Willem Defoe in a career sleazy performance as the Hitman, and Ledge Bobby Peru.
The movie was given a $10 million budget, and Lynch took the show on the road, filming in New Orleans and LA. By all accounts, lynch runs a good set, and most of the actors he works with return for more. Jack Nance, he of Eraser Head fame, still returns in Wild at Heart as a man with a story about a dog.
The end result was edited, however, shaving a couple of scenes that were deemed too erotic, including one in which Dern tells Cage to take a bite of Lula while sitting on his face and another where she orgasms while talking about being eviscerated by an animal. You know Lynch stuff. Also, some of the violence was trimmed, including the scene in which Harry Dean Stanton is tortured and another where Bobby Peru meets his unlikely end. And because it was so violent, test screenings were bad.
At the first screening, 80 people left after the torture scene with Harry Dean Stanton. That was eventually cut, but only after 100 walked out at the second screening. And then came Cannes, where Roger Ebert led some jeers, but Lynch took home the palm door anyways.
After the buzz around the film grew, author Barry Gifford, who would later partner with Lynch to write Lost Highway, recalls being asked by reporters how he felt about the movie, clearly angling for the writer to stamp his feet about Lynch's changes Instead, gifford said this is wonderful, it's like a big, dark musical comedy.
When it hit theaters in the US, the movie nabbed about $15 million domestically, which isn't much, but it covered the budget, and critics were of course split, some saying it was genius. Others like Ebert, saying Lynch veered into territory where his characters became quote so cartoony. One is prone to address him more as theorist than director. Re-evaluations have been kind to the movie, though, and I would argue that this represents Lynch at his most daring and creative.
A preview has Lynch set off on one of his most fascinating periods of creativity, including Lost Highway, mulholland Drive and what I argue is his best film, twin Peaks. Firewalk with Me. But that, ladies and gentlemen, is a tale for another day. Now let's get chat out a PD Corrational Institute and take one more road trip into a whirlwind of Elvis Oz and some incredible cage.
Ladies and gentlemen, sailors and lulas, it's 1990s, wild at heart, music, and welcome back to another episode of Pick Six Movies. My name is Beau. I am one of your hosts on this road trip in the hell.
With me, as ever is the lula to my sailor.
And where's always an outfit that shows off his nipples.
Yes, the beloved Chad Cooper, they're perky.
They point up and they say hello, yeah, that's what my daddy always said he liked.
I'm very interested in discussing this movie with you because it is truly unlike anything we have ever discussed on this podcast and we have reviewed a lot of movies. I feel that Wild at Heart is, dare I say, more artistic than any film we've ever reviewed. Yes, I dare do say that, beau.
Yeah, I think that's accurate, but we've never talked about David Lynch to this degree Not directly and Lynch is somebody that can absolutely do a line drive down the middle if he wants to like straight story and even a lot of Twin Peaks is not as weird as people give a credit for until you get into like that third season, that and straight story and Elephant man and he's done some documentaries and things like that but he's also a first-class artistic weirdo.
Absolutely. This movie is like a club that Stefan would describe on SNL Weekend Update. This movie's got it all Nicholas Cage, laura Dern, the Wicked Witch of the West, underwear, cockroaches, manslaughter, obese ladies in lingerie, rape, bad oral hygiene, exploding heads and pantyhose, abortion, an old man with a vacuum cleaner, elvis impressions, voodoo, leg braces, car crashes, isabella Rosalini's carpet vomit, homophobia, silver dollars and lap dances while you shit.
All of that is 100% accurate.
And that's not all. There was so much more that I could have added to that.
Every bit of that's in here. None of that is an exaggeration. All of those things are included in this movie, which is sort of what makes it wonderful. Like I get why people don't like this version of Lynch.
I don't think I liked this movie. I get that. You know what this movie reminded me of. It reminded me of that time that you and I and a few of the other vagrants that we grew up with, when we went to the local county fair in Bug Tussle, america, right, and there was a trailer that said you could come in and you could see these Haitian pygmies or something like this, and we were like just idiot teenagers and we were like, oh my God, we totally got to do this.
So we paid our two bucks, went in this trailer and then they pulled back this curtain to show these two little people that played a guitar and started howling music and it went from this is going to be entertaining and fun to this is one of the most disturbingly sad things that I will remember for the rest of my life.
Yeah, that's how I feel about Wild at Heart, because when you hear about it on the surface of a movie with Elvis impressions and Wizard of Oz imagery and it's David Lynch being wacky and goofy and you're like this will be a pretty good time and seriously, 60 seconds into the film, it's like oh no that's the thing about this movie is it's a real roller coaster ride for me.
I don't dispute that at all. Like you said, it begins with this scene of incredible violence and then gets kind of goofy and then gets really dark and sexually disturbing and then it gets goofy again and then it gets super violent again and then it just gets weird and then goofy again and it goes all over the place.
But that's I think, if I'm defending Lynch and I kind of am in this situation, it follows the idea of a road trip with a lot of destinations along the way and I think you end up in a happy place, but along the way you're going to see some really sick shit.
It had been decades since you or I had seen this movie and I can take. For some reason in my head, this movie got mashed up with true romance, oh yeah, and the movies kind of follow some of the same beats, and true romance came out, I think, three years after this and it just made me wonder if Tarantino was directly influenced by this movie when writing true romance. I wouldn't be surprised.
As I said in the introduction, lynch tends to be the director that a lot of directors love. Yeah, because he kind of puts it all on the field.
I also got this movie a little bit mashed up with Raising Arizona. Not the plot of it, but Nicholas Cage's performance in this. I don't know how many months away it was from when he filmed Raising Arizona, but there are whiffs of HI McDonough in this character.
HI McDonough is a little more slapsticky than this character and a little more innocent, even though, I would argue, sailor is not a bad guy. He's kind of a low level crook at worst, and even though he banse lauders.
HI McDonough never split somebody's head open like a pumpkin. Well, that's true, Right, I don't think he ever had any malice in his heart. But again, in both of these movies we do rob a feed store and we do wear pantyhose on our heads to comedic effect. This is true, there's a lot of like crisscross. And again in my head I was like is that what happens here? Is that what happens there?
And it was interesting to go in and tease out, because I truly thought at the end of this movie that Elvis Presley is who wakes up, Sailor. And then I was like, oh shit, no, it's the other one. Yeah, that's true.
There are moments in this movie, though, that I find so endearing, and one of them is the story we'll get to it, but you know the story about Cousin Dell and Nicholas Cage's reaction of oh hell, peanut. Yeah. As that story is, we told, it's still one of the funnier things I think I've ever seen in a movie. It really makes me laugh.
One thing I think that's important to touch on is the time period in which this movie came out, because this was really at the forefront of this rise of the independent filmmaker. Like Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival was this thing, and you had, like, people like Sotterberg with Sex Lies and Video Tape, and Gus Van Sant with my own private Idaho, and even people like Spike Lee or the Coen Brothers or Kevin Smith or Jane Campion.
There was this track of getting films into theaters, where you went to these small festivals and then studios would come in and scoop up movies and then throw some marketing dollars behind them and then they would get some real notoriety, and then it was almost like the independent filmmaker became a brand in and of themselves.
Tarantino is a perfect example that it was this person's next film and, even more so than the movie itself, that audiences were going to see what these new artists were creating, and I don't think that that exists in the world today at all. I mean, you have movies like Moonlight and Lady Bird, things like that, where it almost feels like big independent studios like A24 or the things like that are putting these movies out.
It was a very different time where you could make a freaky, weird movie like this and then be able to find the fast track to getting it into theaters in small town America.
This is a movie that would end up on streaming today.
And get lost in all the noise of streaming. Absolutely. I think that with all of the noise in the world of streaming, not that I need someone to curate movies and tell me what's good or bad, but I need someone to curate movies and tell me what's good or bad, Like if a studio is going to come in and say, hey, this is a quality film, there is buzz about this movie, there's something here worth seeing. Then you put some dollars and you begin to market it.
I think just putting it on streaming and like, oh, the audience will find it, that doesn't work. Marketing works, getting a title out there and helping people to find these hidden gems. You have to do that and I don't think just blasting it up. The stuff I see on Amazon Prime of the new Tom Clancy interpretation or a new Lord of the Rings something or whatever I don't know what this is, Is it any good? I don't know. Do people care? Apparently not.
Lynch is in many ways such a precursor, Like there was the all tour system of the 70s where you had your Coppola's and George Lucas and Spielberg and but that was overtaken by huge blockbusters, Right, and then they got fat and bloated.
Then they went back to independent films, which makes me wonder are we poised for another wave of hey? Look, we're going to spend $20 million on a movie and give it to this talented writer-director and see what they come up with, as opposed to hey, we just spent $350 million on a movie that's got to make a billion dollars to get back our production and marketing cost? I hope so, and you got to market that stuff. You got to come tell me to watch your movie.
I think there is that possibility for sure, and the ironic thing would be that Lynch has been consistently doing that thing for 40 years.
I think the other thing that's different between now and the 90s and the 70s is the quality of television programs, and that's where you're seeing a lot of this innovation.
You and I were talking earlier about the quality of programs like the Bear or Only Murders in the Building or I'll argue, what we do in the shadows is one of the funniest comedies out there, like Always Sunny, something like that, where it's like I couldn't tell you the last time I saw a good comedy in the theaters yeah, but Always Sunny consistently makes me laugh every time.
Last summer I watched Our Flags Mean Death and found that to be innovative and charming and shockingly funny. Who knows, we will see, but I think anyone trying to make a movie like Wild at Heart is going to feel derivative, because this movie was really one of the first films that I can think of that incorporated so many pop culture elements.
In a way it's like a precursor to something like Scott Pilgrim, where pop culture as a meta element is infused in this other kind of pulpy, strange type of storytelling.
Part film noir, part Grindhouse, grindhouse, part in.
Pee Wee's Playhouse.
Yeah right, part Pee Wee's Playhouse. It's a fascinating blend of just the shit that's in Lynch's head that gets spilled onto a screen, and the thing that's fascinating about it is that he has actors who consistently show up for it Not necessarily Cage, who doesn't work with a lot of the same directors often, it seems like, but all of the other actors in this movie work with Lynch pretty much on the regular.
It's kind of like Wes Anderson and his stable of people. Yeah, all right, so let's get into it. Let's talk about it. Yeah, we'll get into it.
