Personal freedom in Wild at Heart

A speed metal band is playing. Red lights dance on Sailor and Lula, lost in the music. She writhes on the floor, he is kicking the air; they are outrageously, incandescently sexy. A man – described in the script as “idiot punk” – gets between them, blocking her way. Sailor lifts a fist into the air, fingers extended into horns, and the music instantly grinds to a halt. He demands an apology for his girl.

The punk: “You look like a clown in that stupid jacket.”

In a thick Elvis drawl, Sailor: “This is a snakeskin jacket. And for me, it’s a symbol of my individuality, and my belief in personal freedom.”

Watching Wild at Heart for the first time was a sensation: lurid colours, cars exploding into fireballs, that indelible guitar riff. Seeing it again 20 years on, although recalling little of the plot, every contour of Nicolas Cage’s snakeskin jacket is etched into my brain. The jacket is spectacular in its garishness, glistening in the sun like a second skin. It is almost a character in itself, a totemic talisman of wild freedom. As a visual shorthand, the leather jacket evokes an archetypal American masculinity: Elvis, Brando, James Dean; tragic, beautiful men upon whose gravitational pull an entire nation’s identity was formed.

PhDs could be written about the significance of leather jackets in Lynch alone. In his world of doubles, doppelgangers and mirroring, a leather jacket is likely to be associated with a character at one of two extremes: on the one hand, a heroic, almost innocent ideal (James Hurley, Michael Cera as Wally Brando), on the other, someone darkly, deeply dangerous (Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, evil Cooper in The Return). Sailor falls somewhere in between: he has the capacity and taste for violence, if he feels it is needed, but his moral compass keeps those impulses in check (mostly).

Cage had found the jacket in a second-hand shop in Los Angeles a year earlier, and Lynch worked it into the script. Cage has said it reminded him of James Dean’s red jacket in Rebel Without a Cause: “that was such a symbol, an icon of that time”. In turn, echoes of Sailor and his jacket can be found in Ryan Gosling’s satin scorpion bomber in Drive, and the charismatic, troubled men who populate Lana Del Rey’s work (in 2021, she named one of her songs Wild at Heart, featuring the ominously prescient line “I left Calabasas, escaped all the ashes, ran into the dark”). Fashion runways, including Altuzarra’s spring 2017 and Khaite’s spring 2023 collections, have been inspired by the jacket.

The idiot punk wasn’t completely wrong. The snakeskin jacket does look ridiculous. And yet, somehow, Sailor pulls it off. The character’s obsession with Elvis – shared by Cage and Lynch – is dialled up to a sometimes comical extreme, but his relationship with Lula is genuine: something pure and sacred that protects them both from the corrupt world around them. At a time when the dark side of America has never been more apparent, Sailor’s snakeskin jacket is a reminder of its smouldering, shimmering best.

To commemorate the life and creative legacy of the peerless filmmaker David Lynch, Little White Lies has brought together writers and artists who loved him to create ‘In Heaven Everything Is Fine‘: a series celebrating his work. We asked participants to respond to a Lynch project however they saw fit – the results were haunting, profound, and illuminating.