Wild at heart

I rewatched the David Lynch film 'Wild at heart' last night. Well bits of it. I don't like it much and there was only one scene I wanted to see.

(Long explanation why)

Ok, so I used to have this flatmate who was very interested in pop culture (he runs a retro record label these days I believe). His investigations of it always seemed to involve watching any particular video over and over and over again. The worst was 'Faster Pussy Cat Kill Kill' which he must have watch at least 17 times. I never actually sat through the whole thing but I used to hear it through my walls. Well at some point WAH became the object of his intense study. It is quite a memorable (and in bits unwatchable) film but he sat through it alot, and I saw or heard it almost as many times. He was probably only at about mid-point in the obsession when I moved out of the flat and went over seas. A month later travelling through the desert I was involved in a car accident. Car flips in the middle of nowhere. Two passengers immobilised and in pain. The driver wanders off to find help and me, hang-over as hell and in shock, left in 'charge'. (So no one worries, everyone ended up ok and we were rescued pretty quickly given the isolation). As with most intense and dramatic experiences of one's life, there are periods that you remember with a lucidity you don't often get. Maybe some of the vividness may be retrospective, I mean I have spent alot of time thinking about this particular afternoon of my life. But this impression isn't.

When I was out of the car and the situation had sort of sunk in, totally unbidden a scene from WAH came to mind. Anyone who has seen it knows it, the bit when Sailor and Lulu come across Sherilyn Fenn in the desert, the only survivor (although not for long) of an accident. All to something suitably moody by Chris Isaaks.
And although it was daytime and I didn't have a major head injury, my accident got a soundtrack and a possible outcome. I externalised it and imbibed it with a degree of romanticism that it seemed to lack and my experience was, as they say, mediated.
I remember this for many different reasons, but the two that strike me now are that, I am not a very visual person. So most of the time I make sense of my experiences by referencing book and things I have read rather than seen. The other one is that, the most profound thing I got out of it, I mean the whole accident and its aftermath, was just how banal it all was.
That it all turned out fine doesn't change the fact that at one point I was pretty sure that my best friend was about to die, that I was about to be stuck alone in the middle of nowhere with her body, a gravely injured woman and completely without a clue. And yet my thoughts, when I had any, were incredibly trivial and I took the time to make an appropriate pop cultural reference for my situation, and a self-dramatising one that.

Anyway all this was at least 10 years ago and I hadn't seen the film since, so I was interested to watch that scene again. I wasn't quite how I remembered it. For one thing the music actually stops during that scene and just plays when Lulu and Sailor are driving.

All in all, watching it was a rather post modern moment.