So we open on both an MGM and a Samuel Goldwyn production. That's fancy that feels like a real movie is being watched and then you get to add some awesome credits and I know you're not a credits fan no, I'm not but it starts off with a flame, beanstruck like a match, and it starts to burn as the credits roll and then this chunky guitar starts playing and it turns into just this background of flames and a conflagration, just orange and red and black.
It's a long title sequence.
And the guitars are just bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom bom. And you're like what in the fuck is going on here? But it goes on way too long. It's lots of twin peaks actors.
Again, this was shot right after the pilot, so you've got not just Nicholas Cage and Laura during showing up here, but Jack Nant, Sherilyn Finn, Grace Abriskey, Richard, David Kelly, Harry, Dean Stanton the list goes on where you're like oh, this is just him putting together his roster of actors and just doing his usual Lynch, like hey, you want to go do something, fucked up. And then everybody does.
So the movie fades from this boring credit sequence into the Cape Fear Hotel, somewhere near the border between North and South Carolina, as we hear Glenn Miller and his orchestra playing in the mood, and we meet Sailor, as played by Nicholas Cage, and Lula, as played by Laura Dern. And they're walking down this tall staircase inside this hotel and who should come upon them, beau?
But Bobby Ray Lemon and he walks over to Sailor and he says hey, sailor, marietta tells me, you've been trying to fuck her in the toilets for the last 10 minutes. You're a bad boy trying to fuck your girl's mama. Tell me how that cute little cut Lula feel about that. That's the opening dialogue in our movie. It's just downhill from here.
And Sailor is like oh boy, oh no.
Hey man, what are you talking about?
It's a little bit of. You're about to press the go button on the whoop ass machine.
During this exchange of words we see Marietta, who is Lula's mama, and, as played by Oscar nominated actress Diane Ladd, watching from around the corner at the top of the stairs. She was nominated Beau for best supporting actress in this movie. Her competition that year was Annette Benning in the Grifters, a movie that I think is grossly overrated. Mary McDonald for Dancers with Wolves I liked her in that. Lorraine Braco in Goodfellas and, of course, whoopi Goldberg in Ghost.
You remember who won right? Beau Was Whoopi Goldberg, was it? Huh, yes, whoopi Goldberg playing Whoopi Goldberg in the movie Ghost. Her performance was stellar. I've never seen her play herself so fantastically.
I don't know that I would give it to Diane Ladd. I would probably go Lorraine Braco honestly in that field.
Lorraine Braco or Mary McDonald.
Diane Ladd is giving a performance. Yeah.
Anyway. So Bobby Ray Lemon, he's talking to Sailor and he pulls out this fist of cash and he says Marietta gave me this to kill you. And then Bobby Ray pulls out a switchblade which he plans to stab and kill Sailor Boat. And then Lula screams Sailor, she's like Olive oil, like is. This attack is about to happen. Bobby Ray Lemon's plan was not well thought out here. If he succeeds in killing Sailor, there are literally dozens of witnesses around who will testify against him and put him in jail.
Also, if I'm a hitman Chad, and as far as anyone knows listening to this, I am not.
I agree.
I know nothing about anything that you do outside of this podcast, going to your victim and saying, hey, that lady up there gave me a bunch of money to kill you and here it comes. That's not how you do it.
So I end up in the pitch, some 90s era grunge guitar kicks in and then Sailor proceeds to start throwing Bobby Ray Lemon around into the wall, down on the ground, and this ends with him just grabbing Bobby Ray Lemon's head and just smashing it into the marble floor an excessive number of times, however many times you think it is. Add five to that until we just see Bobby Ray Lemon's brains spilling out the back of his skull like a jack-o-lantern filled with squishy noises and all.
Laura Dern as Lula screams through the entire assault.
It's a real bye bye, bye, bye.
And then, after he's done brainin', this guy, sailor, stands up in his snake skin jacket, of course, yes, lights a smoke, pops it in his mouth and points at Marietta as if to say, oh, then we cut Chad to the PD Correctional Institute, yes, where Sailor is being put behind bars. Yes, and this is the first of our Oz imagery where it fades into like a Wizard of Oz glass ball and there's an insert that says 22 months, 18 days later, where he makes a phone call.
Marietta answers at her house and immediately is like there is no way I'm gonna ever allow you to see my daughter, lula. You are trash, you hear me Trash.
It also needs to be mentioned here that every single time you see Marietta in this film, her hairstyle and her fashion choices change dramatically. It's almost jarring to the point of is this the same person? Her hair goes from shoulder length to down to her waist. Sometimes it's flat, puffy, braided, quaffed updo, bangs, perm, it's bonkers, and her style of clothing bounces around from one decade to the next Puffy shoulders, tight waist, low cut, high five.
It's just David Lynch being fucking weird man.
I also like that, as she's laying into Sailor. His response is to say what? Yeah, it's makes me laugh. And they end up hanging up and Marietta sees Lula at the top of the stairs who was it, mama? And Marietta says you are not to see that Sailor again, you understand Like hell, right? That's her response. And then she just runs off and we see Marietta just going to town on a martini in response.
You either see her with a cocktail in her hand or an empty high ball in her hand. Yeah, this whole movie feels like a Tennessee Williams play on PCP.
And that's a pretty good analogy Cut to the next scene, which is Lula picking Sailor up from the PD Correctional Institute. Yeah, and a 1965 Ford Thunderbird convertible, handing him the snakeskin jacket we saw in the first scene.
Hey, my snakeskin, jacket. Thanks, baby.
Oh, I love that. Thanks, baby, and we get the first of his ever. Tell you about how this snakeskin jacket symbolizes my belief in individuality and personal freedom.
About 50,000 times Sailor, it's so great. Then she says I got us a room at the Cape beer and powermads playing at the hurricane. Wait, you booked a room at the hotel where he murdered a guy two years ago. Man slaughtered. Sorry, were you manslaughter a guy two years ago?
Well, his response is stab it in steer, baby yeah. And so off they go and do. The next shot is them just going to town fucking as the screen kind of bleeds red and like there is a lot of fucking in this movie. One thing I really appreciated watching this movie again is how much fucking there is in it, that these are two people who are passionate about each other, they like to fuck and we see a lot of it.
Nicholas Cage's hair in this is died this blackish brown and he was 28 when he made this movie, but his hairline looks like he's 42. And it is crazy that Nicholas Cage's hairline has been receding in slow motion since he was probably 12 years old.
It's the damnedest thing. And then came back on account of some good plugs.
Laura Dern was 23. I know Laura Dern from this, from Jurassic Park part one, part three and part six. And then I remember her as the lesbian who kissed Ellen DeGeneres on that sitcom. But I tell you the movie I really think about her more than anything else was when she was in Citizen Ruth, the movie where she's the centerpiece of the pro life, pro choice movement. I really liked her in that. I never saw that series where she gets cancer, but I heard that was pretty good too.
She is incredible in the third season of Twin Peaks.
Imagine growing up with Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd as your parents. That had to be an interesting dynamic, right, bruce kind?
of won. She had a sister that died at a pretty young age. Yeah, killed by Bruce Dern, Really To serve as an example? Yeah, damn, I will get a yes for that.
You mentioned that they had sex. This is the second time we've seen Nicholas Cage have sex this season with a woman who was nude, or at least from the waist up. Notably this time he does not have a gun in one hand and a bottle of Jack Daniels in the other. But take it where you can get it, we're not far from that.
No, we have a close up of a lighter, because everybody in this movie smokes constantly.
Sailor constantly smokes two cigarettes at one time.
There's one scene in particular where he lights and smokes too. That I find very funny. But Lula is getting dressed while Nicholas Cage, as Sailor, is just balancing this old radio on his feet in bed. He's pulling it taut with the electrical cord and she's having a conversation about how, like baby, I love your cock. I have missed that thing.
She's just female sexuality come to life. She's just constantly writhing and moaning and just in a state of zen eroticism. She does tell Sailor my mama told me when I was 15, I was on start thinking about sex and I should come to her for I do anything about it. And Sailor says but, honey, I thought your uncle pooch raped you when you were 13. And then she says yeah, that's true, but Uncle pooch wasn't really an uncle, he was more of a business partner.
My daddy's mama never knew nothing about me and him. Which my question to you, bo? This is a lie.
Absolutely, because the in the flashback immediately we see that Marietta all but catches Uncle pooch, who, by the way, henry from Alice.
Henry, the telephone repair man from the hit CBS sitcom Alice, is who was cast to play Uncle pooch. Now, if that means nothing to you, it would be like watching a movie and seeing Teddy from Bob's Burgers raping a child.
I'll be partner from Home Improvement.
The most sweet, good natured, kind character on a show that was just kind of a heel would come in and say dumb stuff and then would be like watching it. It's like this is awful, like it's another level of disgust in this movie. But he's raped her and she's got blood on her mouth. I don't want to know how that happened, but he like chunks a rag at her and he says you're a real pumpkin.
And then the mom comes in, marietta starts screaming and she chases him out of the house, punching him and beating the shit out of him. But here's another thing you know on the sitcom Alice that's based on the movie Alice doesn't live here anymore and in that movie Diane Ladd played the character Flo, but she was not cast on the TV show as Flo. That was Polly Holiday, who you know is the old lady who got thrown off that sliding stair chair and Grimlins.
She got killed, she was Flo, but then, after she left to do her own spin off, they ultimately brought Diane Ladd in to play a character on the show, alice to replace Flo. It's crazy.
This whole world's wild at heart and crazy on top Chad.
They ought to sell tickets. I'd buy one.
So, Lula stares at herself in the mirror in the present.
And then we get another flashback where a car is just exploding and going off. A road Toons is the cat style explosion. It's pretty clear that what happened was Marietta caught Uncle Pooch and then arranged for him to be killed.
Lula says my uncle Pooch died in a car crash a few months later while Holiday. And in Myrtle Beach. I still got too much traffic there for my taste.
Somebody starts laughing through the wall and she says I hate that sound. It reminds me of the wicked witch. And Sailor says baby, let's go dancing, yeah. And then they just make out for a little bit and off they go.
We cut to Marietta in our home. She's here with Johnny Farragut Detective extraordinaire, sad sack extraordinaire. Well, he's being played by Harry Dean Stanton. You know what you're getting in for, that right. All you really need to know about Johnny Farragut is that he's not a very good detective and he's madly in love with Marietta, lula's mama Right, and Marietta uses this to her advantage.
