Weird America.

WILD AT HEART, David Lynch recently conceded, is not a film for eve ne." Maybe he's right. It begins with the hero bashing open the skull of a black who pulls a knife on him. After a brief prison term, he elopes cross-country with the girl he was fighting over; they have frequent and fairly explicit sex along the way. Her mother, who it transpires has tried to seduce him in a public toilet, sends several men to murder him. On the road, the lovers come across a bloody traffic accident. Meanwhile, a rich mobster sits on a toilet talking into his telephone as naked women attend him. During an armed robbery, one man is vividly decapitated; another has a hand shot off, and as he crawls around in his own blood trying to find it a dog trots out the back door holding it in his teeth. At different points in the film, both mother and daughter vomit, and a man is murdered

o rite. Oh, and the hero gets his nose swollen in a fistfight.

I hope I haven't given the wrong impression: Wild at Heart is a comedy.

And believe it or not, it is pretty funny. The two lovers, Sailor (Nicholas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern), are a pair of losers who are in over their heads. They stick together in dopey devotion as gory misadventures befall them. "This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top," Lula wails. Sailor faces everything with the polite, stoical stupidity of an Elvis Presley, whom he explicitly resembles; in one wonderfully sweet and funny scene, a hard-rock band turns into a backup group for Cage's dead-on Elvis imitation as girls scream and swoon. He proudly wears an outlandish snakeskin jacket, which he says "represents my individuality and my belief in personal freedom," a slightly cracked credo that gets more endearing every time he repeats it. Other eccentric characters keep roaming in and out, most of whom have nothing to do with the plot. Then again Sailor and Lula don't have much to do with the plot either. They more or less outrun it.

But even the jokes have an eerie edge. Wild at Heart has Lynch's trademark themes: death, violence, mutilation, deformity, sex, kinkiness, secret traumas-but at the heart of it all, an innocence that escapes being overwhelmed by the monstrosities around it. The innocence is what makes the rest so scary. You never know what will happen next in a Lynch film; you feel trapped and fascinated, as in a dream. "Dreamlike" is the word most often used to describe his films. Dreams, disturbing flashbacks, and strange images are his stock in trade.

Lynch is all the rage right now, thanks to his explosive hit Blue Velvet (1986) and his TV series Twin Peaks. Both are formulaically said to reveal "the dark underside of Middle America," which makes them sound like exposes, as if Lynch were your basic left-wing avant-garde muckraker of the national soul. Perish the thought. He's a 44-year-old former Eagle Scout who is said to adore Ronald Reagan (probably an unrequited passion) and whose only known addiction, now conquered, is milkshakes. Interviews show him to be something of an eccentric himself, given to ancient boyish locutions like "golly" and "neat." He talks more like a worried schoolboy-a hick Holden Caulfield-than a theorist of the cinema, let alone an avatar of Freedom of Expression.

If there's any sort of philosophy behind his work, it's probably something like what he recently told Rolling Stone: "There are too many possibilities for something to go wrong-so you could always worry about that. And there's many things that are hidden and seeming like many, many secrets; and you don't know for sure whether you are being just paranoid or if there really are some secrets. You know little by little, just by studying science, that certain things are hidden there are things you can't see. And your mind can begin to create many things to worry about. And then once you're exposed to fearful things, and you see that really and truly many, many, many things are wrong-and so many people are participating in strange and horrible things-you begin to worry that the peaceful, happy life could vanish or be threatened." He's said to have scolded a woman on the set for swearing too much.

A Strange World

IT'S a strange world, isn't it?" says the heroine of Blue Velvet. On Lynch's showing, it certainly is. His first movie, Eraserhead, is about a young couple with a horribly malformed child. It's sometimes billed as a horror film, though again, the label doesn't quite fit. Lynch made it when he was depressed about his first marriage, which produced a daughter born with clubfeet. His first real success came in 1980: The Elephant Man, a film of dark tenderness, with a moving performance by John Hurt under a ton of hideous latex. Lynch showed that he could play on heartstrings as well as nerves.

He bombed his next time out, in 1984, with Dune, a clumsy version of Frank Herbert's science-fiction classic. Lynch blames the studio for hacking his work down to two hours, but it's hard to see how longer could have been better: the story is tediously futuristic," full of big battle scenes where confused hordes zap each other with ray guns and things. That sort of "future"-10,000 A.D. or so-is too abstract to have the quirky emotional resonance Lynch excels in.

Blue Velvet was Lynch's own idea. By general consent (John Simon demurring: "mindless junk") it was one of the most powerful films of the Eighties. Set in Lumberton," a wholesome-looking Everytown, it's another label-strainer: a mystery, a black comedy," a tale of perversion and guilt, what you will. Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) comes home to Lumberton to visit his sick father. Walking through a field, he happens on a severed human ear. With the help of a local detective's wholesome daughter (Laura Dern), he learns that the police suspect a crime somehow connected with a nightclub singer (Isabella Rossellini), whom it would be stretching a point to call wholesome. He sneaks into her apartment one night and, in a bizarre and terrifying scene, watches helplessly from her closet as she is abused and raped by a sociopath (for want of a stronger word) who is holding her husband and child hostages. Jeffrey becomes strangely implicated with the singer and her tormentor, Frank Booth, played with maniacal force by Dennis Hopper.

