So it’s fitting that we at Vulture would bestow our first totally real and extremely legitimate honorary degree in culture to Laura Dern. Whether she was playing the drug-addled mother at the center of a national abortion controversy in Alexander Payne’s 1996 film Citizen Ruth, the prickly social-justice warrior Amy Jellicoe in Enlightened, the 2011 HBO series she co-created with Mike White, or the furious one-percenter Renata Klein in Big Little Lies, her choices have always felt slightly ahead of their time. Instead of completing a BA at UCLA, she took part in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, which then led to her role as Lula, the sexually confident woman voraciously in love with Nicolas Cage in Lynch’s follow-up, Wild at Heart. She turned down a role as the love interest in a Brat Pack-era movie in favor of doing a smaller part in Peter Bogdanovich’s Mask about a child suffering from lionitis. "Lost Highway" - "I like to remember things my own.This is to say that, when most actors her age zigged, Dern, who was then 16, zagged.No Country for Old Men - "What You Got Ain't Nothi.Wild at Heart - "This Whole World's Wild at Heart.It’s Lynch unhinged just doing whatever the fuck he wants, and I enjoy the film by just embracing the oddness of it rather than allowing myself to be distracted by it. When that’s going on in what should be a simple scene, I just can’t stop to try to decipher any of it because by the time I start to have a thought, something else even wackier happens. I mean, we’re talking about a movie in which a contract killer manager(?) takes a phone call while sitting on the toilet, drinking tea, and watching a nearly naked woman dance for him. I think the all out assault of weird shit throughout the film was too much for me to stop and dwell on any of it. I couldn’t believe I had so few random thoughts about this batshit crazy Wizard of Oz sex fever dream. But when I got to the end of Wild at Heart, I realized I didn’t stop very often to make note of what was happening while I was watching. Normally, the Random Thoughts section for any movie, but especially a David Lynch movie, would be the longest section.
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