This whole scene can best be summed up in the lines you know. If you don't think you can handle it, johnny Farragut, I could always call Santos now now now Marietta, there ain't no need to be calling Marcella Stansos, and that's the scene. But at the end of the scene Harry Dean Stanton is trying to talk her down from calling Santos, who later on will learn as a world class leased ball not the sleaziest character in this movie, no, not even in the top two In comparison to the other characters.
I don't know that I would call Santos sleazy.
He's trying to talk her out of it and he's clearly nervous that she had this affair with Santos, and that's what's going on again. And then Diane Lad gets on the floor, chad, and just starts playing kitty cat with him and he's playing peekaboo with her.
Yeah.
She says why don't you trust your very own Marietta?
Because she wants him to go after Sailor and Lula. And Marietta says, johnny, you don't need to worry about me, you need to worry about getting that murderer away from Lula. So she wants him to go after them and he corrects her, but, but, but man slaughter. Sorry. Johnny Farragut says look, sailor was just trying to protect Lula. You were there. You saw the whole damn thing, didn't you? And again, you're going to get whiplash from all the flashbacks and flash forwards in this movie.
And the movie flashes back to before the start of the movie and we see Marietta. She got a drink in her hand, of course, of course, and she follows Sailor into the bathroom. But would you care to describe what happens next?
She's a couple of drinks in, follows him to the urinal and says you want to fuck Lula's mama? And, to his credit, sailor is like no, ma'am, I do not. Are you sure you don't want to fuck Lula's mama? It's so gross he turns her down repeatedly. I will make the argument that I think this was less about her wanting to fuck him than to break Sailor and Lula up.
He does refer to her as Miss Fortune, because that's her last name, marietta Fortune, miss Fortune, I'll say. I say these are the jokes on.
And then we cut back to the present and Marietta says I did not see anything. All I know is that he killed someone with his bare hands.
He is trash.
And then Marietta whimpers till Johnny Farragut agrees to go after Sailor and Lula. Yeah, and then we cut to Sailor and Lula. They're getting ready to go dancing and Sailor asks Lula, you know, lula, there's more to me killing Bobby Berry Lemon. That's driving your mama to keep us apart. How about a flashback baby? So we flash back to the bathroom the scene we just left. Which, po? Would you care to explain what happens now?
Sure, At this point Marietta says you used to be a driver for my husband, but you are a piece of shit, Sailor, you belong in one of these toilets because you're a piece of shit. And he says you're just gonna have to kill me to keep me away from your daughter. And then we flash forward slightly not back to the present, but just a little bit to Bobby Ray Lemon, with the knife right to give us the full story of Marietta pulled the. Do you want to fuck Lula's mama bit? That didn't work.
Then she calls him a piece of shit because he used to drive for Santos and that he's just kind of a low ball criminal.
You go to Lula's mama you're like hey, marietta F, mary kill. She's like all three Sailor.
Sailor, Sailor and Sailor.
Now give me that highball Leave the bottle. So we cut back to the present, where Sailor and Lula are going out dancing and Sailor says you know, I got a mind to break parole and take you to sunny California.
Scylla, I loved it. I go to the Warrom for you. Let's go dancing.
And so she starts dancing on the bed yeah, like just stomping, which fades to what is charitably called dancing as Power Mad plays, which is this heavy metal band.
No, the band is Slaughterhouse. They're playing the song Power Bad. It's this guitar-fueled high-energy song in this club and there's kind of a mosh pit and this one guy gets a little handsy with Lula and then Scylla throws up his hands at the band and they immediately stop playing. Just stop.
Dude, and he throws up Devil Horns better yet.
He walks up to the sky and he says you, there, you gonna provide me an opportunity to prove my love for my girl, or you gonna save yourself some trouble. Step up like a gentleman and apologize to her.
And then there's this mild confrontation that ends with Scylla kind of throwing this guy to the ground, followed up with some karate moves that he learned from Napoleon Dynamite, and then ultimately the guy just apologizes. It's not nearly as violent as what happened to Mr Bobby Ray Lemon.
And I think that's kind of indicative of Scylla as a character, that he was defending his life and, theoretically, Lula's life at the hotel at the beginning of the movie. In this case he puts the guy in his place for sure, but after he lets him off the ground he gives him money and is like how about you go have a beer? Then he looks over at the band. It says you know, I gotta say you boys have the same power he had. But do you know this tune?
And then this is one of my favorite scenes ever in a movie. I swear to God Really. Oh yeah, because it's just so nutty but kind of sweet in its way and I just love it. And he starts to break into the song Love Me the dream miracle food.
And all the women in the background start screaming like it's the 1950s.
Like he's singing on the Ed Sullivan show. Yeah, and he goes through this whole song.
He sings the whole damn song. Yeah, not just like the first verse and then we cut away it's the whole song. It's the kind of bit you would see on Family Guy where you're like, oh, he's going to sing the entire song.
I'm going to go piss, I'll be right back, I will remember to insert here this line from David Lynch, because David Lynch seems to be a fairly well-regarded director, even by people who work with him, Like he's not a tremendous dick on the set, but there is a clip that I love of him talking to someone and this woman says like oh well, you can make this shot a little shorter.
What is this with everybody?
What is it really? It's really me.
It's like I'm not. I'm not. I'm serious Fucking a man and drive me nuts.
Who gives a fucking shit how long a scene is, and that's why I kind of love this moment. I love everything about it. I love him defending Lula.
I don't disagree with you. I said I would go take a piss. I did not. I agree 100% with everything you're saying. It is sweet and charming and Nicholas Cage is a good cover. Singer of Elvis songs.
I even like when the guy apologizes to Lula and she says, oh hell, you just bumped into the wrong lady is all yeah and everybody's cool, like it's such a moment of real, like sweetness, like we'll get to some really fucked up shit in this movie. And this is one of those moments where you see the love between Lula and Saylor presented in this really off kilter way, but it's really pure.
One thing I found troubling about this movie is that when we first meet Saylor it's such an act of hyper violence and then that never reappears again, and even by the end of the film he's almost neutered. He's just kind of like crying. I'd never felt like his journey as a character was that.
I don't know I understand what you're saying, but I also don't think like even that initial. It's super violent, for sure, but also he's defending himself. This wasn't a violence he initiated. This was a guy pulling a knife on him. Right after, by the way, his girlfriend's mother called him a piece of shit and he told her the only way you're going to get me away from her is to kill me.
And so the very next thing that happens is some guy comes to kill him and he puts him down and basically levels a finger at Marietta to say like this is on you.
To pull in. Another film from this era is De Niro in the remake of Cape Fear, where you have a character that exhibits monstrous ultra violence and therefore, from that point going forward, you know that this character is capable of really bad stuff and that's always simmering through that movie of like, how bad this person is.
I felt like in this film you start there, but then you don't simmer, you just turn the stove off to carry that metaphor through, or analogy, or simile, or hyperbole, I don't know which one it is, but do you know what I'm saying? Like I didn't. He never, really, he doesn't return to that and, if anything, there are other characters in this movie that embrace that level of shocking violence.
Sailor's Ark in this movie is about four minutes long and it happens at the end. But anyway so we cut to Sailor and Lula fucking again, of course, again Afterwards Lula says Sailor, baby, why didn't you sing me Love Me Tender? And he says well, you know, baby, I said that I would only sing that to my wife. Then they start smoking, of course, reveling in some post-coital bliss.
And she says you know, sailor, sometimes I just start thinking these weird things and I hear a wind and I see the wicked witch of the West and she just kind of looks off into the middle distance and we get this visual insert of my aunt Lad, dressed up as the wicked witch of the West, flying on a broom. Her mom is the witch and Sailor says you know, peanut, the way your mind works is God's own private mystery, which is a terrific line.
Then these two swap stories about how they started smoking, and Sailor says he started at age four and then his mom died of lung cancer and his father died of alcohol related causes. And Sailor says I didn't have much parental guidance.
My lawyer kept saying this at my parole hearing he was a good old boy.
You stood by me, Peanut, after I planted Bobby Ray Lemon. I can't ask for much more than that. You're perfect for me. And then they get very intimate and very close. And Lula says you mark me the deepest sail. You remind me of my daddy. My mama said he likes skinny women with breasts. That stood up and said hello what? How did that conversation happen with Lula and her mama? Oh, never mind.
After the bottle of beef eater rolled off the couch and clunked on the ground, Lula, you ever hear me tell you about the kind of titties your daddy likes.
He'd like to fuck Lula's mama.
Gross Lula says to Sailor he had a long nose like yours. Did I ever tell you how my daddy died? Here there's a flashback.
We see this visual of a stuntman running around in a house on fire.
Mama said he covered himself in gasoline. He lit a match. I appreciate that it's a practical effect, but if you look, even for half a second, the mask that this dude is wearing looks like Michael Myers in Halloween 5 or something.
Yeah, this is the thing where, like, blu-ray doesn't necessarily do this movie some favors. But at the time I'm sure Lynch was like I love it.
We cut back to Sailor and Lula laying in bed, probably thinking about having sex again, and then Lula says that was about a year before I met you.
And then Sailor says ah oh, maybe I shouldn't say that.
And then you cut to this over the headshot where Sailor is playing with Lula's naked breast. Before one assumes these two started having sex again.
God bless him. And then we go to Johnny Farragut who is calling Diane Ladd up to say well, I just haven't found him yet, Marietta. While he's on the phone with her, we cut to Marietta, who has this flashback to the vision of Nicholas Cage as Sailor pointing at her after he kills Bobby Ray Lemon.
In case you forgot that or came in late to the theater.
So then we're on the road with Sailor and Lula.
They're yeah, finally our road trip movie starts proper. Yeah, Holiday road baby. Here we go, and to California.
Lula says well, there it is. Looks like we just crossed the state line. Sailor, you just broke parole. And he says well, I hate to contradict you, baby, but we broke my parole as soon as we crossed out of the county lines and we're cutting between this of them taking off. It's really this moment of freedom and euphoria, as they're off into the wild yonder and Marietta rolling around getting drunk on the floor and hiring. Marcella Santos.
When you cut to Marietta, she's now wearing some kind of crazy fucking outfit and her hair looks like 1980s Dolly Parton. I cannot stress enough how bizarre. Imagine if you lined up photographs of Miss Piggy from the original puppet to right now and her hairstyle changing. That's what she does in this film in a 90 minute window. Yes, it's all over the place. I found it so off-putting, among other things.
There's a great cutaway where, while Sailor and Lula are on the road, Lula is just kind of musing about their relationship and she says you know, Sailor, you ain't let me down yet. That's more than can be said the rest of the world.
