Painters love Lynch. His compositions are exquisite, the frame divided into stylized pools of shadow and light. Then there is his signature color sense, that brownish-blue acidic palette that seems to derive most from art photographers like William Eggleston and Cindy Sherman. In Wild at Heart, however, his inclination to create memorable autonomous images sometimes leads him off in a static, uncinematic direction. Like Fellini, Lynch is too uncritically fond of the Absurd, and cannot resist showing off his collection of miscellaneous grotesqueries: his close-up of flies buzzing on vomit, his obese topless dancers, his rich man on the can surrounded by harem girls. There's no discrimination between true perversity and silliness. Of course, Lynch might say that this silliness is intentional, that he wants a polyphony of moods from the transcendent to the inane. The trouble is, the moods get jumbled. Miraculously adaptable as the Angelo Badalamenti score is, too much stress is placed on music to key the change of emotions. The ear adjusts, but not always the heart.

One thing that gave Blue Velvet an eerie edge was its daring slowness, its willingness to space out-like the Dean Stockwell party where the plot drifts away and we simply watch the spook carnival unfold. Wild at Heart has much shorter, choppier scenes, and less vivid places: I wonder if Lynch's television work, with its episodic hopping about, has not had an adverse effect on his cinematic rhythms.