In a very real sense, Wild at Heart was an integral part of an awakening that led to the life I am living today, and it will forever hold a special place in my own heart even as my research and teaching interests have broadened to many other things. And in Montreal I stayed, first to do my PhD, then to teach, and I have included Lynch on many of my syllabi over the years. By then I was eyeballs deep into the formal study of film at the end of my BA, and the papers I wrote on Lynch got me into grad school, the impetus for my move to Montreal in 1999 where my only goal was to write a thesis on sound in the films of David Lynch. A long obsession was sparked, and when Lost Highway dropped after Lynch’s long, depressed hiatus of 5 years my head nearly exploded. From here I began to look out for Lynch’s other films, diving full throttle into Twin Peaks while getting caught up on Lynch’s classics. It was this film, along with a few others from the early 90s, that I came to realize that to find more of what I liked about these films was to seek out more by the same directors. But at the ripe age of 18 or so, entering my first year of university, it was so clear that there was something else going on in this film, so different from any I had seen before, so passionate. I was drawn to Wild at Heart initially because I was a Nicholas Cage fan, and on that front it didn’t disappoint still one of my favourite of his performances after all these years. I enjoyed its grim absurdity and wanted more, but at that time the answer to where I could find more was to seek out other science fiction films. As a science fiction fan I had seen Dune many times, but did not think of it as an auteur film – or even know what that was.
Throughout my teenage years I had made movie choices based on things like genre, celebrity, or franchise. Wild at Heart was the film with which I became conscious of David Lynch as a director, and which had a major role in awakening me to the very idea of the director itself.
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