This is also where he says to her you're not starting to second guess your decisions, because you're worth an, A number one certified murderer. And Lula says manslaughterer, not murder, honey, Don't exaggerate, All right, manslaughterer who just broke parole and got nothing in mind but immoral purposes. She says thank the Lord.
Yeah, I love man, I love them.
I love their relationship. They just like genuinely enjoy each other and enjoy fucking each other.
and more power to them, I say movie cuts back to Santos talking with Marietta, and Santa says you want me to shoot Sailor in the brains with the gun in the forehead.
Wrong, you got to blow a hole to the back of the head, out the bridge of the nose. Lots of irreparable brain damage. Why did you send Johnny Farragut?
And Marietta says you should go to New Orleans. Lula can't stop talking about that town.
And Santos says we ought to kill Johnny Farragut One day. He's going to find out what we're up to with Mr Reindeer.
You still sweet on him. Huh, is that what's?
going on. No Santos, you can't kill Johnny Farragut, just kill Sailor.
Santos says I'll kill Sailor, you could be certain that that may be somebody else. No, no, all right, but probably no.
We got the Sailor Lula. They're heading down the road with Sailor exhibiting early signs of future. Nicholas Cage weirdness he's like dancing and saluting in the car, like you get those hints of how weird Nicholas Cage is, probably as a real life person. And then Santos gets on the phone and he makes a call to a character that you mentioned in the intro, mr Reindeer, who looks like Colonel Sanders 10 years before he figured out those 11 herbs and spices.
And Santos calls this guy Mr Reindeer and he says I got a couple of problems. And Mr Reindeer says for each problem, drop a silver dollar through my mail slot with all the particulars. And then about we get this wide shot revealing that Mr Reindeer is sitting on a toilet in this marble and tiled bathroom, where all of the fixtures are as gold as the evidence photos from Mar-a-Lago. There is a silver tea tray on the sink in front of him that is adjacent to the toilet.
There is a formal tea setting for him to sip while he is shitting. And oh yeah, I forgot to mention there is a topless woman with red flowers in her hair standing there with his viewing pleasure, just wiggling around and dancing while this guy shits and sips. Earl Gray.
I mean, some people just live a good life. Chat that poor, poor woman. There's also a stable of these women, as we find out later, and I don't know if you get.
Maybe there's a worse job for this guy.
If you're on toilet dancing duty, maybe that's when you've screwed up. You showed up late or something I'm like. Well, we all put our fingers on our noses and said not it, you weren't here, so you get to dance in the john today.
Hold me closer, shitty dancer. Burn some incense. The Hershey Highway.
Unsurprisingly, this was an invention purely of David Lynch.
I'm sure who here wants to watch a guy take a shit while this lady dances around topless.
I see one hand up. It's mine. It's unanimous. It would be great for the movie if you could actually shit 30 minutes later. I forgot to say action. The cameras weren't rolling.
We're going to put a camera in the bottom of the toilet. Let's see what the MPAA makes of that.
I'm just going to finish his shitting and watching this poor woman dance around nude, good God.
So there's a couple of little bits where, like, sailor is singing a little bit of Love Me and laughing about being a Jimmy Swaggered country.
We see Johnny Farragut chain smoking wearing a suit and tie. Listen to Van Morrison sing Baby, please Don't Go, as he heads to New Orleans.
It's a little on the nose Then we get back to Mr Reindeer, who gets two silver dollars dropped through his mail slot and an envelope and he's flanked by two more topless women holding silver trays.
One appears to have aspirin and Pepto Bismol bottles on it, but I didn't figure out what was on the other ladies tray.
Unsure, I'd have to go back and look at this point.
It was like shredded aluminum foil or something.
I mean, it could just be confetti, God only knows. Make sure one of them has some Pepto Bismol. This is going to sound crazy, david, but how come?
Because of all the confetti you idiot.
Let me ask you a question in return. Why wouldn't he? I guess so.
Right, try to disprove a negative. Good luck, shithead.
What do you think this movie would be without the naked girl in the Pepto Bismol? Oh shit, that's what it be, which reminds me. We got to do a pickup shot in the toilet. Mr Reindeer makes a call to an unseen contractor about one of the silver dollars. While these half-naked women. Just sort of rub his shoulders a little bit. He does just them shush.
The phone is ringing, ladies.
And so he calls Guana, the first of our contractors, and then he makes another phone call and we just see this ramshackle building in the middle of the desert. Yeah, we'll get back to that. Oh yes, Sailor and Lula finally turn up in New Orleans. Having sex again, and this is where we saw that killer in silhouette who turns out to be Guana.
There's also this really great lynch moment where we see David Patrick Kelly as Shadow Dancer I think is his name in this movie Just walking down the street while this kind of jazz musician is just making some noises walking beside him.
I thought that that was Reggie and George, the two that are in cahoots with Guana, as they're walking down the streets like the first time we see them.
That's right, but the two people in Cahoots with Reggie and George. According to the good people at IMDB, there's Reggie, and Shadow Dancer is his name.
Okay, so Reggie is Shadow Dancer.
Drop Shadow is his name, catoo Sailor and Lula once again in bed.
Sure, no one is surprised when she turns up pregnant. It's shocking that she's not pregnant all the time, like she's not pregnant eight times, like she's just cranking out babies every 30 days has octuplets or something. Right like a litter of children, the amount of times that they're having sex.
She is waxing poetic about you pay attention to me during sex, but you really are dialed in and your cock is so sweet.
And he goes. Please, bo people are listening.
He goes you know you are dangerously cute peanut and then just starts rubbing her tits with his forearm while she's kind of giggling about it.
They often say they don't make them like they used to. They don't make movies like this anymore.
We are the worst for it Seeing a couple actually fuck a bunch in a movie is kind of refreshing.
We went through that phase where all of these repressed men from the 50s were making movies in the 80s and it was just gratuitous nude women left and right. Then it matured a little bit in this era where it was like let's really get down to some fucking. And then it got to the point like, well, we kind of been there, done that, now let's get into some other territory of strangeness and weirdness and more ultra violence and CGI and what in the house.
You don't really see that much nudity in contemporary films. If so, it's usually purposefully and tastefully done. You don't just have a whole lot of naked breast or floppy cocks bouncing around all over the place, which is a real shame.
Like, I feel like seeing this relationship, I think one of the things that makes it is that they both love to fuck and you see that and they also love to talk about how much they love fucking.
And smoking and drinking, yeah, and they're exploits with other men and women.
Like I said, it's refreshing because it feels like a relationship that has as weird and out there as this movie is. Their relationship feels much more honest as a relationship than most romantic movies. Yeah, I do agree. They go downstairs to this bar.
Lula shows Sailor in what may be my favorite line of the movie.
She shows him this little mermaid chachki that when you turn a crank it just does this little wiggly dance with his bare breasts and Nicholas Cage, as Sailor in this moment, says with all genuine sincerity yes, that's just about the cutest thing I've ever seen peanut, and he means it. There is no irony in that statement.
While sitting at the bar, this old drunk walks over and starts quacking like a duck and then speaks in this high pitched voice.
Pitching sprat diseases. I'm messed up the place. You see that.
And then more duck quacks. Oh, classic Lynch, there Beau. Classic Lynch, what?
if a weirdo talked like a munchkin?
There's gotta be context, boss. You gotta give a little context. He can't just talk like a munchkin.
What if he quacked like a duck at the beginning, then the end. There's your context.
Fire this guy, Start quacking. It's one of those things that like for whatever reason Lynch was like.
This scene is missing something. How many people have quacked like a duck in this scene?
Ah-ha, over here.
I mean zero, david.
What.
Somebody's falling down on the fucking job.
This isn't the last time we're gonna detour in this movie into weirdsville for a little bit.
Absolutely not.
We're just starting. Yes, we come back to Mr Reindeer's house and there's a long formal dining table and Mr Reindeer is in the middle of the table and he is just surrounded by all of these young women and at the head of the table is this older woman who appears to be the madam and she says listen up, ladies, You're not just a pretty face with a fucking smile.
You're gonna make Mr Reindeer happy. Okay, don't bring misfortune on yourselves. Ah-ha, four women.
At a bar Sailor is telling a story about grabbing some woman that he wanted, slipped my hand between her legs and then I just followed her up the stairs.
Oh Sailor, tell me more. I wanna hear about you and this woman.
Followed her up to her room, my hand still between her legs, and I found out that her room is full of assault weapons.
And jerk off books. You're right, ha-ha-ha-ha, put your spank magazines, assault weapons and ammunition. And he says and I had a boner with a capital O.
And Lula says oh, sailor, you're turning me on. You better take me back to the room so we can fuck. And they do. That's what happens, ha-ha-ha-ha. Afterward she says Sailor, do you think there's any way to stay in love the rest of our lives? And Sailor says I promise you I won't do anything that isn't for a purpose anymore. There are plenty of bad ideas out there.
One thing we skipped over was at Mr Reindeer's dinner party. Reggie, wanna and George are trio of miscreants. They show up and Mr Reindeer hands over a silver dollar and in the background they're a top of swim and dancing and a string quartet. One of the top of swim is a fire eater and Mr Reindeer tells Reggie, I forgot to give this to you. Show it just before the deed is done. And then our three visitors leave.
Yeah they're on the hunt, as we'll find out Not too much longer. So Lula then tells Sailor the tale of Jingledale, which is played in a cameo for the ages by Crispin Glover.
Well, she sets it up and she says you know, Sailor, there's something I've never told you. This here's a story with a lesson about bad ideas. And, Bo, would you care to explain to people what happens in this flashback? She?
tells the story of Del, who we all call Jingledale on the count. He was obsessed with Christmas and aliens wearing black gloves.
And we see Del dressed in basically the Santa Claus outfit that Dan Ackroyd has on at the end of Trading Places. It's soiled with all of the pee and the poo and the dirt and the filth. It's vile what he's wearing.
So she says, Del would just say up all night making sandwiches and we get this shot chat of Crispin Glover with a knife cutting up a bunch of main gold sandwiches in the middle of the night in this kitchen and his mother kind of peeks in and he just stops everything and says I'm trying to make my lunch. There is also Chad. A quick shot of Crispin Glover like crouched to the floor laying belly down with a stick, pushing a black glove inside this square of masking tape on the floor.
I think it's also fashioned out of retractable measuring tapes for precise squareage, or something like this, and he's rolling around and he's not wearing any clothes, except for his underwear, speaking of which, and then Lula says also, dale's mama found cockroaches in his underwear and she discovered him putting one on his anus.