The plot, as Simon complained, is incoherent. But so is any nightmare. You don't think of that while you're experiencing it. Blue Velvet is one of the most frightening sequences of images ever thrown onto a screen. Hopper and his cohorts appear in only three sequences, but they are enough to leave you drenched with fear. Even the innocuous title song becomes a little chilling to listen to. In Lynch's world, innocence is at bay. Innocence is real, but it's never quite ... innocent. At least it's not beyond the possibility of corruption. Jeffrey feels the tug of evil through his attachment to the singer, who has succumbed to it.

Not Quite Agatha Christie

TWIN PEAKS, subject to TVs constraints of decency and decorum, shows that Lynch can give his intuition subtler expression when he doesn't make use of shocking extremes. A girl's body washes up on shore. The town is stunned. Everyone knew her. She turns out to have led a double life. So does everyone else in town.

"Who killed Laura Palmer?" has become a sort of marketing slogan for Twin Peaks, but it's hard to imagine a solution. Lynch is about as far from Agatha Christie as you can get. Not only is the tightly woven plot alien to his style; it's not even clear what the ground rules (if any) are in his world. The real interest of the series lies in the delineation of the populace of Twin Peaks itself. Everyone turns out to have idiosyncrasies. The FBI man who is sent to investigate Laura's death is a little pixilated too; he dictates endlessly into his pocket tape recorder, not omitting such details as what he's snacking on at the moment, and he announces that he plans to crack the case with the use of a Tibetan mystical technique he has learned of. In one sequence he dreams he is several years older, sitting in a red-curtained room with a dwarf and a dead ringer for Laura, both of whom utter nonsequiturs in accents so strange as to require subtitles. Then he bolts up in bed, calls the sheriff, and says he knows who killed Laura-but, having awakened the sheriff in the dead of night, says he won't tell who until they meet in the morning. It's funny, but in a funny way. There are no mandatory laughs in Lynch's work; even the broadest jokes seem to be private. Good and evil are clearly-even violently-distinguished, but, otherwise, the normal and the abnormal keep close company, even within a single character. Lynch is so interested in loose ends for their own sake that it's almost impossible to conceive of a satisfying resolution for Twin Peaks. In the same way, Blue Velvet's happy ending, an Ozzie-andHarriet return to suburban bliss, seemed forced.

Despite what sounds like a highly normal boyhood, Lynch hardly seems to know what normality is. He admits as much. Asked how many cards are in his deck, he replied, "I don't have any idea, but it's not 52." He may have dealt a few away in early adulthood. After growing up in Twin Peaks territory (he was born in Montana) and Alexandria, Virginia, he lived for several harrowing years in a bad part of Philadelphia, where he once witnessed a murder and became a regular visitor at a local morgue. That may account for his preoccupation with dissolution and how human beings get from here to there. Not that he's analytical about such things. In fact, he has a naive fascination with surface phenomena, and he just puts them up there on the screen, exaggerated, uninterpreted, for their own sake.

He really pushes it in Wild at Heart. The violence is just too much for most people, even though Lynch edited out a few bits that were grossing out preview audiences. And the film is held together, if you can call it that, by a badly overworked Wizard of Oz conceit: Lula's mother appears as a hysterical witch, sometimes riding (in Lula's hallucinations) on a broomstick over the highway; and at the end, Sailor has a brief dream in which a Good Witch, in a pink ruffled gown, floats down from the sky in a bubble. A private joke is one thing; this is more like a private thigh-slapper.

New under the Sun

NEARLY everything that has been said against Wild at Heart, and against Lynch generally, strikes me as true enough. There are obvious risks in an ecentric making films about eccentrics. All I can say is that Lynch is something new under the sun. If you can bear to watch him, you can't bear not to watch him. For all their violence, his films aren't cruel to the viewer in the manner of Total Recall and a hundred slasher movies. They contain indefensible obscenities, but their spirit is monogamous. They move in dangerous territory, but they know right from wrong.

Society doesn't have many secrets left. Individuals do, but each of us knows in principle how strange any of the others may be. In Lynch's films, normal" is something you act, not something you effortlessly are, and private and secret selves spill out unpredictably. Closely observed, nobody is average. When he keeps this intuition under control, Lynch is funny, scary, and utterly riveting. His awareness of human queerness gives him acres of territory all to himself. His refusal to turn it into a statement means you can't outguess him. Even he seems not to know what happens next.

Still, what magic! Life is awfully weird, now that you mention it-in America and elsewhere. Someone has noticed! Someone with a camera and an imagination and the wit to spot the specifically American expressions of it, without being anti-American in his attitude toward it all. He'll bear watching.