It is where Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) learned to smoke (at age four, shortly after the death of his mother from lung cancer), where his parents rarely were. It is where Lula Fortune (Laure Dern) was raped, her father betrayed and murdered by her mother. Home is not possible because it is, in Wild at Heart, a place of abuse, terror, and deep, irrevocable unhappiness. The title suggests a refusal of domesticity, or a failed domestication in Lynch’s film, the domicile itself falls apart. Although the film follows in the path of The Wizard of Oz, which it invokes frequently and openly, “home” remains elusive within the diegetic spaces of the film. In Wild at Heart, the diegesis takes place entirely over there, elsewhere. 1 Even then, the passages are visible: the radiator in Eraserhead, as well as other quasi-imaginary topographies the expression of interior monologues in Dune (a technique that recalls one of Lynch’s favorite films, Sunset Blvd.) the recourse to Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) as an exaggerated referent and framing device in Wild at Heart the environmental transformation (of everyone and everything around him, including the scenery and the weather) of Alvin Straight’s tractor-induced travel in The Straight Story. Some films seem to take place exclusively on one side or the other (but even then always with an awareness of the other side), or entirely on the other side: Eraserhead, Dune (1984), Wild at Heart (1990), The Straight Story (1999). Most of Lynch’s films depict the passage from one side to the other, this world to that, the world above to that below, night to day and day to night.

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