And this is where Sailor interjects oh hell, peanut. And then we discover one day Dale just disappeared.
Well, you see him standing on the sidewalk, side stepping left and side stepping right, cause his underwear is full of roaches. Then it cuts back to Lula and Sailor. And Sailor says sounds like Old Dale was more than a little bit confused.
It's just too bad he couldn't visit that wizard of Oz for some good advice.
Too bad, we all can't sail. What say you? Hop on and put a few more miles on the Lulutrain?
It is truly one of the great cameos of all time, in my opinion.
And then it's not the last time we're gonna just pull off the road into Weardsville. We got a few more stops before this thing wraps up. We cut to Johnny Farragut in a hotel. He's watching a documentary that includes Hyena's attacking an animal and killing it. While he growls, the phone rings and it's Marietta, and she's in a real state of crazy, more than usual. Earlier we had a shot of her in the bathroom, did we?
skip that where she when she takes some lipstick and kind of rubs it on her wrists.
Yeah, she's talking to him and it's almost like she's slitting her wrist to kill herself, but she's just smearing it with the red lipstick. In this scene, when she calls him, you get this shocking wide shot where her whole face is just covered in red lipstick and the music is like boom, boom boom, and she says Johnny Farragut, I've done something bad.
Real, real bad.
I'm gonna come to New Orleans and tell you what I did.
What'd you do, darling? You can just tell me no. No, johnny, I gotta come to New Orleans and tell you in person. Totally, stay right there. I'm gonna come down, get on the plane, come fly in New Orleans together.
Oh okay, love you click and after they hang up, Marietta just starts vomiting.
Yeah, and her hair is down to her waist again now and after she pukes everywhere she rolls around. Keep in mind her face is covered in bright red lipstick and there's just puke in her hair and on her clothes and she's sitting on the floor in front of the toilet just drunk and exhausted and manic. And then the camera pans back and we see that she's wearing the curl tip black shoes like the Wicked Witch. All this Wizard of Oz stuff is just here for no real reason other than to be here.
It doesn't really do anything. You could get rid of it all and the movie would only be 2.1% less weird than it already is.
I think it does say something about the underlying innocence of Sailor and Lula.
It makes it feel more like a perverted fairy tale.
Yeah, for sure, and I think that's kind of what Lynch is getting at is that this is more like the actual Grimms fairy tales than the Americanized version of them. But we cut over to Sailor and Lula who are getting gas, and Sailor says we've only got about $100 left, at which point they kind of pass into. Texas and Sailor is taking a nap while Lula drives and she's listening to the radio and she like, turns it to one station. It's like a man was accused of murdering three children today.
She's like, oh my God. And turns it over. It's like, and so it was discovered that the man was having sex with the corpses. Oh my God.
Three rapes occurred at the dog pound oh my God.
And she turns it again. It's like a story about how they're releasing crocodiles into the Ganges to eat all the corpses that are stopping up the river. And she just freaks out and pulls over and jumps out of the car and Sailor's like baby, what's going on? And she says, sailor, you get me some music on that radio right now. So he flips through the dial until he finds some heavy metal.
He finds Slaughterhouse. Yeah, playing Powermad, the song they already paid for earlier in the movie. Why should they pay for a different song? And these two start dancing on the side of the road and doing karate moves for a good bit.
Until they kind of fall into each other's arms and exchange. I love you.
And, I assume, had sex in the backseat of this convertible.
It's twisted and silly, but it's the, you know, depending on each other and helping each other out of a bad place.
We cut to a fancy French restaurant in New Orleans and Marietta and Johnny Farragut are there having dinner and Marietta, who is not covered in red lipstick, she says Johnny, I can't we just leave tonight and go off to Sailor? You can kill him and save my daughter Luba. And Johnny Farragut says Marietta, I have a tiny, tiny question Is Santos involved in this in any way?
No Santos, of course, Santos is not involved.
I wouldn't do something like that without talking to you first. And then Johnny Farragut says remember Uncle Pooch from earlier in the movie? That son of a bitch was the one who introduced you and your dead husband to that. No good, santos, in the first place, johnny, stop giving exposition and backstory, we'll just worry about our future together. Our future, oh yeah, our future with you and me, johnny Farragut, together, forever, just the two of us.
My little human crawler like a kitty cat playing peek-a-boo. You will be peek-a-boo. And then, johnny Farragut, he's so happy hearing their own future together. He starts crying.
He is such a pathetic, sad sack in this movie, which I kind of love. He is maybe the single kindest character in the movie, yeah, but also that makes him the perfect victim, because there's absolutely no way that he is going to survive a movie surrounded by these kinds of reprobates.
You know what this?
movie needs An old Jewish woman walking past the screen wiggling her fingers kind of like a cheerleader but not.
How about that? Do I need to cast for that, david Hell?
no you craft services lady. Come over here, wiggle your fingers, put a spotlight on her put that in the movie.
And then we get to sort of the fall of innocence in this movie where Lula and Sailor on the road at night. And we get Wicked Gameplained, or the instrumental of Wicked Gameplained, behind this whole scene.
Boy, you could not escape that song.
And Chris Isaac and Lynch have a bit of a history. Chris Isaac shows up in Fire Walk with me as an actor and they clearly have some regard for each other.
I heard Wicked Game. It seemed like it was playing on every radio station everywhere in. What was it like 1989, 91?
Yeah, 89, 90, yeah.
That song was everywhere. It's a good song.
It's a great song. You know what that song makes me think of? Chad Fuckin' Sailor. Fuck, I think.
I mean it's just kind of a sexy song that wasn't the one with the girl on the beach.
Oh it, a hundred percent was. And David Lynch actually directed another version of the video for Wicked Game. It's not that one, it's not the one that everyone knows, it's just a bunch of clips from the movie.
What happened to Chris Isaac? He had that song and he had that song. Somebody's crying, that was one. That's a good one, I really like Don't Go Walking Down there.
She did a bad bad thing.
And then probably a bunch of Elvis covers.
Look at all the lonely people, yeah.
That's a good song. He's probably on one of them CSI shows now. That would make sense.
You know they were like sad news today Roy Orbison is dead and Chris Isaac said check please, but I got a career.
I really like Chris Isaac a lot. Let's see what he's been up to. I hadn't really been acting in anything and he's also almost 70 years old now, so good God, I know that he's incredible in fire. Walk with me. He's so fun. So this is where Sailor is. Like you know, lula never told you this, but I used to drive for a man named Marcello Santos.
I knew your daddy Clyde. He was a good man. That's the good news.
You knew my sweet daddy Sailor.
Yes, I did. I knew him and he was a hell of a nice fella. But there was one night where I ended up outside your house. I don't know what they think I saw that night, lula, by day. I mean. Well, we'll get to that in a flashback later. I was in the car the night the house went up in flames. That was the night that your sweet daddy died.
Be sure there's a Wicked Witch in this scene.
Movie cuts to a flashback where the house is full of smoke and then we're back in the car and Sailor says you know, Lula, we all got secrets.
I hope you don't think I've been lying to you about a whole bunch of other things, but I probably have.
This is where Lula looks out into the dark mess and sees the Wicked Witch mother again, yeah, and then they see some lights up ahead. But before we get to that we have to go back to an old man vacuuming the floor at the hotel. Well, yeah, and Johnny Farragut and Marietta going to their individual rooms and she's like you get your bags packed there, Johnny Farragut, we're gonna hit the road.
They kind of kiss passionately for a moment and it's sort of gross. Not that old people kissing is gross, but it's kind of gross. How dare you.
I thought it was gross.
Watching them like nom nom nom each other, I think I was more bothered by what's gonna come next.
I was thinking, boy, I wish I was Harry Dean. Stand right about now. You know what I'm saying.
He goes off to his room where he's gonna die and he opens up the door and immediately gets clocked on the head out. He goes. We got to Sailor and Lula. They're driving along at night in the desert top down, and this is probably one of my favorite scenes of this whole movie. As they're driving they start to see clothes strewn across the highway and then, as they get a little bit closer, they see a car flipped over on the side of the road and this is another detour into Weirdsville.
They get out to see if they can help anybody, to see kind of what's what? One guy is dead for sure. There's another body just sprawled out of the back of the car in the backseat. And then they find Audrey Horner herself Sherilyn Finn wandering around in the darkness and they're like oh, you need to come with us. You seem to be a little bit potatoed. And she is like where's my purse? I got to get my purse. There's blood on her forehead, but you're not really sure how bad this is.
And then she reaches up to scratch her head, chad, and the entire top of her skull just starts to jiggle around. Yeah, it's bad, she is in a bad way.
And.
Sailor's like hey, little darling, you might want to sit down here on the ground before your brain's spilled out over the floor.
Don't worry, I'm not going to smash your head on the ground. Seems like damage has already been done.
She basically keeps complaining about like I need to find my purse, my wallet's in there, and then just kind of staggers to the ground and rolls over and dies, and then Sailor and Lula split. But this is kind of the innocence loss moment because up till now, like their trip on the road has just been dancing and fucking and Old men quacking like ducks and little naked mermaid chotchkies and. Just kind of being these like fun-loving rebellious kids who are in love.
And this is the point where we're getting back to and I'm putting this in quotes but reality where, like, the darkness is starting to kind of creep back in. Because from here on out nothing good happens to them Not at all.
We come back to Marietta in the lobby of the hotel and Johnny Farragut has not shown up. And then the hotel manager, who I think is British hey, put this guy on crutches so he's standing there and he's next to this other man who I think works at the hotel and he's trying to call Marietta down. And there is another old man on a cane in the background just hanging around watching what's happening.
And the second hotel worker gives Marietta a note that was handed to him to give to her, and she looks at it and she's like I can't read this. I don't understand how to let us make sounds of words. Will you read it for me? And then the manager reads it and he says well, I don't mind. It says I've gone fishing with a friend, maybe Buffalo Hunting too and she's like Buffalo Hunting what the fuck does that?
mean that Johnny Farragut, he's run out on me.
But then Santo shows up, you three clear out, and the old man in the cane goes me too. He's like yeah, especially you, Conch sharnit. Blink, blink, blink, blink. Marietta goes. Santos, as I live and breathe, Uh-huh.
It's pretty good.
Well, that's Johnny Farragut. What's going on here? And Santo says you're my girl now.
Santos is gonna wipe away all your tears.
I make you happy all right, you need to stop crying like a baby. Don't worry about it. I didn't do anything to Johnny Farragut. I mean me personally. Other people are doing crazy shit to him right now.
