Personal freedom in Wild at Heart | Little White Lies

In Heaven Everything Is Fine

Per­son­al free­dom in Wild at Heart

04 Feb 2025

Words by Kathryn Bromwich

Colourful illustration showing two women, one smiling with large fluffy hair, the other with eyes closed.
Colourful illustration showing two women, one smiling with large fluffy hair, the other with eyes closed.
A snake­skin jack­et stands for so much in David Lynch’s lurid fairy­tale 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. 

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