COMMENTARY : Why the Critics Have Lynch’s Head in a Noose : Movies: Their rejection of ‘Wild at Heart,’ a Cannes winner, has all the sound and fury of a comeuppance.

Instead of being wild at heart, it’s empty at heart.

--The Washington Post

You may enjoy ‘Wild at Heart.’ But an hour later you’ll wonder why . . . It’s David Lynch Lite.

--The Boston Globe

“Wild at Heart” reveals a master of movie style on his way to becoming a mannerist.

--Time magazine One comes out of the theater feeling as if the mind had begun to melt.

--The New York Times

The Backlash, that curious natural phenomenon that occurs somewhat less frequently than the aurora borealis and is considerably less pretty to watch, is upon us. The viciousness of the pans David Lynch’s macabre road movie “Wild at Heart” has received indicate that something more than a “bad” movie is the motivating force here. The film’s trashing, coming just three months after it won the Palme D’Or at Cannes, has all the furious force of a comeuppance. So, for that matter, does the recent snub of “Twin Peaks” at the Emmys.

Why the Lynch mob?

I’m not blind to the film’s faults: It doesn’t really have the haunting suggestiveness of “Blue Velvet,” it crams too many crazies into too little story, the last half-hour runs out of steam, and a few set pieces are uncomfortably close to David Lynch shtick.

On the other hand, I find it difficult to sanction the film’s spirited, wholesale dismissal, particularly since the dismissals come from critics (and audiences) who exulted over “Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks.” After all, it’s not as if the sensibility at work in “Wild at Heart” has nothing in common with those films. And it diverges from them in ways that make sense both for the film and for Lynch’s expansion as an artist.

Can it be that Lynch, having broken out of his “Blue Velvet” cult status to the mass-audience TV success of “Twin Peaks,” is being pasted for becoming a household name? Hell hath no fury like a critic whose cult icon has gone public.

Hollywood isn’t so chock-a-block with genius that we can afford to trounce Lynch for attempting to extend the boundaries of his artistry, particularly at a time when on-the-edge filmmakers are bucking a conservative juggernaut in popular culture. Even if the film is counted a failure--a verdict I reject--it should still be obvious that a failure from Lynch is far more interesting than the bland successes of most studio hands. Blind praise can be as deleterious for an artist as blanket dismissal--if he bothers to listen to his critics. But there are plenty of reasons to praise with open eyes what Lynch has accomplished in “Wild at Heart.”

Far from being a sweeping of oddments from Lynch’s left-over pile, “Wild at Heart” reverses many of the strategies set up in “Blue Velvet.” Where that film was infernally dark and enclosed and trance-like, “Wild at Heart” is recklessly agitated, lit up, on the move. Lynch started out as a painter and sculptor. In plastic terms, “Blue Velvet” is representational and static, while “Wild at Heart” is action painting.

Where “Blue Velvet” centered on a single demon, Dennis Hopper’s Frank, “Wild at Heart” proffers an entire grab-bag. The Kyle MacLachlan character in “Blue Velvet” followed the filament of his own sexuality into pitch-black terrain; it was a profoundly inward journey. Nicolas Cage’s Sailor in “Wild at Heart” has a profoundly extroverted sexuality--that’s why his Elvis mimicry is so viciously apt. And, unlike “Blue Velvet,” the rigors the hero must undergo are there to test his love for his woman, Laura Dern’s Lula. The film’s emotional core--the love between Sailor and Lula--is both more ardent and more sentimental than anything in “Blue Velvet.”

It could be that this sentimentality, this hankering for the fairy-tale complacencies of true love, is part of what is putting people off to “Wild at Heart.” At the end of “Blue Velvet,” many in the audience refused to accept its peachy-keen idealism as anything but a put on. But Lynch doesn’t have a taste for satire. The twinkly small-town bliss of “Blue Velvet”’s final moments is no joke. Quite the opposite, it represents what Lynch wants the world to be--all mowed lawns and elm trees and chirping birds. The horror in his movies issues from the fact that the world isn’t like that. It’s a child-like revulsion, of course, but some of our best fantasists have been children at heart (as well as wild at heart.) In the arts, sophistication isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Perhaps the reception to “Wild at Heart” would have been stronger if people hadn’t toted their baggage from “Twin Peaks” into the theater. (And perhaps, after all the ratings controversy, the film would have fared better at the box-office if it had been branded X.) Stylistically, the Lynch-directed episodes of “Twin Peaks” are a more corseted and “knowing” version of “Blue Velvet.” The malevolence of the ordinary is still on view, but tricked up with a dry jokester’s wit. (The collaboration of Mark Frost, who produced “Twin Peaks” and co-wrote many of its episodes, may be the key to the show’s mass-audience accessibility; he may have tenderized Lynch’s furies, although apparently not enough to assuage the artery-hardened Emmy voters.)

“Wild at Heart” doesn’t dampen its rampages the way “Twin Peaks” does; and the “dryness” of the wit quickly turns to tinder. Unlike most of Lynch’s other films, “Wild at Heart” doesn’t turn its audience into voyeurs. On the contrary, everything in the film is startlingly on view--the beetles of “Blue Velvet” have crawled out from under the thickets and into the molten sunlight. The film’s emblem is its first image: a huge blooming close up of a lighted match.

Lynch, like most genuine film artists, draws on his own private menagerie. It’s a dangerous way to work in Hollywood, where “personal” filmmakers with a vision often end up on the unemployment line--or the assembly line. Lynch’s movies are so shocking partly because we’re not used to such unimpeded, deeply felt force in the movies. Lynch’s dreamscapes transfer intact to the big screen. Because of the intimate way in which he works, it’s natural that Lynch delves into themes and obsessions which tend to recur in film after film. But is this necessarily a sign that Lynch is repeating himself, becoming a “mannerist?”

Certainly, this sort of thing has befallen film artists--Fellini, to take the saddest example. And sometimes, as in the case of Woody Allen, the syndrome periodically flares, although even Allen’s stinkers tend to get raves from the Woodman’s many minions. But Lynch is nowhere near the point where his movies are make-overs of each other. Artists are open to accusations of self-parody for precisely the reasons that they are artists. Less versatile, less “professional” than the hack, the film artist is constantly tuned to his own frequency. His career becomes a working out of a single theme, the realization of a single vision.

Lynch has been working in a multiplicity of mediums in the last few years--besides television, he created, with “Twin Peaks” composer Angelo Badalamenti, a symphonic work “Industrial Symphony No. 1,” which was performed at the Brooklyn Academy last November; he’s exhibited his paintings, written rock lyrics. But all of this activity is partly a response to his difficulties getting film work.

Lynch may be a household name, but his notoriety--at least in the feature film arena--has not translated into the kinds of freedoms he requires. By all rights, Lynch should have made a movie right after “Blue Velvet.” Instead, it took four long years. The drubbing that “Wild at Heart” has received may renew the waiting game.

The problem with Lynch is not “Wild at Heart.” The problem is all the movies Lynch should be making but can’t. As Orson Welles discovered long ago, in Hollywood, everybody loves a genius. They just don’t want to subsidize him.