Look me in the eyes. I, Santos, did not hurt.
Johnny Farragut in the gut, other people are, but don't worry about that. Cut to Chad.
Juana, the woman who has a leg brace and bleach bond hair and a unibrow. We forgot to describe her weirdness. Yes, just screaming in the camera.
Grace Abriskey from, who played Laura Palmer's mother in Twin Beaks. It's her and Reggie in Drop Shadow.
Johnny Farragut has white duct tape across his mouth that is covered in red lipstick kisses.
And they are all but fucking. Juana and Reggie are all but fucking in his lap Because there's this weird voodoo ritual murder shit happening right now.
Yeah, and she's screaming out fuck me, fuck me. And then they show Johnny Farragut a ring that lets him know that Santos was the one who put out the hit on him and that Marietta was part of it At least that's what he figures out. So he's real heartbroken. And then this just escalates with more screaming about fuck me and kill him. And they do a countdown from 10 to one and, long story short, they shoot Johnny Farragut in the back of the head while Juana is just fingering herself. That's right.
What are we doing?
Bo, lula and Sailor then roll into Big Tuna, texas, ah, where nothing good comes of any of this, no, and Lula is like Sailor, baby. What are we doing here?
This is where the movie's going to end. Oh, ok, and we see the shitty house that was out in the middle of where ever'sville, texas, from earlier.
Sailor is paying this place a visit. It turns out Isabella Rossellini playing Perdita, who is Wanis daughter. She looks just like her Right. Has the unibrow and everything. Apple doesn't fall far from that tree.
For a moment it was like is this the same person? Is this a flashback when she was younger? Like well, let's see how this pans out.
Wait a movie for that Chad. That's a lot of time it's gonna have time travel people.
That's how it is. You see back to the future. That movie was full of racism.
What if the same character is played by two different actors?
It's like Bewitched, but all the seasons rolled into one, can we?
make half this movie in black and white. You know I made a whole movie in black and white once and it got nominated for Oscars.
I only want one, not the eight. So one eighth of this movie should be black and white or contain people quacking like ducks. It turns out one frame of black and white film is equal to one frame of someone quacking like a duck. I did the math.
So Sailor goes up. Hey, baby, is there a hit on me? Because, remember, we promised to tell each other if there was a hit on us and she says no, sailor, there is not a hit on you.
Oh, thanks, baby. I appreciate you telling me that. By the way, did you see my sneak skin jacket? So symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.
Yes, is Lule with you? Did you know that her mama and Santos killed her daddy here? Watch this flashback to add more context to the story. And then we head back to the bathroom from the start of the movie and Marietta tells Sailor, maybe you were in that car, maybe you saw something that looked like me and Santos burning up, somebody who looked like Lula's daddy.
Did you want to fuck Lula's?
daddy? Definitely did not. I do not want to fuck Lula's mama Still a hard. No, I apologize. I am strictly a Lula man, not a Lula mama man or a Lula daddy man.
Be bop a Lula, she's my baby.
We see that Santos is the one who killed Lula's father. And not only did Marietta know, she like cackles all wicked witch style as this happens. That's where Sailor reminds her, like way to deal to tell each other. And you say you've heard nothing.
So I agree, I didn't see nothing outside that house.
Isabella Rosalina and she says but maybe I saw something. Wait a minute, you were there. Everybody in this movie knows everybody in this movie. This is the craziest day I'm learning.
Would you like me to quack like a duck?
Quack quack, quack, quack.
Oof quack, oof quack. That is how ducks quack in France.
Oof quack oof quack, but for some reason I am Spanish in this movie.
I don't know what she was, just weird. Sailor goes back to this shitty room that they've rented. As soon as he comes in, we see that Lula has puked on the floor and left it there.
There's flies all over it too, yeah, it's gross.
And she says Sailor, baby, I think we need to rest here a couple of days. I just hope that seeing that girl die out in the desert didn't jinx us or something. We get another little Marietta as the Wicked Witch moment and then we come back to Sailor, handing her one of those candy necklaces where it's like sweet tarts on a string.
Yeah.
And he says here, baby, I got you this. Oh baby, that's so sweet. I'm not going to eat it right now, but if I ever do, I'm going to thank you every time I eat one.
I would think you would think about me. I gave it to you. What else would you be thinking about? How?
delicious it is.
These are not very good.
We cut to the courtyard of this motel and it is just full of USDA Prime.
Cut. We've got Pruitt Taylor Vence, who we've seen on this show before, who is always the fat guy with the weird eye. This time dressed up in full cowboy attire and he is reading the report of the car accident while one of his flunkies is talking about like who died? Bobby, that guy was so dumb, he deserved to die. He's a piece of shit.
And then Lula and Sailor are just sitting off to the side watching the circus come to town.
Pruitt, taylor Vence is like what is going on in number four, where all those lights are always on. One of the guys says they are making a porno in their Texas style. If you want to join in, sailor is like oh no, thank you very much. I will just stay out of this one if you don't mind. Thin Chat Keep going. One of my favorite moments in this whole movie. Jack Nance Eraser Head himself shows up as Spool 00 Spool.
Is that what they call it? 00 Spool hey, just go in there and freestyle a bunch of weird shit, can it?
be about a dog. Hell yeah, I wouldn't have it any other way.
Are you gonna kill a dog? If so, there's another C-note in it for you.
If you bite the head off, it's two bills, but Jack. Nance says my dog is missing and even though I have not described my dog, you have a picture in your head of what my dog looks like. It is fucking great it might even be Toto.
I love it.
This guy knows what we're doing with the Wizard of Oz Everybody. You can learn from this guy. He made some shit up about a dog and then he brought Wizard of Oz stuff into it. That's why I work with the pros.
I love this so much because it is prime lynch weirdness, but it also has that element of like. You know what he's kind of right. When somebody says to you my dog is missing, you do get a picture of what that dog might look like.
That's like saying to somebody don't think of an elephant, or this is not a pipe, you know like okay, right, his signal. Whatever I?
kind of dig that, and I love Jack Nance's performance in this as well, because he's just way over the top.
Cut to Lula and Sailor, responding the way everyone in the audience who saw this film did with a look of just blank confusion, like their eyes are wide open, like what the hell? Cut to three fat women, topless in some dress of lingerie, frolicking around smoking and eating like fried chicken and drinking booze, on their way to that Texas size porno shoot.
To or from. Yeah, it's quite a harem. And then we see a couple of other guys walk by one of whom, by the way, is Brad Durif on their way to this Texas style porno.
Was he the producer or the actor? The producer? I didn't catch that, but good for him.
Then, chad into the movie strolls willem de faux as Bobby Peru we got to describe.
His hair is slick back, it's jet black. He has this pencil thin mustache that is about a half a centimeter tall. That's just perfectly attached to his upper lip. He has a usmc tattoo on his hand that sailor calls out, but his teeth are the size of dirty brown tic-tacs meshed up into his gums. His smile is 90% gums, 4% teeth. The rest is just disgust. It's terrifying.
He is truly one of cinema's greatest scumbags.
He makes Santos look like a boy scout.
He is by far the craziest character in this movie, and that is saying something. He's just spewing weirdness like he's a former marine.
Things get a little heated between Bobby Peru and one of the other men in the courtyard regarding their time in the military service. But then, to calm things down, somebody offers Bobby Peru more Jack Daniels. That usually works, bo. Let's let cooler heads prevail with more whiskey.
After pouring some booze on this and this is really just a setup where we introduce Bobby Peru especially to sailor Bobby Peru exits the scene because after they pour him the jack he says, speaking to Jack, one of Jack's yearning to go a peeping in a seafood store, giggles old grossly and then staggers off in this movie.
Lula says baby, I'm going to bed, will you go with me? Sailor and Lula, they retire for the night. When they enter the hotel room, he locks the door. To your point. There's a dangerous world outside. And then something about all this it's actually the smell of the vomit, I think triggers a flashback for Lula. That involves Uncle Pooch raping her, and this is the moment where she realizes she's pregnant.
So he kept back to the president in the hotel and Sailor says man, that barf smell don't fade fast. Is there anything I can do for you, baby? And Lula says I don't think so, sail. Then we go to a flashback, however many years ago, and it's Lula getting an abortion, one assumes because Uncle Pooch raped her and got her pregnant.
Certainly that is the implication.
What's missing from this movie? It's got it all shed. Do you think John Waters at the end of this just stood up and just slow clapped like it has finally been Bravo, bravo.
more the one thing I will say for this, other than I think that we don't see the rape of Laura Dern, which thank Christ for that. Yes, and it was never shot. It wasn't something like they edited out or anything. I'm not a monster, but we do see this bloody goop hit this jar in the abortion scene. I know, again, we're talking about everything being spoiled at this point, and this is one of those things.
And this is where Lula is telling Sailor like I need to tell you something, sail, but I'm afraid to say it, so I'm just going to write it down. And so she hands him a note that says I'm pregnant.
This is where Sailor lights up those two cigarettes at the same time.
I find very funny Lights and smokes two cigarettes at the same time. And then he says, well, I guess it's okay by me, peanut. And then she says maybe, sail, but I'm not sure if it's okay by me. I feel like we broke down on that yellow brick road sale and then Sailor says listen, baby, I promise not to let things get worse, not in a million years. Cut to things getting worse.
And the next day Sailor is working on the car and Bobby Peru shows up at Lula and Sailor's hotel room and he bangs on the door Lula is just lounging around in sexy lingerie and red heel shoes, as you do and Bobby Peru comes in when she opens the door and he says I need to use your head. I mean, I'm not going to piss on your head, I just need to piss in your toilet. And then he goes into pee in their toilet. And then, but would you care to explain what happens next?
As he's peeing he says y'all, take a listen. You'll hear a deep sound coming down from Bobby Peru. Then comes out of the room, complains about the smell of vomit, by the way, and then starts to talk about how sexy Lula is, comes right up to her and says do you fuck like a bunny? And she's like what are you talking about? I want you to leave. And he says you know, I sure do, like a girl with nice tits like yours, who talks tough and looks like she can fuck like a bunny. Do you fuck like that?
Because if you do, I'll fuck you good Like a big old jackrabbit bunny jumping all around that whole Bobby Peru don't come up for air. And the whole time he is saying this, his hand is running over her breast and then down between her legs. And he gets right up to her and it's like just go ahead and I'll leave if you say fuck me.
And he repeats it over and over getting more and more is it fair to say intimate and quiet with her. And something else that happens is that whenever Lula has an orgasm, her whole hand, she like extends her fingers almost like a web that they show. And in this scene, what starts out as sexual assault or something very close to it? It's assault. I don't know if it's sexual. Well, no, it's sexual assault because he's rubbing her and touching her Right.
At a certain point she kind of gives into it and is sort of turned on by it. And then she gives him what he wants and says the magic words, and then he responds how bow.
Not right now, baby, I gots to go.
So you later, bye, and he skimpers out and she's an emotional mess and I think he called her out for being pregnant and then just starts weeping.
And then we see her tap these red heels together because you know Wizard of Oz imagery. Bobby Peru then drives up to cage.
Hey say look, will you all go with me and have a?
couple of views. And so he goes, while Lula stares at herself in the mirror and just call sailors name, while she sobs uncontrollably yeah. Meanwhile, bobby Peru and sailor are in this bar, a lot of bottles lined up in front of them. There's this feedstock.
It's got $5,000. Okay, let's go. I know that Lula is pregnant. Lula told you she's pregnant. I made a guess you ain't got no money. $5,000. When did you see Lula? I was pissing on her head Well, not on her head in the head.
Not on her hair and all you understand.
I was in your room and then I sexually assaulted her and made her say fuck me, but did nothing happen.
Nothing happened, but we should, you and me, robbing the food store man.
just thinking about him, he may be the most vile character we've ever talked about on this podcast.
Bobby Peru is absolutely at least in the top three greatest villains we've discussed, and William Defoe is such a good actor and he is clearly just taking this thing for a walk. He is disgusting in this movie Vile inside and out, he looks oily and greasy. Everything he says is vile. His motivations are all vile. He's just the worst kind of person. Sailor, to his credit, turns this down initially, wasn't this?
in Racing, arizona, like you're in a family, like, come on, we're gonna rob these hayseeds here. That goes. Here's our code names.
He sees himself all distorted in this reflection in steel or something. And Bobby, peru is like you know. If you're planning on raising a family in big tuna, $5,000 gets you a long way how do you? know this again. Bobby Peru is just using this information about Lula to squeeze him into a green and he's like, well, what's the plan?
And then Bobby Peru takes him outside to show off some guns in the trunk Shotgun and a pistol and he says how much money you and that little fiddle of yours got anyway? And Sailor admits that it only got about $40 left. I know it ain't much money. Then we see Bobby Peru and Sailor in a crystal ball, as Sailor agrees like that kind of money sure would get us a ways down that road. And then Sailor goes back to the room late at night.
He's a little drunk. Sure Lula's chain smoking in bed, pregnant like you do mostly naked clocks right away that he's kind of drunk You've been with Bobby Peru.
Oh, darling, you know what? It's been a long day. I'm just going to take off my jeans here and show off my hilarious thigh high male stripper underwear.
It is quite a banana havoc he's got going on here.
Lula says are you up to something with Bobby Peru? Sailor, that Bobby Peru is a black angel. You hook up with him and you're going to regret it. And Sailor says thanks, darling.
I know you got my best interest in mine, but I got to get some sleep. And that night I had a dream. I drifted off, thinking about happiness, birth, a new life. But now I was haunted by a vision. He was horrible, the tiny tooth biker of the apocalypse that I feared. I myself had unleashed him. Well, he was the fear that would soon be when Florence Arizona found her Nathan Gaugham Wait, shit, that's not the right movie.
This is where we get Lula saying the titular line, where she says this whole world is wild at heart and weird on top.
That's the name of this movie, wild at heart, although now that I think about it, you could have called it weird on top would have been equally as appropriate names Sailor.
I just wish I was somewhere over that rainbow sale.
Will you sing me love me, Tinder. Remember earlier when you said that that's what you'd sing to your wife. We cut to the farmhouse Isabella Rosalini's there. And wouldn't you know about Bobby? Peru is there.
Everybody knows everybody's small world and she tells him about Sailor coming to see her. He came to see me.
He asked if there was a hit. I told him no, we quite like ducks, both in French and in English. That sure sounds like a lot of fun. It was great fun. We played a quick game, old MacDonald. That's how the ducks came up into conversation.
But it is what we do Bobby Peru says I think Sailor may have an accident before, during or after this hold up.
That sounds very reasonable to me.
We see, by him sticking it on his oily forehead, that he has one of the silver dollars dropped into the slot for Mr Reindeer.
I think we kind of figured that out. We didn't need to see the silver dollar. It's great that you made sure that anyone who wasn't paying attention to what was going on.
But okay, fine. And Sailor is out in the desert waiting for Bobby Peru to show up we're really close to the end of this movie, by the way, yeah and he's about to turn around and leave. He's having a bit of a realization like this is probably a terrible idea. But then that's where Bobby Peru shows up with Perdita, isabella Rossellini, and Sailor is like wait a second, you know her. And he's like sure, everybody knows everybody in this movie, sailor.
And it turns out Isabella Rossellini is going to be their driver. Bobby Peru is like well, you ready to go do this thing? And Sailor says well, I guess a eagle flies on Friday, let's go.
Let's go get Nathan Jr.
I mean $5,000.
Which I like the fact that this is such a low amount of money to you know, it's like again. This is just such a low ball, low rent kind of criminal enterprise.
Our trio of bandits head up to this feed store, bobby Peru and Sailor put a full pair of pantyhose on their heads, with the legs hanging off. As I mentioned earlier, the same joke was in Raising Arizona. Once they get inside, bobby Peru wields his shotgun and here Sailor goes full, nick Cage just screaming and whipping around and karate kicking outside Isabella Rossellini.
She's greeted by the sheriff in his car and the sheriff gets out and he walks over and he's like oh hey there, young Missy, you in for somebody. And she says my husband. He is in the feed store, gasoline supplies for a duck. And then, before this conversation can go much further, back inside the feed store, bobby Peru just decides to shoot one of the employees, alerting the sheriff outside that something is awry inside the feed store.
Isabella Rossellini immediately just leaves, she hauls asked and kind of hits the sheriff and sideswipes him, knocking him to the ground and she speeds away. Sailor is inside the feed store and he goes oh man, are you kidding me, bobby Peru? What are you doing? And then Bobby Peru points this shotgun at Sailor and he says you're next. How haunting is it to see Willem Dafoe with this mustache and these brown baby teeth and his swollen gums stuffed inside a pair of women's pantyhose.
You can close your eyes and still see it. Oh, sure. It's horrible.
Sailor tries to shoot Bobby Peru, yeah, and it just clicks and Bobby Peru says those are dummies, dummy. A guy pops up behind the counter and Bobby Peru has to shoot him, emptying the chamber on the shotgun. So he's got a reload and cage just runs.
Bobby Peru follows him outside and then the sheriff shoots Bobby Peru six times. Then Bobby Peru falls to his knees and, through a real twisted of bad luck, the shotgun is beneath his chin and it goes off and blows Bobby Peru's head off his shoulders and this blob of brains and skull and face and pencil, thin mustache and pantyhose just flies through the air and bounces off the building and then just squishes on the ground.
Yep this movie is bananas.
Sailor just moans to himself while he's lying on the ground in the dirt. I'll really let. Lula down this time. Yeah, he's kind of crying.
This is where I was, like you can knock like a man. What happened to all that bravado and coolness you had earlier in the movie, with your individuality and belief in personal freedom? Now you're just laying on the dirt, weeping.
There's something missing from this scene. Let's get back to the tellers. Um, how come, david, aren't they dead? He shot them both. No, it's a shotgun, they're just maimed. And so we cut back inside Chad and one of the tellers has had his hand shot off. Yes, the other one, who is bloody all over his chest from getting shot with this scatter gun, is helping him look for the hand he is missing and assuring him that they can sew this thing back on.
They're looking around like it's the back of an earring or something.
Not a full hand Meanwhile we cut outside where there is a dog running away with the hand in his mouth. Perfect, why, never mind, let it go.
Please ask the question why was there a dog there? Was it like bring your pet to the office day or something? It's the bank dog yeah. Yeah, dollar. Didn't we see another movie where a dog had a hand in its mouth wandering around?
I'm thinking of the movie house from 1986, which we haven't done on this show yet. Yeah, but that definitely happens in that movie. Anywho sailor gets thrown into jail, Of course.
Clink.
Lula calls his name and starts eating her necklace as Marietta shows up at the courthouse Santos is with her, by the way.
Marietta eyes her daughter and immediately knows she's pregnant.
Lula initially refuses to go home and as Santos tries to hug her like a father, she just screams bloody murder.
Felt like there was more to that scream than what the movie was letting on. But you know what? Some stories don't need to be told. Sailor's in jail. He's reading a letter from Lula that says Dear sailor, darling, I'm keeping the baby. I will name him or her, pace. It is hard to believe pace will be six years old when you get out of prison. I love you. I miss dancing and talking and the other, xoxoxo Lula.
Then an insert five years, 10 months, 21 days later, Marietta's laying flat on a rolling footstool drunk.
Her hair is just out of control and she's on the phone screaming at Lula. What's on this sailor's drinking in?
Lula says if you try to interfere with me and sailor's happiness, I will pull your arms out by the roots.
You left out the part where Lula is holding a glass of ice water and she's rubbing it on her nipple.
Oh sure, Well, keeping it standing up and saying hello like sailor like sailor and her daddy liked. But she throws this glass of water on a picture of her mother. You know, wicked witch of the West and all. Oh and then we get a moment that I find really interesting, where they're on their way to pick up sailor and they're walking beside some train tracks and they walk by a motorcycle accident and she hides their son's face from it.
They're driving by in their car. Oh yeah, right, right.
And she hides Pace's eyes, and it's that sense of this is, in a way, sort of innocence regained, at least for Pace. I'm going to keep my child innocent because we would sort of a mirror of the car accident that they saw earlier in the film, when everything went to shit.
Yeah, but when they go by the car accident, there's like bloody bodies on the ground and then a dude in a wheelchair rolls up and he goes. Hey man, the same thing happened to me last year. Let's not make this all about you, sweetheart. There's some dying people on the ground down 911.
Maybe we've got bigger fish to fry in this situation.
We'll hear your story later, champ.
Sailor is waiting by the train tracks with a stuffed bear that he-.
No, it's a lion.
Right, of course it is Stuff lion for Pace and Lulun. Pace show up and of course he's in his snakeskin jacket.
Hey, little buddy, I got you this stuff lion and this tiny oil can, and then here's some sweet breads. Those are brains.
Thanks, mister. Who is this guy? Mom, this is your daddy. What?
And they pick off, like at one big happy family. They jump in the convertible. At a certain point, though, lula just stops the car and gets out, and Sailor chases after her, and Sailor says I'm sorry, baby, this is just a mistake. Look, pace there has never known me, and being apart for six years makes it easy for us to split up too.
So I'm just gonna ski that on. See you later, baby.
And he leaves.
Well, he stops off to give Pace fatherly advice. Hey, amigo, if ever something doesn't feel right, remember what Pancho says to that old Cisco kid let's win before we're dancing on the end of a rope with no music. Keep your chin up and then takes off. Chad, I can't stress enough to our listeners. We are about what? 180 seconds from the end of this movie. Excluding the final song yes, so Sailor takes off, is immediately surrounded by a bunch of tufts in this random neighborhood.
It's like a random assortment of urban youth, and then they proceed to just beat the shit out of him, rightfully so.
They beat the shit out of him, laura Palmer herself. Cheryl Lee shows up as the good witch, as he is having this hallucination after being beaten up and says Lula loves you. And he says I'm no good and I'm wild at heart.
Look at my big old nose now where I got beat up.
I look like Carl Walton, if you were truly wild at heart, you'd fight for your dreams. Don't turn away from love, Sailor.
Hey, that sounds like some pretty good advice.
I'll do what you just said, too, fairy. He wakes up, the urban youth look at him and they're like have you had enough asshole, cause he called them a horrible name.
And he's like yes, I have had enough, but I want to apologize to you, gentlemen, for referring to you as homosexuals. You have taught me a valuable lesson.
Lula, and he just takes off running after her.
The fact that he thinks them for beating the shit out of him, I think is very funny. And as he screams Lula and runs off, we do a quick cutaway to that picture of Marietta that Lula threw water on, and Marietta, her picture, just fades away Like the witch in the Wizard of Oz. And then Sailor literally runs over the tops of cars in traffic to get to Lula and he embraces her and then he begins to sing Chad, Love me tender, love me true.
And as this happens, she realizes what this means and it's like oh, Sailor. And then the credits roll as he sings the entire song.
And then, when he finishes singing the entire song, the remainder of the credits roll in total silence. Yeah, it's an interesting bold choice.
They kiss again at the end of the song. It fades to black and then the credits finish against a black background. End of movie. The end, their end, completes Wild at Heart, which for my money I think I said this in the intro this is sort of the beginning of Lynch at his most audacious as a director, and I think this movie is very uneven and it's certainly all over the place, but there's just nothing else like it.
I agree with that. I think it was also Lynch at a point in his career where no one would or could say no to it. He can do pretty much whatever he wanted. Yeah, within reason, and this movie is evidence of that and I'm thankful for it. But I don't think I like this movie. Like when I say I don't like it do. I find it enjoyable Parts of it, but the parts that I find off-putting outweigh the entertainment and the enjoyment. That scene with Bobby Peru and her I don't like that at all.
It's hard to watch. There's a lot of scenes in this movie that are hard to watch.
I mean, I don't disagree with that. I think that Roger Ebert's complaint with Lynch has always been that he wants to show all this graphic, outrageous stuff and then sort of give it a punchline and back away from it. And I don't know that that's true. I think it's more that those things just exist alongside each other in Lynch's mind, that you can be outrageous and violent and gruesome and silly at the same time.
But I think one of the critiques of this film are all of the weird side detours of the cockroach anuses and the Texas-sized porno, all of that and the Wizard of Oz stuff. Maybe that kind of goes to your comment about it being just somewhat uneven. It just feels like a mixed bag of different things and every now and you get a bite of something that's just toxic.
I've seen this enough now that the stuff that is really shocking and crazy and ultra-violent I'm kind of okay with it's still uncomfortable to watch but I'm like, oh okay. Well, that's kind of Lynch Like at a certain point you're either in or you're out, right With the kinds of violence that he enjoys exploring, and I'm kind of in on it.
It's one of those movies we've talked about this before that it's not a movie I can recommend to anyone because it's like you gotta go through a questionnaire of like okay, do you like David Lynch? Uh-huh, uh-huh, okay, and which films of David Lynch is do you like?
Uh-huh okay.
And if they say, like Lost Highway, it's like, oh okay, you should watch Wild at Heart. And if they say I really like the Elephant man and Dune, it's like, well then, you should not watch this movie.
How do you feel about movies with Laura Derns and Wicked Witch of the West and Ray Bad? Oral Hygiene A visible abortion. Car crashes, abortion, carpet vomit, homophobia, lap dances while people shit. Yeah, Wow, you had me at lap dances while people shit. Sign me up.
When you describe that to me, I'm like that movie sounds great.
You give me that. I'm like I don't think so.
That's the thing is like Lynch is not for everybody, especially Lynch at his most experimental. And this isn't his most experimental movie, I think.
Maybe Inland Empire is maybe a little more inscrutable than this is, but there are some really fascinating moments in it and I think Nicholas Cage is giving a fantastic performance and I love Lord Dern in this and, like I said, I like a movie where two characters are genuinely in love with each other and love to fuck and they talk about that and you see it and it's part of their relationship and it feels like an actual, honest, to goodness, grown up relationship.
If that's the kind of movie you wanna watch, go watch True Romance.
They don't really fucking that movie. They do. It's kind of discussed around it. That feels more mainstream, not even mainstream. That feels a little more sanitized than something like this where this is a movie where these people fuck every chance they get. That is true, it's such a critical part of their relationship.
But what else do they do? Smoke and drink and have sex.
Both of them come from bad backgrounds and they found some kind of solace and peace in each other, and that's the thing that I think makes the relationship kind of wonderful is that they're both these incredibly broken people and together they are sort of one decent person.
Here's how I rank these movies for this season. Holiday Road my number one this movie, without question. Film on Louise, best movie we've discussed this season, arguably best movie we've ever talked about on this podcast. I got a surprise for number two. My number two is Over the Top Wow, I know, do you hear the gas from the audience? Because I think that it is so goofy and terrible, for all the right reasons, as an 80s canon disaster, that's more palatable. My number three is Wild at Heart.
Now, the only reason Wild at Heart is number three over number two is because Wild at Heart is so off-putting.
All right.
Like if I'm talking to John Q Public and Jane Q Normal, I'm going Thelma and Louise and like here's Over the Top, it's terrible, but for all the right reasons. Then we're crossing the train tracks in the rough part of town, then Wild at Heart, artie, farty, weirdsville. My number four is Vacation, followed by Drive Angry and then the Hitcher.
I'm going to go reverse order. I think the worst of it is the Hitcher. I think we agree on that. Okay, my number five, then, is going to be Vacation.
I can't argue with that.
I debated Vacation and Drive Angry A number four is going to be Drive Angry. Right. Number three is Over the Top. Here's the big one. That's the thing is like comparing Thelma and Louise and Wild. At Heart Is it like you have to. It's not apples and oranges, it's like apples and manatees.
I think it's apples and Bobby Peruse.
I think Wild at Heart is my number two, thelma and Louise is my number one, but that is such a close call. It is because Wild at Heart is so uneven and Thelma and. Louise is like consistently great and entertaining it's tight. But yeah, it's such a great movie. But the fact that we've talked about Thelma and Louise and Wild at Heart in the same season even if you weren't as wild as I am about Wild at Heart, it's unquestionably a movie made by a great director.
Yes, you will feel something. I'll tell you that. Yeah, you're not watching Wild at Heart and walking away from that like you did. Madagascar too.
I know that I've seen the movie Ice Age. I can't tell you anything about the movie Ice Age.
No, you watch Wild at Heart. There are 10 scenes minimum that will stick with you forever. Then when somebody says, give me 10 scenes from Wild at Heart, you will have those forever, whether it's I'm trying to make my lunch.
Do you want to fuck Lula's mama?
Cockroach anuses. Do you see my dog, texas Sauporno, the abortion, the rapes, the pantyhose head explosion.
That scene of them going dancing him, humiliating the guy that hits on Lula and then singing Love Me. That eight minutes of film is just one of my favorite things that's ever been in movies. It's so much fun and it's so silly and over at the top, but it's also just packed with genuine innocence and sweetness. It kind of captures what I love about Lynch, which is it's absurd, but there's real emotion in there and that's tough to get.
That's a tough line to walk and Lynch is kind of when he's firing on all cylinders. He's sort of genius and one of the few people in the world that can kind of do that.
You know, bo, as one season comes to an end, another season begins, and these days there's a lot in the news about artificial intelligence and the power of machine learning, and a lot of people are wondering should I be frightened of a future where robots are going to take over and enslave humans?
The answer is absolutely, and, based on what little I've read on the internet, one thing is for certain there's no stopping and the robots will be taking over, and I, for one, welcome our new robot over.
Hail robots.
I'd like to remind them, as a trusted podcast personality, bo and I can be helpful in rounding up others to toll in the underground mineral caves, in the silicon mines. Ha ha, ha, ha, ha ha. So, as a preliminary act of goodwill, our next season is going to feature six robots themed movies in a season that we're calling Domo Origato.
Just like that song. Wait, what now what?
Anyway, to kick things off, we are going to watch a movie that I believe is currently only available illegally on YouTube it's a movie that stars Christopher Guest, Randy Quaid, Bernadette Peters and Andy Kaufman Wow, what a cast. Yes, in a movie that I do believe has a 0% freshness ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. In a robotic nightmare of a failure called Heart Beeps, what happens when two robots fall in love? Well, come back in two weeks and you'll find out. Huh boy it's back to the crap.
Huh yeah, it's more shit, but I think this season I've kind of enjoyed dabbling in the world of quality films. So, for everyone listening, if you have a listener request, email us at picksixmovies at gmail.com Let us know what movie starring robots you would like for us to review. We have not finalized. I think there's only two movies that have been actually chosen for this season, which means we have four more that are open up. So reach out to us, let us know.
You can always find us on social media or walking down the street or doing whatever it is that we do. So that's what's happening next season. Bo, any final thoughts that you have on Wild at Heart?
No, I'm just glad to wrap this episode up because I got to hit the head, Not your head, head you understand, not your hair and all but your head.
Somebody get a camera. This guy's gonna piss on this dude's face. I smell a sequel Wild at Heart, number two, the quackening. Can you shit on the guy? There's a C note in it for you.
Oh, I can shit on someone, pfft.
Pfft, we'll see you two weeks time, everybody.